Linux - Tor

I went through the whole Tor thing, as outlined in the Register.

I installed Tails on usb disk.  I think I am now running a Tor relay, but it's difficult to prove.  The network looks active.  I used some of the default bandwidths, and I'm happy I have unlimited on my Bell plan.  I'll see if it interferes with the spoose's MS Skipey thing, whatever the company uses.  I know that doing a full download mucks up the Bell connection.

Using Tor and a Tor relay adds great confusion to the NSA, since encrypted connections become commonplace.  If the boring people don't use it for boring stuff, then those that use it are flagged.  I hope it gives Bell's hopes for deep packet searching conniption fits.

Update:  None of this works well with your mobile phone, since these things are designed to leak information all over the place.  We'll have to wait for Linux phones.  :)

Update2:  The Tor relay takes a while to validate.  There was a recent attack on Tor, and this feature saved them.

Update3:  Now running full blast with 33 circuits open.  Take that, poutine!

Year-End Summary of Eastern Earthquakes - Part 7

Longest series ever.  I've been writing in snatches between festivities.

Natural seeps may be very well and good, but what if you want to create a New New Madrid in a hurry?  You inject surface water directly into the Precambrian and upset all that balance.  The fascinating thing about earthquakes is their chaotic nature.  And you never know the initial conditions.  Yeah, that makes them impossible to predict on the fine scale required for humans.  You can predict that if you inject you will get earthquakes, but you'll  never know how big and how soon.

Initial conditions depend on earthquakes past, and so a minor seep such as Virginia can almost instantly produce an M6 from a dammed lake.  The M5.6 Oklahoma happened quickly, as well.  That is to say, the fault was all primed up and Ready to Rumble.

On the other hand, you can have something as slow as the main OK mechanism.  Massive injection of billions of barrels of water has only brought things to M4.8 so far.  That means the area may be generally destressed.  Earthquakes are also fascinating in that they are self-similar (fractal) between two limits - the very large, and the very small (grain size).  So, if you looked at a picture of fractured rock, you wouldn't be able to tell the scale, unless there was a scale, like a person standing in front of it.  Some satellite photos look like they were taken with a magnifying glass.

This self-similarity produces the classic straight log-log plot between Magnitude and frequency of occurrence. So, there are a lot of little earthquakes for one of the next bigger size.  The slope of this curve is related to fractal roughness.  OK has a high fractal roughness, and California is probably very low.

OK has developed a full mechanism, just like New Madrid.  We just don't know how long it will take to get to M7's.  At any time we could have a 7 or it may take decades.  The same is true for the natural seeps, such as Toronto.  Who knows?  It would be prudent for all these areas to have a good earthquake plan, but they just go on and party.  Ce la vie!

The End

ps. I just put a complete version, with links, in Geofish Clarified.

Year-End Summary of Eastern Earthquakes - Part 6

So now we know we have these huge megathrusts forming bands of good and bad rock.  Good rock is what we drilled with our deep holes at Darlington -- high stress, extremely tight.  The rock came out in 10 foot solid sections that you could use as baseball bats.  No fractures, no water.

Bad rock is right at the faults, and it is fractured all the way up.  It is what was chosen for the Bruce Black Hole.  The fractures go all the way down to the Moho.  Recent studies have show there are oceans of billion year old water in those fractures, along with bacteria, probably from the very beginning of life.  A whole ecosystem, probably as alien to us as anything on Mars.

All this water lives in perfect harmony with the rock, since it's been there long enough.  Once in a while there have been huge earthquakes to accommodate the shifting of the plates, but the whole thing is in chemical equilibrium.

The one thing that disturbs this happiness is a seep of fresh water.  This water is aggressive to the strong points of quartz that are holding the little NW stress that remains.  Over the millennia, natural seeps have caused local earthquake hotspots along the megathrusts.  We are mainly aware of New Madrid, because it happened in historic times, and it still has aftershocks.  There could be many other spots.

Seeps happen when lots of surface water accumulates.  Lakes Erie and Ontario have them, and there are some in Quebec, wherever that is.  :)  New Madrid is still sucking in the water.

--

Year-End Summary of Eastern Earthquakes - Part 5

So, for a few hundred million years we had this Precambrian surface which was not flat, as some people would have you believe.  Then the plates shifted over a cold spot and the whole thing sank beneath the sea.  Although silicates are less dense than the ocean basalts, they will sink if cold enough.  They just sank enough for shallow seas, which built up sediments and sank more.

This is all the limestone and such, full of little critters.  The Appalachian collision shoved up more sediments, and everybody forgot about the Precambrian, which held us up.  :)

The amazing thing about the Precambrian is that it takes all the strain of the plate moving about.  There have been several collisions and separations, and that rock keeps us alive.  Of course, we humans are only a blip on the geological time scale, but we should respect our elders.  The last Atlantic collision had all the continents together and it was a great time for the Earth's heat flow to cook out all that buried carbon dioxide and water.  The result was the dinosaurs and a very hot world.  The Precambrian was stretched to its limit.

All that heat, and then the continents separated to form the Atlantic.  NA slid to a colder spot, which is like pressing a thumb on a beachball, and it settled into a dimple.  It uniformly compressed the Precambrian on all sides, yet only a strong NE-SW trending horizontal stress remains.  What could have happened?  Does anybody in the USGS think of this?

It's all in the grain of ENA, which is strong down the spine of the megathrusts, and weak in the NW direction.  In order for the stress to be so strongly polarized, a lot of displacement had to happen in the NW direction.  This crunched up the Paleozoic over the megathrusts, and caused things such as the gigantic Paleo-collapse up at the Bruce Black Hole, which has conveniently been left out in the reports.

Now we are left with the strong NE horizontal stress, which kills us when we have a water seep such as New Madrid.....

--Christmas dinner - too much to drink...have to stop.

Year-End Summary of Eastern Earthquakes - Part 4

Now, Arkansas and Ohio did not do their bit for Science since they chickened out at M4 and banned direct injection into the Precambrian.  As well, we had the Virginia earthquake, which was very poorly covered by seismometers, but the later aftershocks showed a NE trend, and some association with a dammed lake.

Fortunately, we have other desperate states who are dying to prove my theories.  If we are very lucky, they should go all the way to a New Madrid M7+, since they just can't give up all that money.

For the final bit, we digress into the whole story about the Precambrian under our feet.  This a new story to most, since all the geological people ignore the deep structure, and when they plot earthquakes and faults, they stick to the shallows.

So, billions of years ago we had our Earth and oceans.  The Galactic Seeders had come and gone, leaving a rich bacterial ecosystem.  The amazing thing is that as the plates subducted with all the water, it cooked some rocks that were rich in silicates, and wanted to float like pond scum on the dark basalts.  This scum became our continents, and North America was slowly built up by having huge island arc complexes, with their fresh silicates smashing up and pasting themselves like a big snowball rolling down the hill.

A billion years ago when this was in full swing, Toronto was under mountain ranges, up to the limits of rock strength.  They were built up by sliding on huge megathrusts that extended in straight lines, NE to SW.  You can see this type of linear range in the Rockies.  The pressure eased off and these mountains slid back down.  Eventually, erosion carved the landscape into something you see up in Cottage Country.

---

Year-End Summary of Eastern Earthquakes - Part 3

As I was saying, Arkansas was my 'Eureka" moment.  We had observed that all the earthquakes in southern Ontario were under the lakes.  Thus, all our historical seismicity was wrong.  It was simple:  No water, no earthquakes.

Fracking was going ballistic, and there was something like 2 million gallons of water per hole.  All of this had to go some place, and that was deep underground.  Arkansas had the advantage of being close to New Madrid, so it was partially covered by a intense seismic monitor array.

I noticed right away that they were getting earthquakes, and they were forming a pattern.  The first earthquakes were lining up on a NW line, and then came a very long NE line.  This was the exact same pattern as New Madrid!  It was also the proper pattern for rock failure along the megathrusts, which have a very strong NE direction in horizontal stress.  Yahoo!  

There were some injection earthquakes in Ohio, but the lack of seismic monitoring meant no clear patterns.

There had been the M5.6 Oklahoma earthquake, but I was not following the pattern at that time.  In retrospect, the reprocessed locations showed a very strong NW line.

Thus, the rock was acting as though it were in a giant rock testing machine.  Using the testing machine analogy, all California earthquakes were acting as if there were a very weak, lubricated cut in the rock sample, and the machine turned on.  As the rock was compressed, the fault slid.

On the other hand, the earthquakes in ENA were completely the opposite;  they acted as though the rock sample was compressed and you were weakening the rock with acid.  There was a major difference in the way the surrounding rock acted, and those California guys didn't have a clue.

---

Year-End Summary of Eastern Earthquakes - Part 2

In those old days, the company was divided into the "Force", and "Darkness".  You can guess what side I was on - Design and Development.  We lived on debt for new plants, and all that shut down.  Everything went dark when when the 'Factory' took over -- all they were interested in were Soviet production numbers at any cost.  You can see the result with the early destruction of Darlington, and no hope with the refurb.

I had one last hurray when we drilled the famous 'Fault under Pickering'.  Just like California, somebody put great stock into a visible surface fault.  We drilled it and found out it was only shallow and the main bedrock was undisturbed.  I knew all this, but I needed the money.  :)

My last days were under great depression, and I never did anything interesting, but I retired as soon as I could, and it took two years to heal.  But then I felt great, and decided to review all this in order to clarify the great mystery of ENA earthquakes.

What finally woke me up was the injection of fracking wastes in Arkansas.

-whoops, present time!

Year-End Summary of Eastern Earthquakes - Part 1

Here I am, sitting all alone on Christmas Day, very early, waiting for everybody to wake up.  The earthquakes in ENA have always been a mystery, mainly because very little effort was put into studying them.  Over the 30-40 years I've been looking at this, Eastern North America (ENA) was the poor cousin to California.  Even in Canada, all the effort was on the giant Quebec City zone, and 30 years ago nobody looked at Toronto and such.

I managed to change that in Canada, at least.  We were looking at new nuclear plants, and I couldn't live with this lack of interest.  It allowed wild theories to come up and take over the media (yes, they were interested in this at one time when they had money).  They were making up 'magnetic lineaments' and we had the famous 'Fault Under Pickering'.  So, to my great satisfaction, I drank from the firehose of wasted company money and extracted a small percentage for seismic studies.  When put outside for the academic community, this was a huge Christmas package.

I always partnered with notable academics and had no control over the output.  The only influence I had was to direct the studies, since somebody had to do it.  Dealing with academics is like herding cats.  I didn't do any of these 'bespoke studies' as consultant reports, as was done with the Bruce Black Hole.  For this type of study a famous consultant once told us "Tell me what you want to hear, and I'll see if I can live with it.".  

I engineered the seismic monitoring to be unstoppable and totally open.  Nobody can hide inconvenient earthquakes, and we did the best monitoring in ENA.  With all the other studies, I was not so lucky, since we got poleaxed by the NDP election, and all such records were slated to be destroyed.  I hid them in my desk and eventually could get them back into official records where they could be lost forever.  A portion of the studies made it out to papers securely hidden behind the 'paywall' where the Bruce Thing could safely ignored them.

These were all the geophysics studies we made before we were shut down.  They went into vast government archives, but we all know what happened to that under Harper.  These studies told me everything I wanted to know about the mechanism of eastern earthquakes.  All the scientists involved were muzzled by having no Harper money, and went into retirement.  They are all running their farms.

These marvellous studies clearly showed the role of Precambrian megathrusts, and the massive earthquake activity around Toronto.  The seismic monitoring showed the importance of fresh water seeping into the faults.  We flew a magnetic study so detailed, it showed all the individual farmer transformers, and shipwrecks in Lake Ontario.  Nobody has ever duplicated that anywhere.

-whoops, people are waking up, good-bye.

Addition - There are 7 parts.  I've put all together on the Geofish Clarified site.

Shutting Down for Christmas

Once again, I've gone a bit too manic on this, and I am suffering the shudders.  For sure, if there is an M5 in Okieland, then I'll wake up.

Seismic Hazard for Ontario Nuclear Plants Triples

I have confession to make.  When I first installed all those seismometers (along with people who knew what they were doing, I couldn't install a lightbulb), I did it so we could find out more about the true seismic hazard of the region.  I was convinced that the truth would set me free, in that we would localize the really big earthquakes to the Hamilton fault.  The trouble with the old fashioned probability analysis was it would slide a big earthquake right under the plant as you went to lower odds.  So, there was a huge jump in ground motion for every probability decade, ie. 10-5 was much larger than 10-4.  This was unsafe, since the basic premise of seismic design was that if you designed linearly for a higher probability (10-3), you'd be good for graceful decay at the rarer levels (ie. no horrible cliff).  Seismic is not supposed to blow out everything until 10-7 or there about, whatever that means.

Now, the geology shows that I was wrong.  Ohio, Arkansas and Oklahoma show us that water activates all the megathrusts, and water has been seeping down under the lakes for thousands of years.  You can see the two strongest linears in Lake Ontario.  To me, this is horrifying.

We have to add this to the fact that the lake sediments look like they were churned by multiple earthquakes.  Thank god that was suppressed by Harper-science!  And the regulator toadies just smile.

I could list some mitigating factor about seismic wave stress and all that, but my scenario of nuclear destruction, especially for Pickering has become a bit more probable.  I write this because all of Canada is in on this reality distortion and the geology will be dismissed, just like they dismiss it for the Bruce Black Hole. That keeps me out of trouble.  :)  And it's no use for you remaining homeless newshounds, everything is locked up tight.

**Did you know I heard that they sent a group of intense dummies honourable very old engineers to look again at the Maple reactors and figure out what went wrong.  That place is an absolutely pure Seismic Death Trap, and they didn't put in the internal bracing that the Koreans did, which in turn saved the Korean Maple because it eliminated the internal distortion that caused the Canadian problem.  Sort of like an earthquake while operating.  :)

Answers:  One question from g+.  Yes these are the megathrusts that caused New Madrid and Oklahoma.  Keep those questions rolling.  Any hint that the Big Canada Putins are reading this, will send me scurrying under the nearest rock.  Links:  Megathrust    Nuclear Scenario
Please note that the Pickering threat is mitigated by 'time at risk', in other words:  "Thank God it's shutting down."

New Nuclear Plants Back on the Table

I give it a 1% because Big Bruce Guy (I'll build a nuclear plant anywhere) has bought a house near Darlington.  It all hinges on how much he'll soak the Liberals for.  If I were him I'd buy a house for odds as low as 1 in 1000.  If nothing happens, then sell it at no loss, but something does, you couldn't buy a big fancy house for love or money.

I go with this article.

And this picture.

Well, come on, all you fracking protesters, and Suziki-pipeline protesters.  Huge solar farmers (farms) are cutting down forests in Ontario.  And windmill farms give us headaches.  As well, all these stupid things only work in Ontario at 5% capacity.  They will never get back the energy that was pumped into them.

Even our dear Liberals may have, or might get somebody who can do the math.  As well, the Darlington refurb is trying to defy physics*, and Pickering is gasping.  What to do?  What to do?

Oh yeah, we can rely on US fracking for cheap natural gas.  Only that each little bit of that gas involves injecting waste water deep under Oklahoma where all the deep bacteria are getting slaughtered.  You know they will fight back with earthquakes.  Exactly 5 years from now they will get M6 earthquakes, and 5 years from that the M7's.  But natural gas production will drop faster than the Russian Rouble.

I don't think organic farming will save us all.  Even for that all those organic farms need electricity for the hothouses.  So, I give it 100% that we'll have new nuclear and Mr. Bruce Big Guy will take over Darlington.  (The timing is my out on this, probably when Toronto condo prices crash.)

*the old seismic design basis could break a block of solid steel.  The only way they got through it was to twaddle with the results (I mean that in a totally not libalish way, Mr. Big).  Some people might use words stronger than 'twaddle', but not me!  And they boosted that up, and are using young people with modern analysis.  Now we're talking solid titanium.

**Mr. Big will be smart enough to bring in two or three Chinese Westinghouse reactors, along with poaching all the builders.  They've gone cool on this in China.  At solar electricity rates, the pension funds will go ape-shit.

Annual Vault Scam

I get something like this every year, I don't know why.

Dear Person, I am saddened to hear of the death of my non-existent relatives.  Perhaps they will join all my other non-existent relatives in non-existent heaven.  Please give the money to those too unfortunate to have such a cornucopia.

Lunch with the old gang

It's been a year since we had lunch together, the old gang from the old company which shall always remain nameless.  I never laughed so hard since the last time, since things are 10 times worse.  Nearly all the old guys I knew will never retire, so you have a bunch of 70 year-olds doing engineering analysis the same way they did it 50 years ago.  I love it!

As well, I published a long time ago that they could never do a Dar---ton refurb with the same seismic assumptions from 40 years ago.  Well, they are doing that, but 30% more.  The smart money is on the toilet.  :)

That's all I'll leak out, the other stuff is much worse.  I'll laugh for a long time.


Further fun:  Apparently the big guy from Bruce has bought a house near a certain refurb and new nuclear plant site.  He was successful in getting twice the rate for Bruce, and if he can get 4 times the rate on Lake Ontario, then we may see something new, all owned by pipelines and pension funds.  So, all you hot speculators, drive up the house prices way east of Toronto.  :)

Tiger Rice Cooker at Costco

There's only one Costco that has a rice cooker and that's in Markham.  I don't know why...

Anyway this is a Japanese model that forces the Japanese lifestyle on you.  It said it did porridge right on the box, so I tried some oatmeal.  What a mess!  They mean Japanese Rice Porridge.

This machine is absolutely wonderful.  It makes plain old Costco Basmanti rice into something wonderful, while using the 'slow' setting.  We made some Chinese sticky rice dim sum in banana leaves, and that was fantastic.  Well, I ran into another Japanese lifestyle thing when I was steaming the sticky buns, and I wanted to steam another one.  Well, the smart little bastard didn't want to steam twice in a row.  I tried a lot of things, and finally took the first unit back.  And the second one did the exact same thing!

So for this one I phoned their support. The lady said: "What do you mean you tried to steam twice in a row?  I've never done that."  What, is this against Japanese culture?  They have it in stone tablets "Thou shalt not steam twice in a row."  I finally figured out to fool the smart-ass machine by starting a regular cook cycle for a minute, and then steaming.  Take that!

Actually, it may also be "Never start with hot water, because we don't have running hot water in Japan."  But since I tried two things, I'll never know.

Update:  I now know why Japan was never a software powerhouse.  I still can't get it to reliably start steaming, I think it is two things - cold water and start something else first.  But you have to put your head down on it to see if it is starting, why would the display show anything important?  That confirms that Japan and France have no hope, too isolated.  :)  I liken it to why Linux will never go big on the desktop, all the programmers love their command lines.  It's a good thing all the car makers do this stuff in California.  :)

Update2:  Yeah, I separated it.  You must always start with tap cold water for steaming, even though you'd think that hot water would be faster.  Otherwise it just sits there, smiling, pretending to understand your request.  :)

Oklahoma earthquakes - Record 2 4's in a day

Sure as death and taxes, we know that the party in Okie-land just gets better and better.  This was a M4.0 and M4.3 in one day.  But I need an M4.5 right near the city in order to get a solution for a thrust.  Things are starting to pick up in rate, so I think we can do it.

Whoops!  They did give me a solution.

This is a thrust!  Where I didn't really expect one, but the felt intensity is low, so it may be deep.

Organic Sprouts

It's amazing the technology in this now.  I got cheap Chinese LED grow lights that just give the reds and blues, and whatever to produce great m-buds.  But it works great for sprouts.  These are pea sprouts, and when they get 6" high you cut them.  I'm also getting a grow tent for shelves which has a Mylar lining.

For the sake of Mr. Harpering, I have written this as the 'cover' for all this equipment.  Just like bittorrent is used for software updates, all this grow equipment is used for legitimate organic sprouts.  :)

For organic farming, in general, I have this question:  "Where are you getting your nitrogen?".  There are no happy ways for this.  But with legumes, they fix their own nitrogen, and everything comes packed into the pea.  We just assume that the source is organic, with with seeds, you just don't want them treated with pesticides and such, so you source 'organic'.

Outside, in a cold Canadian Spring, I don't have any luck with organic seeds.  Soak them in whatever, you wouldn't be able to detect it in the final product with a mass spectrometer.

Linux - Security

Reference

All the MS virus guys want to go after Linux and Android.  The truth is that these things are probably 10 times more secure than a standard Windows setup.  Nearly all Linux and Android exploits involve carefully downloading a bad program, or a tailored attack on a major target.  As opposed to Windows, where a simple click is sufficient.

I tell everybody that if you have Windows use Chrome or Firefox, and never use Outlook.  Nobody listens.  Every company that has executives using Windows at airports and such, are susceptible to Sony-type attacks, but they take a lot of genius time, so maybe you'll be spared.  Have fun!

Clarification:  No matter what sort of virus screener you have, the Windows - IE - Outlook combination is still susceptible to the 'new trick', after, like, 30 years.  Mix it up a little and you are better off.

Walmart.ca Sucks

I had big hopes for these people.  They have carefully adjusted all their prices to match amazon.ca but with free delivery and none of that Prime stuff.  For some reason amazon gave me Prime for free, since they know I'd cut them off in an instance if they charged.  I buy a lot from them.

Well, walmart.ca can afford free delivery because they don't deliver.  Even though they promise delivery in two days, like Amazon, the order stays stuck in "Order in Progress" forever.  I guess I'll give them a week before I cancel and go to Amazon.

Update:  I did complain through their on-line form, but no response.

Update2:  Since I am getting no response and no deliveries, I upgrade "Sucks" to "Frau - Misleading"

Update3:  Finally shipped a week later.

Linux - normalize-audio

A great little tool for this time of year.  I'm sure you have a whole pile of Christmas cd's that you bought with money that goes to our fine record cartel.  They would want you to buy all over again, but we know you've put them on your Linux system, where you don't have to worry about Sonie rootkisses.  :)

Each album has a different volume, and if you want to play them all together at a low background level, you better put them all into a directory and normalize them.  This is done with 'normalize-audio' which can be directly installed by your usual update process.

Just go into that massive directory and type 'normalize-audio *'.  It's magnificent!

Addition

I'm going to try this for vlc.

Are you constantly adjusting the volume in movies? Music, explosions, gunshots, etc. too loud? Conversations too quiet? If this is your problem, read on. I am combining information found in multiple threads for convenience.

Navigate to Tools>Preferences. Select Audio. Check the "Normalize volume to:" box and set the value to 1.6
Now switch to Advanced view by selecting "All" in the "Show Settings" box at the bottom left
Expand "Audio" and highlight "Filters". Check the "Volume Normalizer" box. You should see "normvol" added to the text box at the bottom
Expand "Filters" and highlight "Volume Normalizer". Set "Number of audio buffers" to 10 and "Maximal volume level" to 1.6
Hit the "Save" button at the bottom
Restart VLC, as settings are not applied until restart. As I did this in increments, you may have to apply one step, save, and restart VLC between for menu options to be present. I haven't tested applying all settings at once, but I believe you can do this all at once.
Double-check all settings are correct after VLC is restarted.

Whoops.  The vlc method is just good for a single track, like if you don't want the house to rumble during the battle scenes, but you want the speech up to understand the English accents.

Another day, another M4.1 Oklahoma earthquake

So far this earthquake is completely unfelt.  Adding in the position, I would say this is a deep normal (tension) earthquake.  Ho hum...

Earthquake Water

Today, the water main down the street really blew, flooding everywhere.  This is a perfect time to review our earthquake procedures.

Any city has hundreds of spots where the water mains are on the verge of busting.  An earthquake will make these all go at once.  Expect no water for 3 days.  By the third day we should have trucked-in water, but some areas may be out for a week.

A good planning scenario is the 1 in 500 earthquake, which is the type that has devastated many a city.  For a city such as Los Angeles this is an M8, and for Toronto, and most of the Eastern Seaboard, this is a near-field M6.  Nuclear plants should plan for an M7 on a megathrust.

Our (Toronto) M6 should blow out the electricity grid, and shut down all the nuclear stations.  They aren't prepared and it'll surprise the hell out of them.  I really have to think a lot of gas lines will rupture.

So, today our main lesson is tap water, of which I have none right now.  Immediately turn off the hot water tank, you'll need that water.  Everybody will instinctively flush the toilets anyway, so tape the handles.  If it's yellow, let it mellow.  You should always have 3 days of drinking water.  I use a water cooler/heater, so I always keep a spare jug or two.  If anything starts to rumble, get another one!

Once the hot water tank cools you can tap it for flush water (or drinking water if you didn't listen to the above).  Crack open both the kitchen taps.  This will also tell you when the water is back on (and vents the lines so you can drain the hot water tank).  Expect the first water to be dirty.  To tap the hot water tank, you need a medium bucket, and a slot-head screw driver.  You should do this regularly anyway, since the first water is black as pitch.

I think the gas will be back before the electricity (a black start is difficult), so I have a mechanical gas fireplace for heat.  A winter earthquake will be horrible.

Seismic Hazard and Dam Safety

Reference

The stupidest thing I ever saw at the old company was their dam safety program.  Now BC Hydro is going down the same path.  The massive report that employed every seismic person in the world was a seismic hazard analysis, and what we want here is seismic risk.  One of the first things I did at Wikipedia was to nail down those definitions.

Seismic hazard is just the plotting of expected ground motions.  The big no-no is that they still work with accelerations, as though they meant something in physics.  Peak acceleration is not tied down by physical reality.  Just as bad, is the next step -- response spectra in acceleration.  Nobody wants to fix this fallacy because they all make too much money on it.

In Ontario, the acceleration zoomed up with the new calculations, mainly because accelerometers showed very high accelerations for locations on rock, and in the near-field of the epicentre.  If they were ever smart enough to put down accelerometers in Oklahoma, they would get a surprise with those shallow thrusts, right in the hammer zone.

So, at high frequencies the acceleration is very high, but there is no physics here.  In Ontario, all the dams are solid concrete on solid rock.  If you calculate the response spectrum, you will find the fundamental is at a high frequency.  Thus, combine the high response spectrum of the hazard study, and you will find that your conventional seismic analysis has the thing sliding down the river.  Millions of dollars were spent in anchoring these things down.

As well, if you measure the uplift pressure in solid rock underneath the dam, you will find it really high.  The dam is being lifted up!  Again, the wrong physics.

Believe me when I say none of this is real.  The PGV is very low and nothing will happen to those dams.  The poured concrete has a permeability orders of magnitude above the rock, and acts as a drain -- no uplift.

BC Hydro will now have their fun.

Oklahoma - a tale of two earthquakes

Just now we have had an earthquake of M4.0 that almost nobody felt.

This was a mostly normal earthquake (tension) with about half being shear.

But, earlier, we had an M4.2 that was strongly felt.

This was thrust, with a very small hammer zone.  No fault plane solution could be calculated.  Even a 3.6 thrust had a greater narrow intensity than the recent 4.0

Now, the USGS believes that these induced earthquakes have less bang for the buck.  They should be in the hammer zone when we get the 5 thrust.  :)

GM and others flee Ontario

In the news today, the US car companies won't even take Ontario bribes.  There is no investment coming in, and they are easing themselves out.

It's totally the unions.  Used to the worst unions were in Michigan, and the companies escaped to Ontario.  Now Michigan has gone anti-union and the investment is flooding back.  As my union buddy once told me, the difference in union wages is insignificant on a the price of a car, so why the big fuss?

It has to with the whole corruption of a union shop, since unions are true monopolies and there is no restriction on their behaviour.  My friends on the assembly line told me the union forced management to make the cafeteria the same auto union, and from then on the food was terrible.

With great painful experience I can tell you that no bright engineer can survive in a union shop.  It's not the wages, it's all the rules, regulations, and stultifying management.  The horrible management is a defensive response to all the grievances, arbitrations and such.  Nothing intelligent can get done in such a place.

Gross stupidity does not make the workers any happier.  I was told of a wiring station on the assembly line that was nearly impossible for a human.  An extremely bright person could have one look at it and fix it.  But that wasn't going to happen, since productivity is seen as a job threat.

Don't forget that the top 10% of bright people are ten times more productive than the middle bunch.  If you, as an industry, can't attract them, then you are doomed.  And bad food drives everybody away.  :)

Powerful thrusts hit Oklahoma (earthquakes)

M3.6  with a ridiculous intensity map for this size of earthquake.

I'm quite sad that the USGS isn't producing the fault plane solutions.  The 6 may be out of line, but there are a lot of 4's.  Normally a 3.6 is weak.  Some of these higher intensities may be a result of previous weakening.

If these are thrusts along what I have identified as a main thrust fault, then this is just the beginning.  We've already had a few of these quite a while ago.  I've been expecting lots of M5 thrusts for almost a year now, but I'd settle for M4.5.  :)

A big Christmas present for those injecting, since there will be a drop in pressure, and the commensurate increase in volume.  An M5 thrust will affect the whole organism.

Update:  After bugging the usgs forever, I have come to the conclusion that the recent shallow thrust M4.2 can't have a fault plane solution, probably because there are not enough distant stations.  We'll wait for the big ones, then.

Update2:  M4.0 in an isolated area up north.  Probably strike-slip.  No felt responses yet.  Down to 3.7, and must have been really deep, since practically nobody felt it.

Update3:  Interesting that a weak M4, normal strike-slip gets a solution right away, but the shallow thrust never did.

December - Male Depression Month

I'm making that up, after Movember, since I think this takes more men than prostate cancer, which is practically cured now, since they have diagnostics and early treatment with the radioactive beads.

Male depression has no blood test, and a complete aversion.  All the worst cases I've seen spout the words "I ain't seeing no shrink!".  The toll on family and kids is huge, and we must throw all cases of Fordianism (alcohol, drugs) into this.

In my family of German stock, we have the genetics of people being 'Intellectual Depressives'.  This has always ended with a brilliant poet or artist killing themselves at an early age.  I pick December since this is the cruellest month for Northern Depressives.

A Depressive is incapable of diagnosing himself, so you have to do it for him.  There are countless web sites giving questionnaires that do a good job.  Then present him with the facts, and a big gun to his head, to go to the doctor.  You've got to do this before he goes down the 'self medication' route of alcohol.  Most likely a small amount of a simple pill is all he needs.  

You really need the pills to climb out of the hole.  There is no 'buck up' here.  Once you are out, then you can do things to reduce the pills, like light therapy and melatonin.  The pills are needed because a Depressive has brain changes, that need a lot of 'force' to reverse.

If you are under control, then December brings challenges, mainly the parties and drinking.  Treat alcohol as being liquid gold.  Drink fine wine like liqueur.  Make a shooter of half vodka, and half Christmas Port, and fully believe it is the world's most expensive Scotch, and sip it.  It has a magnificent finish that lasts a long time.  The pleasure really boosts serotonin.

M4.7 Arizona earthquake, rugged territory

The USGS isn't giving a fault plane solution, and I don't think there is much coverage, but this is one of those random events that happens in relatively stable geology.  I did get a streetview.

Very mountainous, so you'd expect a lot of internal stress adjustments.  The felt area shows a uniform pattern of very low ground motions.

This is what you'd expect for something that is more than 20 km deep.  I'm doubting they'll see another one soon.

Update:  Normal (tension), the least of ground motions.

Oklahoma M4.2 earthquake - into the Enid Breach

Into the breach.  This earthquake was strongly felt by experienced people, so it may be a thrust.

It has the pattern that I would expect for a thrust - intense and a small area.  All in all, the mechanism is growing nicely.  I still have no idea as to why the Enid Breach exists, I think there may be two megathrusts that have run together.  The oil companies know, since they have the records, the rest of us have to guess.

Update:  Still no solution, but this was followed by an M3.5 on the lower thrust.

And the intensity map shows a thrust.

We won't get a solution for this one, too small.  But the reports should be of 'explosions' if I can find any.  The big thrusts may be finally coming in.  We must wait for the fault plane solutions.

Update2:  On the other hand the M3.8 near Prague had a strike-slip pattern.

But it did some windows, so it is probably shallow.  This is getting quite close to M5.6 and may be in a stress ring.

No discounts or solutions today, it's Sunday.
On Monday, still no solution.

The Hydrogen Economy

That title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, because that is the title of a very old book.  But today, the great Toyota has parted the curtain on a hydrogen fuel cell car.

On the other side of the battle is Tesla, with their government billions to make lithium ion batteries.  It's funny because Toyota and Tesla are bedmates on the electric motor running these things.  The main physics here is energy density, and power to weight ratio.

If the battery keeps improving at its current rate, then I think it will win.  It just needs 'lightning bolt' charging.  A big problem is the lack of any standard for charging stations, but electricity is standard.  :).  Both the car and the charging station need the big super-capacitor batteries, since only a trickle can come from the power lines.

Hydrogen has the problem of making and transporting it, although the filling stations are standard.  For a car, it is quite safe because of rapid venting, but make note of the fact that all our explosions at nuclear plants are with the hydrogen tanks.  This is nasty stuff on the large scale.  As far as energy density, etc, this new car is as good as you get.  The tank is already huge, and the pressure is at the max.  There will be no improvement, except maybe the efficiency of the fuel cell.  If oil keeps dropping like a rock, hydrogen can be generated from it, and all the carbon-dioxide can be used for clean fracking.

I'm really going to bet on batteries, but I'll probably be dead before the winner is clear.  :)  Put your money in electric motors, since these improvements benefit both methods.  Go warm super-conductors!

Texas secret police move in on Irving earthquake injection

It was an embarrassment, even though there were no fancy houses.  Hasn't been an earthquake since Tuesday, I'm guessing it has stopped.  These things are caused by the huge price for disposing of frack waste, so the injecting people mixed in a bit for their cousin.  Normally, they are injecting deep salt water from standard oil well operations.

It would be so nice for Science to know what the Texas secret police are actually doing.  I have postulated that there is a slight chemical difference between deep salt water and frack waste, and if you addressed this, then you wouldn't have earthquakes.  By keeping it secret, as in Azle, now here, you are eliminating this possibility.

I'm always happy to be in a position where nobody listens to me.  :)  I don't have the Cassandra Curse, since I don't really care...

ps.  However, it is a bit sad that this will never be resolved.  There's no pay for journalists, and all the scientists are being muzzled by their PR departments.  :(

Update:  New M3.4 south of Dallas.  Somebody is playing whack-a-mole with the secret police.  :)

Costco Bad Meat

Last week I bought a case of lamb rack from Costco.  We've done this before, we freeze it and it lasts 6 months.  It was great for the summer.  Nothing better for the bbq.

This case had some spilled blood on the bottom, and slight odour.  No problem I thought, a small leak and the racks are packed in double plastic.  I froze them all.

Today I thawed 2 racks.  OMG!!! Heaven Help My Nose!  This makes the third time I've experienced bad meat.  I now have the most powerful deodorizers working.  As bad as when the dog was skunked.  I phoned them, and I would think Costco would be a bit more sensitive to bad meat.  I can't believe I have the only case, and I've got to bring in all the rest of the racks tomorrow.  A case costs $266.

My nose is still burning, and I hope I can eat dinner.  Really, I should get a free Advent calendar or something.  :)  Pooey on you, Costco!

ps. I'm taking it back today.  Frozen, you can still smell it.  Although I'll warn them, I hope they let it thaw.  :)

The Next Ice Age - Part 2

So we got the general picture, that after the Mesozoic, the continents drifted apart and the oceans became more efficient heat pumps.  As well, the large carbon-water cycle stopped pumping out.  It got colder and colder, and not at all friendly to dinosaurs.  At some perfect separation, perhaps exactly equal for the Atlantic and Pacific, the Earth could completely freeze over again.  Something to think about in a few million years.

For now, we live on an Earth that is cooling on the multi-million year timescale.  At some point, a few million years ago, we started continental glaciation, the true Ice Age.  As I have said, the oldest evidence is 2.5 million years old, but I'll bet they keep finding older evidence.  The ice advances have a tendency to erase the evidence of older advances.

Technically, we are now in the Ice Age, but that term is reserved for ice advance.  During that time, we have sheets kilometres thick over poor Toronto.  But the tropics don't give a shit.  They go on with their happy life, drinking Pina Coladas.

During the height of the Global Warming Induced Panic, I made fun of their use of unending exponential positive feedback.  If carbon dioxide really would be like that, we'd be a baked husk a long time ago.  The melting of the Arctic is not positive feedback, because the place is so good at radiating heat out into Space.

But there is one positive feedback cycle that is invoked during an Ice Age.  It is the most dangerous of all, except for one little saving grace of physics.  But first things first.  Even though we are slowly freezing to death, as the heat pump proceeds to be more efficient, there are these 10,000 year cycles of Scotch on the Rocks.

Here's what happens:  The Polar Highlands are at their top elevation, with breathtaking views.  All of a sudden, the N-S heat pipe (ocean currents) takes a chaotic hissy fit, perhaps something every few thousand years.  This is something that is magnificent in Chaos Theory.  For example, if you have the Chaotic Whirling Balls on your desk, you will notice a long-term pattern, and suddenly the whole thing stops and does something else.  Our Magnetic Dynamo, in the Upper Core, does the same thing, when the Earth's Magnetic Field suddenly stops and reverses.  Apparently, a big snooze for mankind.

But this oceanic reversal is no big snooze.  The Pole become cold, and snow doesn't melt in the summer.  Now is the summer of our discontent.  :)  This is exponential feedback, since the Poles are now white, and solar input is cut down.  The snow builds, and oceans drop.  The ocean currents are really screwed.  The whole Trade Winds Mechanism shuts down.  Ice builds up.

You and I would not be talking if that was all she wrote.  Kilometres of ice push down the continents like a sponge ball.  Yahoo!  The ocean floods in, and the ice warms due to the lower elevation.  Warmth is restored and we have our average cold winters.  This is called an Interglacial, and sometimes it really swings the other way.  Toronto becomes Florida!  But not now, sheesh.

So, during Interglacials, we have the oceanic reverse, but it doesn't turn into continental glaciation because the continents are down.  This most likely happened during the Little Ice Age.  We might have more of those, we might have warm periods, but no Ice Age.  Don't buy electric blanket stocks!

Appendix:  As a thought experiment, think of a planet that is pure uniform water.  And think of a planet that is pure uniform continent.  What are the circulation patterns?  Lots of examples in Outer Space.

Appendix2:  Note the continents turn the heat pump N-S.

The Next Ice Age - Part 1

Now that nobody is mentioning that Global Warming thing, I am worried that someone will start the anxiety all over again by 'predicting' a coming Ice Age.  They will make a killing buying up futures in electric blanket stocks.  Did you notice that the famous Dr. S. didn't even mention GW when he was arrested at the pipeline protest?  Truly a dead subject, not even the tricky semantic change to Climate Change can rescue it.

I was never against GW per say, but always said that it had no physics.  This is what we have suffered for years in the earthquake biz -- people finding 'patterns' that had no physics.  For some reason GW got away with this for a while.  These 'pattern matchings', like stock market predictions, always eventually come to tears.

So what is going on?  Dr. Roy Spencer quietly plots the black-body radiation of the earth.  This is good physics since it is immediately how we would tell the temperature of a planet some distance in space.

I just wanted to note the overwhelming influence of oceanic current disruption.  As we know from physics, water convection is the most powerful heat pump we have.  For the earth, ocean currents pump heat from the warm wet tropics to the cold dry poles.  Water vapour is a very efficient thermal blanket for the earth, as anybody who has gone camping knows.  Watch out for those clear nights when you freeze your toes off!  The Earth can't shed heat in the Trade Winds Belt, it has to radiate it up North and down South.

So, N-S ocean currents have good physics, but are they steady?  I'm pretty sure the Gulf Stream had a heart attack during the Little Ice Age.  That's when the Vikings who were colonizing Greenland got frozen out.  And lets think about the start of my favourite Mesozoic, when all the continents were jammed together.  The earth got stinking hot, and the large carbon-water cycle pumped out the juice.

In fact, when the continents are perfectly separated and arranged, we may get super-efficient N-S convection, and we have Snowball Earth.  Let's not think about that, shall we?

(I'll probably continue this, long articles get to me.)

LInux - Mount After Network

Linux sucks, Linux is great.  Such a mixed feeling.  On my bleeding edge machine, I deserve what I get.  And all of a sudden, a perfectly good mount in /etc/fstab doesn't work.  It adds insult to injury by taking minutes to boot.

This was hair-ripping time!  I looked everywhere and all I could find was a cifs mount for directories that are already on samba.  My directory was to be shared over samba.  I hate it when Linux decides it knows best.

For Debian, I finally found that there is an if-up.d directory in /etc/network.  This sucker is only invoked after the network is up, and if you have network-manager, it comes up very late indeed.

So, nano a file, I called 'aftermount'.  Here it is.

#!/bin/sh
#mount after network up
mount /dev/sdb1 /disk4
/etc/init.d/smbd restart
/etc/init.d/nmbd restart

I put a religious empty line at the end.  This is run after the network.  After you create file, you have to run 'invoke-rc.d aftermount start >/dev/null', everything while root, or do the sudo thing.  Also chmod a+x aftermount to make it executable.

Then the stupid thing works.  (I write these things for myself in a year).

Irving, Texas earthquakes

I'm just noting these earthquakes because they have a very high felt intensity for their magnitude.  This is probably due to the fact it is lowland and the events may be shallow.  I looked it up and it is all industrial, so no Azle-type weenies.  The events are misslocated because there are no seismometers near there, but if they had decent coverage, the events would converge to one spot.  Just let it go, people.  :)  This is as big as they go....

M4.0 earthquake Oklahoma

Very boring, I know.  No fault plane solution, the USGS is getting slack.  It would be strike-slip up there anyway.  Everything is just bubbling along while we wait for real earthquakes.

Update:  Yeah USGS!  Strike-slip normal which is indicating a lightning bolt zigzag for the thrust.  This might mean why everything is so slow it's killing me!

Update2:  new M4.2 in the upper zone.  I'm guessing this will be about the same mechanism.

Now discounted to M3.7 longitudinal extension.  All these little mechanisms, just like a rock testing machine, but nothing coming together.  See you next year, big guy.

Update3:  Might as well just keep tacking to this post.  Another M4.0 that may be discounted. Yeah, down to M3.6, strike-slip normal.

Note to Fracking Protesters

It's getting quite heated in the US.  This is seen as a local neighbourhood issue in the quiet countryside, and people are going to jail.  But this is not a local issue, people!  Fracking itself is scrupulously clean, in fact they are just washing the dirty, oily shale, and carting everything away.

I do not want to dip into horrible US politics, but this is a national issue.  They are fracking with water because it is cheaper.  If they were fracking with propane then you would have to let them, without protests.  The main issue is that the fracking waste is uncontrolled, and zooms across the state border.  There, any sleazy operator can do with it what they will.  It's in their interest to let it leak on the roads, or inject it into leaky wells.  Or go to Oklahoma, where anything goes.

So, you protesters have to raise the cost of using water in fracking.  This is done by finding out who is the big guy distributing and refining the product and embarrass them for using 'dirty oil'.  After all, this is being done for Canada and the oil sands, and that's nothing compared to the fracking waste.

Sooner or later, Oklahoma is going to have a really big earthquake.  That will rattle the whole Midwest.  Is it just an OK issue?

*This is my last word on the subject, protester people.

**Final word on the protesting aspect (too much depressing politics), with which I have engaged heavily on g+.  As always, I shall continue to make fun of injection earthquakes.  :)

Extra reading:  “America did not do it right, so let’s do it right here. If we found it was impossible to frack in the UK because, say, there are lots of faults in the rocks, that would come out.”

Additional thought:  We went through this 30 years ago in Ontario with toxic waste.  Basically, if used engine oil was uncontrolled, it was hauled away in a leaky truck.  I remember following one of those on the Trans Canada.  :(  If it is registered at the source, then they recycle the engine oil.  All toxic waste must be registered at the source, and slated for licensed treatment or disposal.  My greatest fear is that if a giant earthquake closes OK, then this stuff goes to worse places.

Another final, final word:  This is big money.  I think the difference between being responsible, and 'wild west' is a million dollars a hole (1 significant digit).  The externalities (unpaid cost to society) are ten times that.  Forget insecticide, carbon, all that other stuff, this is the issue of the moment.  (Fin!)

Dallas M3.3 earthquake - walks like a duck

They were pretty ruthless in chopping down the well for Azle, now it looks like fracking waste again near Dallas.  Oh well, they have a seismologist now.  This is coming up quite fast, so he better get a move on.

ps.  There must be a huge amount of fracking waste building up for them to try this.  I can imagine acres of trucks.  Uncontrolled water fracking has led to this, and it pushes up the price for disposal astronomically.  A bit like cocaine piling up at the Mexican border.  Since the waste is uncontrolled, this leads to 'underground' activity.  In the future, we'll be surprised where this stuff ends up.  :)

More extra reading:  According to accountability project estimates, companies along the east coast can save more than $500,000 by transporting 4,150 cubic feet of waste solids to Ohio rather than dispose of them at local site specializing in radioactive material.

Update:  More little earthquakes.  They are claiming that it is just fracking.  I doubt it.  Texas has this big black veil over all these operations.

Update2:  They must have introduced fracking waste like Azle.  Nice news story.

Uber is not a race to the bottom

Today, a famous Toronto newspaper columnist tore into Uber, based on the fact that the founder is an obnoxious pirk.  They all are, down there, and we need some of those in Toronto.  I mean, we have Conrad, but he's kind of useless.

Now, columnists really are in a race to the bottom, as we see here.  His economic analysis is based on the pre- Industrial Revolution cottage industry.  Taxi drivers in Toronto are like that, since all the medallions are held by Conrads.

As I have mentioned to my good buddy, John Tory, Uber is a 'free-rider' in two things:  insurance, and congestion charges.  But I don't think they are any worse than the typical Toronto business, single person car commuter, who has a free (tax-deductible) downtown parking spot.

I foresee the day when we all are forced to have a provincial sealed gps unit, probably run by the insurance industry.  Congestion charges will be automatically forwarded to the City for transit.  Uber will pay just like everyone else, but their quality is controlled by reviews and choice.  Thus, if you really want to be picked up by a high-rated BMW, then you choose to wait for another minute or two.  And the driver can choose not to pick up a notorious drunk puker.  You have no choice and no reviews for taxi drivers, who pick you up in a barfy car with broken seats.

I just did this because my daughter used Uber while visiting in Palo Alto.  It was great service, totally safe for a single woman.

Pouring Fracking Waste on the Road - New York State

Reference

So, the next time you're behind that brine truck, trying to get through that snow storm, think of the glorious stuff you are breathing.  I'm sure it's worth at least a pack or ciggies or two.

So, now I've found a worse way to dispose of frack waste than injecting in Oklahoma.  I was always joking to people that they can't just dump it into the local creek, because that would instantly kill everything, and somebody might get it on YouTube.  Just pour it onto the road, who will know?

I was looking this stuff up, because one of my wild correspondents was claiming they were going to inject it into the Attica salt wells that once caused a giant earthquake.  Her friend went to jail trying to stop this, and I would find it very interesting, but we'd really have to wait for the seismicity.  Unless they inject it directly into these brine salt wells, and instantly suck it up again for the roads.  :)

So, everybody in New York State, start checking your hair samples for exotic isotopes and such.  I mean, your employer is going to use hair samples for cocaine use, just add some extra tests to the list.

Now, in Ontario, I'm sure they are using just good old Windsor salt, and not importing the exotic stuff from NY, or maybe they are?

Update:  They've probably stopped pouring it on the roads by now.  I did find that they weren't going to inject it into leaky salt caverns, but they want to store propane there.  That's fine, they do it with natural gas, and it's pretty obvious if it blows out.  So, if you want to protest fracking, go for the waste.  :)

M4.3 earthquake Alabama

That's completely out of the blue.  I have no idea whatsoever on that one, and it's too early in the morning to look up historic seismicity.  Would be funny if there were any injection around there.  There is no focal plane solution.

Whoa!  Dying a discount death, now M3.8  One person felt it.  Sucks when you have no seismometers.

Addition:  Strike-slip with a normal component.  Nobody felt it, yet they have a solution, so I would guess this is quite deep, mid-crust, totally 100% organic.

More:  Epicentre felt it as intensity 2, here is the housing stock, so now I'm putting the earthquake at 30 km depth.  Sheesh!  :)

Steel Roofs No Good for the Upcoming Canadian Ice Age*

I had my favourite contractor in to look at the ripped out vinyl piece.  I was panicking that the whole thing was rotten after 15 years, but it was extremely cold and windy, so I think a frozen goose hit it.  :)  The rest looks good, and I found a lot of replacement pieces under the crawl space.  My roof needs replacing, it's heavy shingle that has lasted over 20 years, and he was shocked, since the average roof lasts 12 years or so.

So I was thinking steel, and he said they are taking them down.  When they just nail them over an existing roof, they don't fix the venting and such.  As well, those cute snow stops are useless in Canada, once the snow is higher than them.

I was thinking of that as a geotechnical engineer; the snow stops create a uniform discontinuity for sliding.  So you can have a heck of an avalanche.  People with the steel roofs are afraid to leave their house.

The asphalt-gravel top roof offers uniform friction.  Once again, the whole thing is about fractal roughness, like earthquakes, and the difference between Oklahoma and Arkansas.  :)

*no ice age, just 'That 70's Show'

Turning Toronto into Palo Alto

Now that I'm on the inside with the new mayor (hey, I sent him a g+ note!), we need a grand vision for the city.  He's already for Uberx, which is the service for under-employed youth.  Some nasty people want to fight it, like France fights Walmart.  As mentioned in the previous post, you can't miss too many of these technological booms until you're totally out of it.

All the brightest people from UofT go to Palo Alto for their start-ups, and Stanford MBA's.  They will go on and lead the 'Next Big Thing', which I think will be 3d printing.  Now, you just can't go all Japanese, like Ontario wants to and centrally plan the NBT, that leads to disaster.  No, you have to go gently, gently into the night.

Ontario is burdened by the fact they have to spread their largess.  Good grief, who wants to go Waterloo?  And solar cells in the snow belt?  They are probably already under 3m of snow, and need nuclear electricity to warm them.  :)

We have to catch the nbt  in Toronto.  For instance, printing a shirt, as my friend mentioned.  You just can't print it as if you were using a sewing machine.  No, you have to visualize a shirt being ultra-compressed into a brick, micro-print that using resin and a starch separator, and then throw into a washing machine.  Voila, seamless shirt!  That takes intense, creative brainpower, like me, but younger.  :)

What we have against us is horrible weather, and tight-fisted bankers who would rather bet all on house speculation.  We have theatre and gay hipsters.  I would propose expanding the underground to include underground parks where you can listen to guitar, or something, and pick up your Amazon purchases.  Retail is going down, and we could use that space.  As well, the demand for bureaucratic office space is going to tube.

For the money bit, we can use excess taxes from condo speculation, and import some Californians to throw it around a bit.  Canadians would want some politically-correct committee that has Olivia Chow on it.  Yuck!  Especially since the nbt might be 3d printed porn girls or boys.  :)

If we do it right, we'll out-Palo the Alto.  Wouldn't that be great?

ps. this is my all-time worst read article.  Everybody in the world hates Toronto!

Japan and Europe Under the Waves

Here is one of my rails against Grand Stupidities.  The inspiration comes from the news that Japan is in recession (and Europe, too).  The news out of Europe is that they are crucifying their last remaining brilliant person, who shall soon be in California.  :)

The entire world is in an economic funk right now because we are between technological booms.  I shall outline some of the major booms.  A true wealth-producing innovation benefits the producer and the consumer of cheaper goods that improve life.

Colonization - Europe did big on this, getting cheap beaver hats.

Steel - Railway and steam, big for Europe and NA.

Oil and Interstates with cars - big for NA and Germany with the autobahns.

Fixed computer boom - starting from the 60's and on-going.  Nearly all export benefits to the US, with Japan producing some.  Productivity is finally improving in Canada with the decimation of the bureaucracy, resulting in high youth unemployment.  No improvement in Japan and Europe, and the US is just getting chip cards.  :)

Shipping and World Trade:  Containers were the big technology, and free trade the big political shift.  China did big here, it was like finding a huge cheap iron ore deposit in the era of steel.  Only this was underpaid labour.  In the early days, Japan and Europe did well with intricate mechanicals, such as small cars and VCR's.  Later years J&E did not benefit due to protectionism.  NA had the big cheap consumer items boom with Walmart and Dollarama importing containers directly from China.  Now China is big with Aliexpress, and people can import their own cheap Chinese goods.

Internet and Wireless - Both software and hardware.  Had the brief telecoms fibre optics boom, but that was their last hurrah.  J+E protected fixed lines and lost out.  Finland did okay for a while.  Big benefactors were other third world countries who skipped land lines, but didn't do anything with that.  It is still nearly impossible to get a visa to visit India if you are a Canadian in California.  I'm running around for this this morning.  California was the big winner here.  Amazon and Uberx are the big new wealth creators here.

Next boom

Whatever it is, you know J&E will miss out.  I'm predicting that it is 3-d printers.  Soon there will be giant centres like Google data centres of 3d printers making 3d printers.  Manufacturing will go local.  China will lose here.  NA will win big.  Europe would do better if they hadn't lost all their brains to California.

*J&E are losing because of the lack of immigration of fresh brains.  They are going through a uniform ageing cycle which is certain death.

ps. I was thinking that Europe should have protected that guy by having a young powerful woman stand up and say "I made him wear that shirt, it was the cleanest one he had!"  Trouble is that they don't have powerful women, which is probably the main issue.  :(

Kansas earthquake - M4.2 -- The Unzippering

That earthquake is probably misslocated a bit, since they don't have seismometers up there.  It's strike-slip, and right beside the 4.8.  This is following the pattern of the OK M5.6, so we should expect something soon.  That was before I started following these things, but you can view a time-lapse of the events.

Update:  Downsized to M3.8 because it is one of those longitudinal tension cracks on a thrust.  That NW line must be another thrust, which is offset from the OK thrust.  Weird.

The classical Arkansas pattern is to match earthquakes on the shear and thrust, with the thrusts being slightly smaller.  So it's now up to the shear....

Update2:  Holy Cow, I was just thinking that the mystery gap might be caused by an offset thrust.  As well, the Kansas events should be shallower.  New instruments might tell us that.  We'll for sure when we get the pure thrust events, but they have to be above 4.

Update3:  M3.7 just happened Nov18 up there.  Only mentioned it because my blog spiked through the roof.  Do Kansans read more?

M4.8 earthquake in the Oklahoma Monster Mash

Holy cow, just as I was relegating all this to the Scrap Heap of History, the biggest one yet crashes the party.

A perfect strike-slip on the upper shear fault.

This one would hurt.  Remember that with the size of these faults, there's no physics that would stop an M 6 or 7 from suddenly popping up.  It all depends on the fractal smoothness of the system.

I highly recommend doing what OK is doing, stopping the injection right at the epicentre 'without implying anything'.  This calms the public and has all the effect of closing the barn door after the M4.8 horse has bolted.  :)

Although this has happened over the border and thus is a Kansas earthquake, the underlying mechanism doesn't give a rat's ass about that.  I consider it to be all Oklahoma.

This was strike-slip.  I believe that a thrust at this level would pack twice the punch.

Update:  Phew.  From the news, I believe this earthquake can be relegated to "Completely Ignored and Laughed At."

Update2:  Bluff City (pop. 3) has called in an Intensity 7.  This is 'Bricks Down' people, or "I'm too drunk to stand."  As usual, the TV stations will not get out there.  Reconsidered in the light of day, down to 6.

Update3:  Structural damage.

:)

Update4:  Yeah, totally forgotten - fish wrap, just like the first M5.6.  This zone is following the pattern of that first quake, so you never know.  And that 6 will be forgotten as well.

The Coming US Earthquake Shock

I'm shelving my new book.  It'll go right beside 'Peak Oil' and 'The Hockey Stick'.  In as lurid a style as possible, I laid out the consequences of a New New Madrid in Oklahoma, and its effect on cheap oil.  It was good as these things go, but I decided I couldn't keep a straight face on the talk shows.  I don't have the talent of Al Gore!

It would have sold well in Europe, where they they like to sit with their lakes of wine, dead economy, and make fun of the US.  We Canadians would be too cold to read anything.

Perhaps the book will float again if we get those M5 thrust earthquakes, but by then everybody and their dog will be putting out a book.  :(

Addition:  I was brought to this sad state of affairs by realizing that the mechanism was growing too slowly and matching the glacial pace of politicians.  I mean, if a Great White Shark moves into the beach, it can munch a few people and create a great movie before the politicians do something.  If the tiny baby version moved in and started shaving armpits, they would probably do something before it grew big.

Today I read that they shut down the injection well near the M4.3 Cushing earthquake "without it implying anything'.  That means they'll shut down wells for any M4.3.  We'll never get to a 7 with that!  Blah.

Update:  The M4.8 earthquake was the Monster's response to my indifference.  I'm sorry....

Update2:  The northern section is ramping up as fast as Arkansas.  The book might be saved if they deny the sharks in the water.  :)

Seasonal Summary of Earthquakes in Southern Ontario

This is from the Southern Ontario Seismic Network (SOSN) that I helped out with at one time.  It's probably the best seismic network east of California.  Combined with all the deep seismic reflection data, it has helped formulate my ideas of what is happening here and in the States.

Note the very tight association with water.  Basically, no water, no earthquakes, with some exceptions.  The stuff around Buffalo and Windsor is a result of heavy salt injections.  The instability of Georgian Bay has only come out recently with new seismometers.  It defines the geology for the Bruce Black Hole, but that's another story.  :)

We've got our deep Precambrian mountain roots, formed from the accretion of island arcs.  This has given us the banding of megathrusts that go right down to Texas.  All the oil companies down there have imaged these things, but like the Bruce Hearings Panel, they have chosen to ostrichify.  :)