Internet at the cottage

Wow,I got a cell phone amp at Costco and now we have full LTE. This is from the cottage.

Two nuclear bids hit the table

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The choice has been laid down:  Two jammed AP1000's on the Darlington postage stamp land, or two corrupt-SNC hamster wheels.

I think they can jam at least 2 AP1000's on the site, but we really need 4 as we could get on the Wesleyville site.  Of course we can expect cost overruns since there are too many cooks for this broth.

Now that the soap-bubble dream of putting windmills everywhere has busted, we might be getting down to business.  This might pick up my seismic business, since the old seismic for Darlington is hopeless, but it depends on whether the regulators become less toadyish under Trudeau.  :)

I really think we can do this if we poach a lot of American and Chinese engineers.  The existing staff has been worn down by 20 years of doing nothing.

Update:  In order to protect myself legally, I should clarify that the stacked adjective 'corrupt' refers only to hamster wheels which were born into corruption, by their promiscuous squeaking.  Historically, this squeaking has been thrown around everywhere, even to various officials.  Of course, the brand new hamster wheel now claims to have a Teflon coating, and doesn't squeak any more.  Nobody, however, is sure of the quality control, and there may be some hidden squeaking yet to be exposed.

Oklahoma - 3 earthquakes

Another fine spray of earthquakes, one as large as 3.4.   Although these are in the general direction of my expected shear wing, you would probably need an M4 to properly open it up.

Toronto runs out of phone numbers

New area code coming next week, but we have run out of new numbers now.  Not quite the Calgary floods, but still.....

I just got an ip phone setup from Costco.  Only $4 a month for basic, and I got a 647 number two days ago.  The service is so good, I signed up for Premium, and wanted a second 647 number -- All Gone!  I couldn't believe it!  I escalated their support right up,and confirmed it.

I really wanted to transfer my Bell landline, but it is tied up with my Internet, and it looks like they'll charge me just as much extra for a dry loop, as a landline, what with all those bundling discounts.  Thus, I'll let my landline die, with no long distance charges.  I'll hook it to a phone that doesn't ring.

This ip phone is great with the Fibe speeds.  Some people might have problems with slow crappy internet.

I still can't believe that this company (ooma.com) is out of business for the Toronto area until next week.  Maybe I should tell somebody about it.....

Toronto seismic issue in waiting

Well, I'm not getting sued for saying anything like this is worst ever.  I'm sure they are absolutely perfect, but look at this crap:

This is the first floor of the old Women's College building being demolished.  A huge mass on dinky columns.  All brick.  Not a chance for seismic.  But not a hazard since it is being demolished.  In fact, all the crappy brick buildings are being torn down, which is good for seismic, but history-buffs will whine.  I just put this in for perspective.

Now, this new monstrous condo is going up.   Look, it has all shops on the bottom with larger dinky columns, but 10 times the mass.

Look up, look way up!

They're all built this way, perfect 2 Hz resonators on a soft-story base.  The huge tower sits on a massive slab spanning the house of cards.  Buildings like this did terrible in Chile, but they still go up.  The only good thing is that they are on rock, but I don't know if the floppy build negates this advantage.

Unfortunately, this passes all the conventional seismic analysis, based on peak acceleration and shake tables.  We must wait for the proper earthquake to provide lessons.  :)

If you own this, get total earthquake 'unavailability' insurance if you can.  That way you can rent another place when this gets closed by an earthquake.

Oklahoma might want to do something about their earthquakes

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Ok brought to task by one of the most famous scientists on this subject (next to me, of course), well maybe a few stories above me, in the Penthouse, while I'm in the sub-basement...

Nevertheless, he thinks these could get big, just like I do.   It's a comfort....

Crete and Mexico earthquakes

Two completely different earthquakes over the weekend, yet somehow related.

Crete.

Situated right on the subduction zone, it was a perfect contraction on the beachball.

But Mexico was a different kettle of fish.

It was up in the 'messed up zone' on top of the subduction.  This is where you have volcanoes and general extension.  Thus, the beachball was a pull-apart.

But, the two zones are almost exactly the same.  Up north from Crete you have a very famous, civilization-destroying volcano zone.  The only difference is that the subduction zone in Crete is very messy and may not be able to pull the M9+'s that the Mexico zone is so capable of.

Oklahoma earthquakes active over the weekend

Being the target of F5 tornadoes, I can fully understand why M3 earthquakes are ignored.  For some reason all these earthquakes are stuck at the M3 level.  In Arkansas, a mechanism quickly develops, and the magnitude rapidly escalates.  For OK, I blame the M5.6 injection earthquake, it has fully mucked up the stresses.

June at the cottage

So far we experiencing a regression in warming of about 10 years.  This June is cold and wet.  We went up Thursday, and were lucky to have 2 days of sun before the next big rain.  Quite cold at night.  We have 2 bird nests near the cottage, and they seem to be progressing quite well, since there are a lot of bugs.  The dragonfly contingent is huge and wipes out all the mosquitoes during the day.  We had the sauna heating and I took my 1 second dips, and I swear the water is getting colder!

A very small earthquake knocked out Mexico City power on the weekend.  We only get a dribble of Internet at the cottage, so I couldn't respond.  I would only say something nasty like they can't take much.  :)

New injection earthquakes in Arkansas

It's the weirdest thing.  These zones suddenly blow up with a lot of earthquakes, and then they stop.  I'm assuming the state is shutting down the wells.  I don't think the earthquakes suddenly stop while they are still injecting, since they always start to form the most beautiful mechanisms.  You can see all the yellow around the abandoned wells of last month.  So the pool is on to guess how many earthquakes form here before they stop.  :)

New Linux kills old printer driver for Xerox 6125 on amd64 Debian

I have written before about my printer and the recipe for success.  Forget all that!

The great thing about Linux is how it evolves.  The bad thing is that it always changes.  :)  The new Linux has gone multi-architecture.  That means your old ia32-libs is gone, vamoosed.  So you have to change your whole system over to this.  Read this stuff.

Now when you try to add ia32-libs, you get a whole bunch of stuff.  But that's not sufficient!

Use the driver 'deb' from this guy.

There is a bug in one of the libraries.  To do that you have to pull from experimental if you are using Sid.

aptitude -t experimental install libcups2:i386

Then it works.  If you are using Sid, then you know how to install from experimental, since Sid stuff breaks often -- that's the whole reason for it.

My other Linux machine runs Testing, and it hasn't had any problem yet.

Super-shear earthquakes

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I've always gone on about this.  The peak ground velocity (PGV) gets very high on the surface.  It's enough to knock down almost anything.  It's the F5 tornado of earthquakes!  From my research, it needs at least an M7, but this ground motion saturates for anything larger.  It produces a total disaster if it is right under a city.

It happens with a steep thrust fault under high stress, and very smooth.  Thus the critical displacement (the displacement required to invoke dynamic friction) is near zero.  With this arrangement, the P wave (compression) is sufficient to start dynamic slip, and you have a 'shock wave' that has very high PGV.

In the remote chance that the Hamilton fault is fully activated as an M7, it would be this type of earthquake.

Philips LED Bulbs Total Losers

In my previous post, I was afraid to mention the name, in fear of search engines.  Now I'm not, since my second bulb burned out.  For the first one, I was willing to accept that it was a million to one, and I was the lucky lottery winner, but two means that this is an ordinary thing.  No manufacturer will admit to a loser, but this has got to be one.

Now I'll have to go through their customer service again, and convince them I'm not a psycho lightbulb-murdering fiend.  How am I going to do that?  They'll say that I'm the only one to ever have a problem with these bulbs.  Blah.

Update:  They are very generous on the return.  But they must be getting a lot of them.  The first time they had no clue what to do, and now they say they have a policy of asking several questions about how the light was used.  Oh, well, they are big enough to survive this disaster, and maybe their new bulbs have a design modification.  Can't wait for my third one to burn out!  ps.  I buy much cheaper LED bulbs now.  :)

Arkansas earthquake swarm stops

But Oklahoma keeps going.

That's the trouble with this whole injection thing - we are missing the vital information of pressure-volume charts.  Since these are all cowboy operations with gov't influence, they can get away with this.  And thus you can never really prove what is happening.  The new Arkansas swarm was proving to be a growing Baby New Madrid, right near a town.  Did they stop it?  Who knows?

When you are injecting into the Precambrian, there should be three types of responses.

Tight rock - This is the rock between the megathrusts.  Do not collect any money, do not pass Go.  This is a dry hole.

Randomly fractured rock - This should be rare, perhaps in the hanging wall of a megathrust.  Appears to be the case with the wells near the lake in Ark.  Earthquakes tightly clustered around the wells.  The pressure should remain steady, with a slow upward creep due to clogging.

Earthquake Sustaining Mechanism - Happened with the first Ark injection.  Bigger and bigger earthquakes forming a thrust and shear sustaining mechanism.  A growing New Madrid!  Pressure should drop, and they would naturally increase volume.  A great money-maker until the earthquakes get too big and they stop.  In Ok they never stop!

Time to thin the apples and pears

This year has produced a tremendous set of apples and pears.  There are too many per cluster.  If you don't want to cry two months from now that all your apples are falling half-grown, then you should thin them.  With a small clipper, cut out all the apples per cluster other than the biggest and best.  Usually, it is the centre one, but not always.  Allow several inches between apples.  Also pears need this, but they generally take care of themselves, so I'm really reluctant with my young pear tree, since I haven't got a full-size pear off it yet!  Spray after thinning.

The orchards have powerful sprays to thin the apples, but we don't so it is a necessary painful exercise.

Nicer than expected cottage weekend

We expected all that nasty Oklahoma weather this weekend, but it wasn't too bad.  Saturday we had a nice warm southern breeze off the lake, and Sunday we had snatches of sunshine between the rain.  :)

Did the first sauna on Sunday.  Get all warmed up and jump in the lake.  It was like an electric shock, and I swear I could almost jump back out fast enough to not get wet!  After the second and third cycle I could stay in for a fast count of three.  The ladies could stay in for a few minutes.  So cold!