There's been a lot of media attention on the Iranian cleric who claims that "immodestly clad women cause earthquakes" and the resulting Scientific Experiment. It seems that there actually was an earthquake in Taiwan today.

Now, ist the guy with the funny beard right, and we can cause earthquakes by collectively showing some décolleté?

Neat.

Let's see if this hypothesis survives some half-assed attempts at basic statistics. Earthquake data can be found at the USGS website. If we look at the data available since the end of January 2010, this should give us at least some short-term overview of seismic activity. We now proceed, considering only quakes with magnitudes greater than 2.5, ignoring the fact that we don't have a control planet and find this graph:



Overall seismic activity seems to be even below the average of our test interval. There is one quake at 6.5 magnitude for Boobquake day, but there were 13 such events since the start of our dataset. So - nothing special to the spare-time seismologist here.

Maybe the sudden increase in earthquakes is not in the magnitude, but in the frequency of earthquakes? Lets see:



Nope. A slightly decreasing trend, but nothing significant. So sorry, no feminine ground-shaking superpowers for you today, girls :-(