The fit that is still 42 km off

The startup idea

The problem

A clean residual makes a model look finished when the epicenter is still wrong.

Who would pay for this?

Primary

A class that wants one real earthquake, not a cartoon of the planet.

Secondary

Someone who will treat a low residual as unfinished.

Early adopter

One event, the residual, the 41.9 km line.

How could it make money?

Possible models. Nothing here is a claim about what Earthquake Lab charges.

• No price.
• LGPL-3.0-only.
• The hosted page and the local build are both described. This page did not compare them.

What would the MVP look like?

1. One replay against a real recording.
2. The residual and the catalog distance on the same screen.
3. The waves that are not in the solver.
4. The license named.

How to validate the idea

• Ask five people where they think the source is, then show the 41.9 km.
• If they still trust the residual alone, the kilometer line was not the product.
• Do not add more events until the miss is readable.

How to differentiate

• The model is allowed to be wrong in public.
• Recordings are real and few.
• LGPL, not a vague open-source badge.
• Do not become a news map of every quake.

Why this could be interesting now

Product that inspired this idea

Stephan's post says Earthquake Lab cuts open Earth, plays modeled waves against real station recordings, and asks if you can find the source. Open source, Rust and WebAssembly, in the browser. The readme calls it a local educational app. Three curated events hold 21 real vertical recordings. The source exercise uses eight Tohoku stations. About 0.476 seconds of residual RMS, and the fit sits about 41.9 km from the catalog epicenter. Depth stays fixed at 29 km. A low residual is not a certificate of historical accuracy. The code is LGPL-3.0-only. The engine only does downward P, S, and PKIKP. A source build wants Node.js 24, Rust 1.99.0, and wasm-bindgen 0.2.129. Browser tests want Google Chrome. This page did not run the lab.

Posted by @steph4n. Watch the original launch. No separate product site is listed unless the post itself is the source.

• science
• browser

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