Cottage Report

Getting quite cold.  Maples are starting to show their colours, some deep reds have come out this year.  Burned an awful lot of mixed brush.  We can see our pretty rocks again!  Neighbour stuck an axe into his thigh, only 4 stitches.  We'll close up and abandon the place next weekend (Canadian Thanksgiving).  Last year we had tropical weather until December, but I get the feeling that it's back to business this year. :)

Bruce nuclear waste technical meeting

Reference

As you know, for my health, I am 100% for this marvellous facility.  Forget that other stuff I wrote, this will be the construction story of the century!

For this meeting, they will show us the wonders of computer modelling.  As we know, computers are marvellous things, and modelling is always right because it shows pretty pictures.  Any Apple fan knows this!  So, all you sourpusses out there, you have no chance to stop this express train.  Give up!

This project has also shown new ways to use geology.  We should be proud it's Canadian...

Virgin Island earthquakes - M3's like clockwork

This is really amazing.  If you look at the earthquake lists, all you see are these earthquakes.  All M3-ish.  This has to be fluid migration to get so many identical earthquakes.  A normal earthquake progression has a straight line B curve, which means it is self-similar and fractal.  Thus, you usually get a relationship where for every 10 M3's, you get an M4 and so on.

The fluid front is migrating towards the islands and they really seem to be getting deeper and deeper as they go down the slab.  Like I said before, just take this as it is, a very unusual phenomenon, and it doesn't have 'larger' implications.

Tiny Ottawa earthquake M3.1

Hard on the heels of a mining event, we get a real earthquake near Ottawa.  This earthquake means nothing, but it is at an interesting place.  All down the river, we have these giant deposits of Leda Clay.  That means two things:  first, the ground motions will be amplified tremendously, and second, a big earthquake will cause a lot of these deposits to go 'whoosh' into the river.

M3.9 Mining earthquake in Canada

M3.9.  At first it looks like it's in the middle of nowhere.

But then, zoom in.

You can see mine workings.  This is large for a rockburst.  I wonder what sort of mess it left.  Hope nobody was killed.

Update:  I may be full of compost!  This is a horrible clear cut and not mining.  Thus, we have a legit earthquake in the middle of nowhere.

Ebooks on the Nexus 7

I've had the n7 for a month and now I have converted fully to reading on it.  My old Sony prs700 is now gathering dust for the winter, although I shall probably revive it for reading in the sun.  I'm using Akido Premium for reading, which I bought with my Nexus credit.

Calibre for Linux now supports the n7, so you can load books directly. Before, you had use the file manager (bought) to use wifi and the windows network.  The reader is very fancy with all sorts of hidden things I haven't figured out yet.  But I just found out you can slide the brightness on the left.  I use a dim screen, and a big font, so I don't really have eye strain.

I enjoy listening to music on the speakers, and then checking the email when it pings.  Of course, you can look up words, and annotate if you wish.  The dedicated ereaders are doomed!  Of course, the better half just converted to a plain ebook, so she'll take a while.  :)  Finally, we won't have a pile of old chick books cluttering up the house!

Quebec does the NDP nuclear thing

Article

Yeah to mindless politicking!!  That was a sad plant, though.  Never liked it.

Roundup to the Rescue

I'm very happy that you can get Roundup again in Ontario.  I use it in a very green manner.  You don't want it to get into the water, so you only use it on dry days.  In a few hours, it binds to organic matter, and can't move.  In a week the little soil bacteria eat it up.

Now, I'm using it to nuke any bad grass.  Without Agent Orange available, the grass has been getting full of all sorts of nasty creepers, as well as huge lumps of quackgrass.  I spray it, wait a week or two and spray it again.  After another week or two, when I'm sure everything is dead, I loosen up the soil with a pitchfork and seed it.  Right now my seed is coming up beautiful!  You can seed right through the dead straw, which provides some protection, and you have to water every day.

Fracking Takes a Holiday

I've just noticed that today all the major fracking-waste injection zones are yellow.  That means no earthquakes for a week!  On this map, if everybody is really good, the dots disappear after 6 months.  However, these things come and go.  I am postulating that Arkansas is brewing a major new earthquake zone, but it will take years to clarify.  Let's see in 6 months if all the dots disappear.  :)

Cottage Report

Starting to get nippy.  It was a sunny weekend, with cold nights.  The water is really cold, so I had my 1 second swim.  We got on the access road at 8 am, and suddenly my brakes were squealing.  It was a full-grown bull moose about to go on the road and squoosh my car!  We have never seen a moose here in 50 years.  Luckily, the car startled him, and he turned and ran away.  Nobody else in the car saw him, since they were reading or sleeping, and bitching about the sudden stop.

This moose was probably 2-3 years old with a medium rack.  Good hunting, since I think it's best to take the surplus males.  A big-rack moose is a successful breeder, and they should leave him alone.  I like a little hunting for the moose, bear and deer, since it keeps them on their toes and afraid of humans.

Because just down the road were 2 deer who didn't give a hoot about cars and were strolling.  With them was a male wild turkey who seemed a little bit smarter.  Perhaps the gang leader?

Home seismometer for ENA

Every 5 years or so, I review the state of the home seismometer.  These are really accelerometers and measure acceleration directly.  The latest technology uses a small proof mass where the motion is detected by capacitance.  The expensive seismometers use a micro-machined mass, and integrate to velocity.  The cheaper ones use a chip-scale mass, and output acceleration.

If you are in California and getting an earthquake every day, then you can use a 12 bit 2g chip, and still get a recording once in a while to make sure it works, and perhaps provide some calibration.  In the East, you can install these things for a "Big One', and never know if it actually works.  That's the big problem, you can slap down an accelerometer anywhere, and not know if you are on some horrendous local amplifier.  That's why when you see accelerations from an eastern earthquake, they are all over the map.

I worked with 16 bit 2g accelerometer chips, and that's still not good enough.  Regional earthquakes, are just a little fuzz with these things.  So I am waiting for cheap 24 bit 2g chips.  Haven't seen them yet, but can't wait to record earth tides!

Virgin Islands Hot for Earthquakes

Wow, these are the earthquakes for the past couple of weeks.  A cluster like this means nothing to the big picture, but it is cute.  If it were serious, we'd have M7's and volcanic activity, but this is probably just deep fluid motion.  I'd still go there for a holiday!

M3.1 earthquake British Virgin Islands

A most insignificant earthquake for this area, but here's where I want to go sailing, and it illustrates a wonderful tectonic zone.  At this point, the Caribbean Plate, which is a very weird spur, overrides the Atlantic oceanic crust.  These beautiful islands are on the volcano side.  We are lucky that the activity is so low it only destroys an island every 100 years or so.  The hurricanes are much worse.

Ontario Seismicity Update

This is the latest map from SOSN.

The Hamilton Boundary Fault (the edge of a megathrust) remains sharply defined.  We would see a sharp line under Oklahoma City, if they had decent seismic monitoring.  We would see the megathrusts if they got off their tushies and did some reflection seismic.  (Oh Dear! -negative!)

Of most interest is all the activity up in Lake Huron.  We still can't see the boundary fault of the Grenville Front which goes right under the Bruce radiation site, but you can draw your own line.

Luckily, Penn and Ohio have stopped injection, so the activity is limited to Lake Erie.  These faults are fully fractal, so we expect a straight-line B curve, but we don't know the slope.  I suspect it is 'rough' which means a lot of little activity for each big quake, unless you inject!

ebay listing for new fashionista riding boots

Neat, I'm trying ebay for the first time with these boots.

This is the ebay listing.

Update - They never sold.  Time to to give them to the neighbour's kid.

Niagara Tunnel Update

This is not negative.  All that hidden money is water under the bridge.  I am calm.

They are proceeding swimmingly, as though high stresses didn't exist.  I am happy for them.  This is a picture of the overbreak-fixing carrier.  Then they go through with the slip form for the arch, and then they have 2 grout injection passes, to make sure everything is nice and tight.  In the old days, we would have had a crushable zone, but what the hey.

I'm sure this will last the full 20 years before it cracks up, which is the same for a badly maintained new nuclear plant.  Then everybody is happy fixing it up again!  :)

The Rainy Season

We got more rain in this past week than for the whole summer!  Our drought is officially over, but the plants sucked it all up, and not a speck went into the swamps.  This is more like the weather of my youth, with dry hot summers, and the rain coming in September, from all the hurricanes.  We did lots of burning at the cottage, all the leftovers from tree thinning.  Couldn't really burn all summer.

Middle son just won a BBQ from some Italian TV cooking show.

China Earthquake

A very tiny earthquake M5.6, but shallow, in a mountainous area.  This was most likely a thrust fault, resulting in a high PGV.  This is a very active area, and there are landslides all the time.  Combine this with a high population density, and you get a mess.

With boulders falling, and unstable ground, I doubt you could even build a resistant house, but probably most housing is poorly made.

Costa Rica Subduction Earthquake M7.6

This is a classic dipping slab earthquake, depth at 40 km.

You can see the strong subduction zone.  That dips under Costa Rica, and makes for nice volcanoes.

This is a solution for fault motion.  The earthquake rupture zone is quite small for this type of earthquake, and is in a good location to be a foreshock of an M8 or 9.  10% chance in the next 2 days.  The earthquake is reporting some damage zones of Intensity 8 (VIII), so there are certainly some deaths and injuries.

Update:  Looks like a very low PGV, not much damage.

LInux on an Acer Aspire 1410

Got a new super-Acer for the son, so I get the old one.  Naturally, I put Linux on it.  I used the Debian installer for amd64, since this thing is a double Celeron with the Intel 64 bit extensions.

You need the Debian installer version with the non-free firmware.  There is one little 'gotcha' in that you need a new boot parameter, explained here.

But did you know that the new Grub2 is totally weird in configuration?  You have to add that extra little thing as explained here.  

Caribbean Dream

A friend recommended this catamaran charter, and it seems best to find 2 other couples from the same area for a charter.

I hope I find some people.  Works out to $5,000 a couple, maybe.

Labour Day cottage report

A very beautiful weekend.  Water was still warm enough to swim.  Very dry and I hope we get that rain tomorrow.  We left at about 6, and it was the best traffic ever!  All the parents must have left early so they can get rid of their kids on time.  :)