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by 3x 2852 days ago
It's a common complaint on HN that too many articles include irrelevant details about the people and scenery of technical fields, but this article really pulls it off perfectly. It is dense in technical information and the personal stories complement this information and make it more memorable (e.g. I didn't know that the duration of an earthquake is a rough proxy for its magnitude, but I won't forget after reading the narration in the opening paragraphs).