I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh. ↗
I come from a family of cops, and all of them share that understanding that they put their lives on the line. They share and deal with that sense of risk every day, so I got to see that up close. ↗
What emerged, of course, was that the magnitude scale presupposed that all earthquakes were alike except for a constant scaling factor. And this proved to be closer to the truth than we expected. ↗