The Technological Richter scale is introduced about 80% of the way through Nate Silver's new book On the Edge.

A full review is in the works (note to prediction markets: this post alone does NOT on its own count as a review, but this counts as part of a future review), but this concept seems highly useful, stands on its own and I want a reference post for it. Nate skips around his chapter titles and timelines, so why not do the same here?

Defining the Scale

Nate Silver, On the Edge (location 8,088 on Kindle): The Richter scale was created by the physicist Charles Richter in 1935 to quantify the amount of energy released by earthquakes.

It has two key features that I’ll borrow for my Technological Richter Scale (TRS). First, it is logarithmic. A magnitude 7 earthquake is actually ten times more powerful [...]