The acoustic emission from breaking a bamboo chopstick or a bundle ofspaghetti is found to exhibit similar behavior as the famous seismic laws ofGutenberg-Richter, Omori, and Bath. By use of a force-sensing detector, weestablish a positive correlation between the statistics of sound intensity andthe magnitude of tremor. We also manage to derive these laws analyticallywithout invoking the concept of phase transition, self-organized criticality,or fractal. Our model is deterministic and relies on the existence of astructured cross section, either fibrous or layered. This success at explainingthe power-law behavior supports the proposal that geometry is sometimes moreimportant than mechanics.
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