
California earthquake alarm sounded – 92 years late - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40366816
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roblabla
I cannot even begin to understand how this could happen :/. Computers barely
existed in 1925, let alone the internet. How could this old quake resurface
seemingly randomly now ? Why was the event sent to the media dated 2025 when
we're in 2017 ?

Seems like a very broken system to me...

~~~
caipre
> The federal body said work it was doing to revise and update information
> about where the historic quake struck had caused computer systems to
> misinterpret the data and think it was seeing a novel event.

It doesn't seem that implausible for a program to be reading through a dataset
and issue a notice for a measurement above some value. If the dataset encoded
years in just two digits, it (almost) makes sense that the program would
report it 100 years off.

Imagine:

    
    
        with open(file) as f:
            for record in f:
                year, month, day, time, magnitude = record.split()
                
                if magnitude > 5:
                    raise_alarm()

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lathiat
> The LA Times, which uses AI-based software to automatically write up the
> USGS alerts, did issue a news story based on the alarm notice

lol who knew it would be so easy to get into AI. I can use my templating
skills (or mail merge for that matter)

~~~
mturmon
As you note, the LA Times has a little bot that generates these headlines.
Like you, local journalists are not impressed:
[http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2014/03/la_times_quirky_qu...](http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2014/03/la_times_quirky_quake_rob.php)

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TazeTSchnitzel
> Few organisations reacted directly to the news because it was dated 29 June
> 2025 - exactly 100 years after the actual event took place.

Y2K rears its head yet again?

~~~
rgacote
This was my first thought when I read this. Definitely Y2K flavored.

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geiseric
I get Earthquake alerts from USGS in my email. I saw that alert and was like
"Oh crap!", but then it was rescinded a minute later. I don't live in CA, but
I would hate for that to happen to folks.

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24gttghh
I was wondering why I got an email about this, then a later one saying the
event was deleted :S

~~~
sjs382
Same. For anyone wondering what we're talking about, the USGS offers an
earthquake notification system that you can sign up for via email.

Global alerts are pretty infrequent, so it doesn't hurt to sign up for this if
it's something you have a passing interest in.

[https://earthquake.usgs.gov/ens/](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/ens/)

~~~
24gttghh
And one can customize the alerts based on region and magnitude, and you can
even set nighttime sleep modes to ignore events under a certain magnitude!
It's a well put-together service from my perspective.

~~~
twothamendment
Maybe they need a new feature to allow customization of alerts based on what
decade they are in!

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vondur
Well to be fair on the geologic time scale, 9 years is practically on time.

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takeda
Sounds like Y2K bug surfaced :)

