What I learned from Boobquake | Jennifer McCreight (original) (raw)

What turned into a viral media extravaganza began as a humorous science experiment. On Monday 19 April, I had just read Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi's assertion that "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes." Amused and annoyed by his ludicrous statement, I suggested on my blog that women dress immodestly on 26 April to test his claims. Tongue-in-cheek, I dubbed the project "Boobquake".

When I first published that fateful blogpost, I thought it would only be enjoyed by my friends and thousand readers. It ended in almost a million unique visits to my blog, thousands of emails, and coverage by CNN, the BBC, and (more importantly to a liberal nerdy college student) the Colbert Report. People around the world engaged in intense debate about how it affected women's rights, Muslims, and Iranians.

To be honest, global discussion and awareness were not my original goal – that wasn't even feasible in my mind. Though I'm glad it happened, I also want to stress the original message behind Boobquake. As a scientist and a sceptic, I firmly believe that we should test claims people make, especially when they're ridiculous. And as an atheist, I don't think supernatural beliefs are exempt from this questioning.

Because Sedighi's hypothesis was testable, how could we not investigate further? Wouldn't it have been fascinating if we did find out tight pants and cleavage controlled natural disasters? That would surely be worthy of Nature or Science, a great thing for a young scientist like myself to have on her resume. I quickly went to work. After recruiting over a 100,000 women somewhat accidentally thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we dressed in our most immodest outfits on the 26 April. And on the 27th, I crunched the numbers.

Figure two – the overall distribution of the magnitudes of earthquakes on Boobquake.

Each data point (from the USGS Earthquake website) represents the total number of earthquakes per day (measured in GMT) going back to 5 February (figure one). That red square is Boobquake. As you can see qualitatively, our provocative dress didn't really seem to affect the frequency of earthquakes. There were 47 earthquakes on the 26th, which falls well within the 95% confidence interval for number of earthquakes (about 0 to 148).

"Aha!" you counter, "but wasn't there a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan that day?" Yes, you're absolutely correct. Except that earthquakes between 6.0 and 6.9 magnitude happen, on average, 134 times a year. That means we had about a 37% probability of an earthquake of that magnitude happening on Boobquake just due to chance alone – hardly an improbable event that needs to be attributed to an angry deity. So my apologies to the Daily Mail, The View, and everyone else who dozed off while learning about probabilities in school – the Taiwan earthquake was good for headlines, but not statistically significant.

But just to be safe, I also looked at the overall distribution of the magnitudes of earthquakes on Boobquake (figure two). These samples span from the entirety of the event – midnight at the earliest time zone to midnight at the last time. The box indicates the first and third quartiles (within which 50% of the data points fall). Not only did all of the earthquakes on Boobquake fall within the normal range of magnitudes, but the mean magnitude actually decreased slightly! Maybe God actually approves of hot pants.

Obviously this study had its flaws. To really be scientifically rigorous, we'd have to increase our sample size by repeating Boobquake on other days. We didn't have a control planet of women covered head to toe, and we didn't have a good way to quantify how much we increased immodesty (what's the unit of immodesty anyway? Intensity of red on blushing nuns?) Maybe we didn't lead men astray enough, or maybe God is just biding his time before crumbling my apartment in a freak Indiana earthquake.

Even though Boobquake wasn't perfect, it still was a success. Some people created counter-protests like Brainquake," thinking that my idea lacked real substance because of indecent male detractors. But the vast majority of people – including earthquake researchers, feminists, and many Iranians – thanked me for this exercise in scepticism. The boob joke probably made it popular, but hopefully the smarts will make it memorable.