that tsunami in bangladesh happened around christmas too, didn't it?

there are going to be conspiracy theories. i just want to get in before them...

it is not completely outside of the realm of possibility that some evil coalition of republicans in the pentagon is getting off on beating down the heathens at the solstice; earthquake technology would be about the same thing as volcano technology, it is not hard to imagine how it might function and it would need to be tested. i neither offer any proof of this, nor do i think it particularly likely, but it cannot be ruled out a priori - this is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, that ought to be explored.

i more just want to point out that there's actually a naturalistic explanation, surrounding the solstice, as the gravitational forces on the earth are experiencing a kind of whiplash around this date. yearly. hey, it's not that different than the milankovitch theory. and, while tidal drag is not the mainstream consensus as the mechanism of tectonic activity, people tend not to realize that we actually don't have a good mechanistic theory at all (what we know about subduction is mostly observational, not causal - we don't have anything close to a predictive model on tectonic activity), and that tidal drag was actually the mechanism initially proposed by alfred wegener. i have to have this argument once in a while with these neckbeards that think they're debunking astrology; tidal drag is actually an existing research question, and it does have some promising potential.

the idea would be that the reason this happened in about the same place at about the same time of year is that the earth went through about the same fluctuations in the gravitational field, leading to about the same fracture in the crust.

and, i think it's important to recognize on christmas just how dangerously in motion we really are, being flung around this star, wobbling, in constant threat of being pulled apart and flung out into the galaxy....

you could do a calculation and try and determine how likely it is that it's a coincidence; i won't bother.  i might say something about how the universe doesn't give a fuck about your ratios - as evidenced by the inevitable contradiction, and then use that to undermine the model. but, perhaps the more cogent observation is that it isn't a coincidence at all - that there's physics here to unravel.

fuck your god.

but happy solstice.