  The acoustic emission from breaking a bamboo chopstick or a bundle of
spaghetti is found to exhibit similar behavior as the famous seismic laws of
Gutenberg-Richter, Omori, and Bath. By use of a force-sensing detector, we
establish a positive correlation between the statistics of sound intensity and
the magnitude of tremor. We also manage to derive these laws analytically
without invoking the concept of phase transition, self-organized criticality,
or fractal. Our model is deterministic and relies on the existence of a
structured cross section, either fibrous or layered. This success at explaining
the power-law behavior supports the proposal that geometry is sometimes more
important than mechanics.
