Earthquake Nerd Hats

Reporting earthquakes is a real federal citizen-science project: the USGS Did You Feel It system, listed on CitizenScience.gov, collected over 5 million individual intensity reports between 1999 and 2019. The more questionnaires come in for a ZIP code, the more reliable the average intensity assigned to it, so every small report counts. Meanwhile some residents of Los Angeles are known as never-feelers, who sleep through or simply do not notice quakes that rattle their neighbors. These earthquake nerd hats are for the other kind of person. The badges name the hobby, and the longer designs carry the habit: the hobby seismologist who gets to the USGS map before the shaking stops, the one who can tell a 3.1 from a garbage truck, the sleeper who is furious about missing one, and the cat everybody trusts. The Big One, in-group slang for the major quake everyone expects, is running late here. Oklahoma set a record of 585 magnitude 3 or larger quakes in 2014 and broke it in 2015, which is how a state with no famous faults became an earthquake-watching crowd. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear one to the next rattle, or give one to the friend who texts the magnitude before you finish asking if you felt that.