Arctic Vortex and Fennel Clouds

Cottage Report - Cold

Here we are sitting on our dock in our winters.  The past few days have been the weirdest weather I've ever seen.  Each day we are bombarded by the Arctic Vortex, and it battles the summer sun.  So we have nice sunny weather in the morning, and then come the Funnel Clouds, huge horrible things.  One went south of us and got the nice town of Lakefield.  Hydro poles and stuff down, I don't know what else.

Could everybody breathe a big harder?

Update:  The weather forecast was calling for 'funnel clouds', we were missing some fennel for a recipe and constantly called them 'fennel clouds' because they were big and round.

Oklahoma earthquake M4.3 - Intensity 6

This is in the upper zone.  Because of the geometry of the megathrust, I posit that the earthquakes here are very shallow.  But the seismometer coverage is sparse, and the error of their depth estimate is as large as the depth itself.  For sure this one was shallow since there was a very narrow zone with an Intensity of 6.  I believe this breaks the record for these zones.

Once again this zone shows the weird mechanism of an oblique-normal fault.  I now think it is trying to create its own thrust, and these are compression-tension quakes.  Whatever, these earthquakes make the fluid injection ten times easier, and the well owners are whooping it up.

Update:  the oilies are laying down a news blackout.  :)  For I6 you'd expect somebody's plum jam to fall off a shelf, even a chimney brick to kill the hamster.  But nothing.

Update2:  Although there were 3 responses of Intensity 6, most people didn't feel anything, so we'll dismiss the 6 as a drunken outlier.

Another cold July

This is the second summer that the temperatures have got pissy in July.  Our cold winter was back to the 70's and the summers are there as well.  Can't get a sun tan in my sauna!

Here is a really nice temperature graph, in that it shows error bars.

I like it because the error bars increase the farther back in time.  Thus, I was not imagining that the snow drifts were higher when I was a child.  The plumbing system was difficult to maintain in the 70's, and this year I had a burst pipe, even though I do everything to winterize it.  So looking at this graph alone, I would assume the temperatures are just as likely to go down again.  So it all hinges on the physics of the CO2 thermal blanket, and I've said before there is no physics here.

I'd be so happy at the cottage if the temperatures really were staying warm.  Right now they are just saying that we're an anomaly, and that all sorts of weird mechanisms such as small volcanoes and deep ocean circulation are delaying the warming.  Did they ever use these mechanisms when it was warming?

One thing I have noticed in the last year or two is that the warm band at the equator has become very narrow, leaving us to the mercies of the Arctic Vortex.  I can imagine that over the decades this band expands and shrinks due to some unknown physics.

This implies a totally new physics that nobody has really gotten in to.  Naturally, those people in that band are really hot. I want some of that heat right now!  :)

Further thoughts - Every 500-1000 years there is a massive North American drought that killed off various ancient tribes.  I was thinking that the Trade Winds band could actually shrink to zero.  Wow, everybody would be up here, sucking up the lakes.

Cottage report - Jul 25

Yeah, I caught a fish  Now I can have a new profile picture.  Weather isn't great.  We have the new Rogers data stick, and are getting 6 mb with the amplifier.  Very neat, but you have to try about 5 times to get a good line.  :)

This was caught in a little place I call 'No Bass Lake',

All ready to cook.

Update:  On the way home I found that the new OPP laser technology can get you from 200m behind you on a straight stretch.  Yuck.

Europe is a Bureaucrat's Wet Dream

Article

I know from the old company that every bureaucrat (bc) longs for the 40's when all telephone lines went through a central monitoring station, and all newspapers were censored.  This gave the bc's great power.

Europe looks longingly to Russia which has made the conversion.  :).  Unfortunately this model is 10 times more inefficient economically, and the only way to support it is through a closed economy (like the monopoly of the old company).

The bc's should never have accepted the physics of the Internet, and should have cut off CERN for enhancing it.  That physics is controlled by the design of the labelled packet, which makes it infinitely routable.  It's like holding dry sand in your fingers.

The bc ideal would be the Blackberry model where all communication goes unencrypted to a central server.  They would have to make a new Internet called NastiNet, and sell it as something much better.  There would be no routers, no packets, just streams to a central facility.  Even China hasn't managed to do that!

Of course the European bc's believe they can sell this, just look at the last quote in the article.  It would be a much 'friendlier' Internet, with no slander or child abusers.  Who could refuse that?  I know that I would never be allowed on it.  :)

Oil companies believe that Oklahoma earthquake swarm is a natural variation.

Article

Funny that's exactly how I feel about global gorming, and I'm sure the oil companies are behind me on that!

We just have to wait for OK.  My contention is that a huge mechanism is developing, just like a landslide.  The only proof is in future action.  Right now we are all talking heads, mainly because nobody is putting money behind measuring the right things.  But the only money in the States is oil company money, and would you put your head in a noose that you paid for?  Right.

So, we wait for the big thrust M5 that knocks down some buildings.  Then it is fun to speculate what the reaction will be.  I think it will be dismissed, which means we get to see an M6.  But they already had one of those, so hopefully we can go bigger.  :)

New US seismic hazard maps are probably useless

Article

For the past 30 years there was an earthquake battle raging in Canada.  The seismologists (who can't do math) were fighting the engineers (who can't do physics).  The national building code devolves all the seismic stuff into a lateral body force coefficient.  It's sort of equivalent to tilting the building, or applying horizontal gravity.  Engineers love it because it is similar to wind load.

So every time the seismologists bumped up the map, the engineers would lower the coefficient, making everything exactly the same.  Now, the US will probably do the same.

The lack of both math and physics into this mess gives us a big problem.  PGV amplification on soft soils in a rock basin can be up to 100 times.  The acceleration doesn't amplify, since it all has to do with frequencies.  As with Chile, we are going to see a big mess if there is a significant earthquake in North America.  Then we will learn, la, la.  :)

Europe is fine with Russia, lots of business as usual

They have accepted his apology for the latest aircraft shooting.

(Sorry, I made up the picture)

Alaska armpit M6.0

It's a shear earthquake, but the fault doesn't really line up.  There could be a lot of error since all the instruments are off in the main part of Alaska.  Anyway, once we have the M7.5 my prediction will be complete, although marked as late.  :)

Oklahoma gets hammered

Unusually strong ground motion for tension (normal) earthquake.

This was an M3.9 that knocked things off shelves.

Android screenshots are a bitch.

Oklahoma earthquakes: 7 in 1 blow!

I remember that fable where the guy killed 7 flies in one swat, and went on to say 7 giants in one blow.  In the same way the news is full of 7 earthquakes in one day.  The best one was the M4.3 along the shear zone.  It was an oblique shear with a thrust component.

That thrust aspect added some more juice to the ground motion, so that it was an Intensity IV, which is probably scary.

The ground motion map (there are absolutely no accelerometers here) is a classic thrust-shear combination.  The long aspect to the NE is the shear, with a little directivity to the north.  The higher intensity in the centre is the thrust.

Mama, don't buy Windows 8!

Got a new laptop for the daughter, who wanted professional word and project.  The neato Asus laptop came with win8 and a touchscreen, which the girlie loved.  Then it was left to Dad to get the dang thing working.  We got the packages through the wife's employee thing, and they are dirt cheap because of the bazillions that the company pours into MS.

But I tore my hair out trying to get this stuff installed.  I must have rebooted 20 times, and installed 5 times over.  Because it always seemed to stop, and the applications never showed up.

That start-up chess set is the worst thing ever.  I finally installed Pokki, which is a nice KDE start button.  Then I found word and project, and they totally installed and verified.  Whew!  Then I tried to get rid of all the Asus cruft, which kept popping up and reminding me about things I didn't want to do.  Man, everybody wants to add 'value', and snare you into something.  I finally had to get my fav.  Tweaknow Regcleaner to bash down all these pop-up whack-a-moles.

So, if everybody wasn't brainwashed that they have to get 'the real word', then I could have just snuck in Linux.  Too bad.  :(

Cottage Report - Lake Trout

The neighbour gave me a lake trout.  He saw hundreds in the lake but could only snag a few.  Lucky for me they have small kids.  It was magnificent!

Direct China ordering - Aliexpress a washout

I was having so much fun, but now all my orders are being turned down.  There appears to be a hidden requirement that you must be a wholesaler, even for the tiny purchases.  I assume that the tiny orders are meant to be samples.  When they turn down an order they want your friggin' bank statement to prove that you are a wholesaler.  They never say any of this, just that it is for 'security reasons'.  I have to go back to Amazon.ca which has lots of direct China orders, but I prefer China Air shipping, since it seems faster.

So, I'm wiping my link at the bottom for this.

Ontario state of fruit

Well, we voted for more restrictions on useful pesticides.  The dirty secret of organic farming is that it only works for a nice plot in the middle of regular farms.  The measured pesticide residue is higher than anything, because all the other stuff gets tested regularly.

This year my American organic, cough, chemicals, stuff is working well.  The apples are thinning, but the pears are weak.  The plum tree isn't dying, and the raspberries are producing without their usual fungus and beetle problems.  With domestic stuff, there is no measurable residue within a week or so.  Unlike that horrible neonics stuff surrounding organic farms.

Oklahoma earthquakes - not much for the week

Up at the cottage we have intermittent wireless internet, so I don't do much.  I'm glad when nothing big happens.

The only big news is a new Science paper that purports to explain everything.  This was carried on all the media - yeah!  The article is behind the paywall, so I couldn't look at it, but it smacks of the seismologist abuse of physics.  Remember, they only go into that field because they can't do math!

Anyway, they blame 4 wells SE of Ok City that inject mostly deep water extracted from wet oil.  Ha!  They should close those wells and see what happens.  Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the next phase which is a large thrust earthquake.  I hope it doesn't happen while I'm fishing.  :)

Update:  They had their big meeting, and everybody out-stupided themselves.  I like the 'Japanese Scientific Whaling' justification.

Cottage Report - the first July week

We were up a week and the main theme was Blueberries!

Every morning was the same:  I wanna go picking!  Oh jeez, I would say.  Then the wife would steal the dog and go up the back.  Of course, to save the dog, I would eventually follow, slogging up Mt. Blue.  There, the dog would be frolicking, and the wife would be picking.  We saw a young elk up there, and it left its Timbits all over the place.  Deer leave beans.  The dog would find these piles and magically turn brown.

Once the dog scared up a huge flock of wild turkeys, more of a creche with lots of babies.  They can really fly!  Once they went up, Mama Peregrine was right behind.  We heard a big commotion in the woods, but don't know if she got a baby.

We cooked up two nice bass I caught, but those were the only fish all week.

Cottage report -- Long Weekend

Beautiful weather. The blueberries are just starting and they are abundant. Nobody is here for the short week, I guess they all want to meet the new Fords.