An old man sitting at the mall watched a teenager intently. The teenager had spiked hair in all different colors: green, red, orange, and blue. The old man kept staring at him.
When the teenager was tired of being stared at, he sarcastically asked, "What's the matter, old man? Never did anything wild in your life?"
The old man did not bat an eye when he responded, "Got drunk once and had sex with a peacock. I was just wondering if you were my son."
Charles RichterBorn 26 Apr 1900; died 30 Sep 1985 at age 85. Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist who devised the Richter Scale that measures earthquake magnitudes which he developed with his colleague, Beno Gutenberg, in the early 1930s. The scale assigns numerical ratings to the energy released by earthquakes. Richter used a seismographto record actual earth motion during an earthquake. That isan instrument generally consisting of a constantly unwinding roll of paper, anchored to a fixed place, and a pendulum or magnet suspended with a marking device above the roll. The scale takes into account the instrument's distance from the epicenter. Gutenberg suggested that the scale be logarithmic so, for example, a quake of magnitude 7 would be ten times stronger than a 6.He wrote the article on Earthquakes for the 1974 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. |
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