Mr P. gets another one

Reference

I get a lot of Russian hits on my blog for some reason.  That's why I'm not spelling out the name of a delicious, if deadly, French Canadian winter treat of french fries topped with gravy and cheese curds.  I feel sorry for you guys descending into a classic 1930's Nasty-ism.

If my blog is now blocked, use a Tor bridge.  I can't wait until they cut all that off.

Of Wolves and Watermains

I love the smell of a burst watermain in the morning.

Note the lovely steam rising from the river.

This was the start of my morning dog walk.  In the valley I saw the remains of a wolf pack kill.  I had said they would come and wipe out the coyotes.

So overnight, a pack of at least 6 wolves got the mangy sick coyote.  I am putting this together from my woodland skills, so the City can dismiss it.  There was nothing left but the grey fur.  The wolves munch everything, just like my dog, and their iron-cast stomachs take care of it.  There were a dozen giant poops all around, so they had a nice meal, not like a rabbit or anything.

Not a speck of blood, since they would eat that snow.  I couldn't tell anything from the tracks, since this is old snow, and large dogs have been all over it.  My dog stayed away from the whole thing.

Is this scarier than a zillion coyotes?  No.  The wolves are efficient, they'll just go after the deer and coyotes, and then slip back to Algonquin.  Wolves are the only thing stops coyotes from taking over the whole place, and our winter is a wolf winter.

Video of watermain

Tale of Two Hubs

Bell Canada, here in Toronto, is hopeless bureaucracy, just like my old company.  That's the trouble in Canada, everybody is or wants to be a monopoly.  Nortel and Blackberry went down this route, but they still had to compete outside our ice walls.

So, I have 25 mb service, with unlimited download, so I can run a Tor relay.  I've had trouble with 'Sync no Surf' for a long time.  The other day the sync stopped entirely.

I had this modem.

Very old and a dangerous router.  I put it in 'bridge mode' and had another router.  Of course, that gives you trouble when you have to run the gauntlet of first level support.  The Bell guy came for an hour or two, tried everything, and eventually changed the street port.  Then it started randomly disconnecting.

So the second Bell guy comes, which means the first guy gets a 'rework' on his record.  Poor fellow.  This guy tried 3 of these modems and they couldn't even get a sync.  By the main test, my line is perfect, with a capacity 3 times the current use.

Finally, he made further internal contacts and found that for my service I get the 'new' modem.

This one was actually made this century!  The time wasted to this point was 3 times the cost of the modem, but if you just yell a lot, they'll charge you $200 for this.  This modem works perfectly, and I've slammed it with my hardest downloading test, which always blew the old modem.  I could probably go back to an IP phone, if I wanted to, but if you lose your Bell phone number, you are in worse support hell.

This still has a stinky router with almost no options.  But if you plug in a fully configured router, it knows enough to get out of the way and act like bridge.  I now use tp-link generic router with openwrt.

Update:  Still solid.  This is absolutely essential.

Mouse Troubles

The hills are alive with the sound of coyotes, and the screech of our Peregrine falcons.  What's a mouse to do?  Why, invade my house and find new penetrations that I thought I sealed all up.







I have now sealed up some more remote electrical cable penetrations.

Wolf PR

Just got this in the mail.

Explanation for those who do not follow my blog:  These guys are all over Toronto pretending to be coyotes.  They knock at doors, and ask if your dog can come out to play.  :)

Tiny earthquake in Spain

An M5.0 in the middle of nowhere.  Here is the street-view of the epicentre.

It's fairly obvious that the windmills caused the earthquake.  I am available for television interviews.  :)

Polar bears should be getting happier

Reference

I didn't think there was much here, but I decided to run this chart again, after my dog walk this morning, and the fact that the wolves are descending on Toronto.  At least they're happy.  They can take down a deer any old day in our deep snow.

The chart basically says that there's a lot more ice volume than last year, and that everything is climbing up rapidly.  That's the problem that the warmers have in extrapolation.  You only have a chance if you got solid physics, or fundamental forces.  No chance if you are like a momentum investor in the stock market.

So, the polar bear scare goes down the tubes for these guys.  Doesn't stop them for a second, and that's what I love about them.  Such tenacity in their convictions!  I just can't argue with them.  Don't want to either, and I run fast.  :)  Really, if Katharine Hayhoe started arguing with me, I'd just roll over and show my throat, so that's why I hide.

Last fall I got the all basement windows and back door, to be super-insulated.  I'll have to think of more stuff to do, since we'll have the cold, and a big earthquake might take care of cheap fracking natural gas.  Get a hot-tub with a car-port-type roof cover like I have.  It's like going to a Caribbean beach every night!  Don't bother with Florida any more in the Winter, they are going to freeze!

One more thing:  Any chart of past interglacials shows the temperature going up and down like a toilet seat.  We are oscillating in the efficiency of our oceanic heat pumps.  If those heat pumps go warp speed, then the Arctic becomes warmer, the tropics become cooler, and then they shut off again.  Love the physics!

Mexico M6.6 earthquake - last gasp of dying spreading ridge

This earthquake is so new they don't even have a fault plane solution for it yet.  Probably oblique-shear, and it was probably lightly felt.  I just like its location.  It's exactly the same as that last mid-Atlantic earthquake, a transform fault near a spread.  Only this one is going down!  What exactly happens when a spreading ridge is swallowed by a subduction zone?  You get a lot of heat under the continent, and it won't be just volcanoes any more.  It'll be the Rockies with volcanoes!

Update:  Exactly the same as the other mid-Atlantic one.

Linux: Setting up a Tor Dark Site

I have a Tor relay set up on my main machine.  It just takes an encrypted stream in, munges the IP addresses, and throws it out.  Anything that you look up through a Tor browser, goes through 3 of these relays, and makes it impossible for Google to trace the IP.  Really, you are basically limited to a very few things, such as view text and graphics, because if you do anything else, like use Flash, it could blurt out your IP.  So really, this is just for basic communication.

I totally believe in "Freedom to Read".  Every few years I look at what is passing for porn these days, and if I wanted to research child porn, I would want to do it without the heavy hammer dropping.  Those that aid and abet that horrible industry must do so with money and influence, and that is easy to trap.

So, you nasty Internet snoopers, go set up traps, and stop fishing the whole thing.  Stop Harper and Big Mother.

I've now gone to the next level, which is a major target of snooping laws, and that is The Dark Site.  This is a web server with a bizarre address which nobody can search on.  It's in the form of 'blkslsj23llss.onion'.  I just rumbled my keyboard for that.  I managed to set up my own and I'm not telling anybody the name.  The NSA can burn a lot of carbon trying to find sites in that encrypted space.  I'm also turning it off and on.  Yeah!

For this I used my old media computer and put on the latest Debian.  I then installed apache2 and tor, configured as a client only.  The default web server goes to a sandboxed file, and is fairly secure.  They can only get at it through the tor client.  When you modify the Tor configuration to allow a hidden service, it generates your encrypted name, which you can then advertise through a Tor chat service.  They have to use a Tor browser, and type in that exact name.  Voilà, you'll see my text page, dedicated to my dog.

If you want to have input to the web server, you'll have to iron-clad it to something above my pay grade.  There are books on this, and it makes my brain hurt.  I am happy with what I did.

Further thoughts:  So you can see the problem here.  One British leader, trying to justify massive police powers, said that "There are dark sites out there that nobody knows about."   That's the point!  If nobody knows about it, then it doesn't exist.  So if I wanted to set up my dark site "Forbidden Dogs", and I wanted to subvert everyone, then I would have to advertise on Facebook.  Every NSA-type spook in the world would be on it, and it would be impossible to spread the word without revealing my identity.  My site would have to be the hardest in the world.  I just can't really do it.

Even further thoughts:  I tried looking around for dark sites.  All the links that several sites listed were gone or had the fbi sign.  Many listing sites expressly forbid anything they don't like.  I have decided that putting up a Tor site is a death sentence.  We need floating sites, such as something that exists in the bittorrent stream, and not on a physical server.

Toronto: Wolves at the Door

For two months we've experienced the new Ice Age, or Siberia.  Now, on the dog walk, we met a trio of very nice coyote wolves.  The first two were magnificent, and I saw them from a distance.  Silver grey, and shaped like a greyhound or Doberman, I thought they were friendly dogs.  Roxie didn't like them and gave a spirited defence.  They just wanted to move down the valley and the dog was holding the pass.

Some neighbours on the valley came out in alarm.  They didn't want Roxie to play with the nice doggies.  They see them all the time, and think they took a fawn last fall.  They have certainly done a job on the valley squirrels, and there are no foxes.

On the way back we ran into the third cw, which was a little mangy thing, and the dog chased it.  Roxie also found what we think is the den, so we should have little cw's all over the place.

The mangy one.  All the local foxes and cw's eventually get the mange around here.

Update:  We're totally invaded by these cute little things.  The girls went down to the big river with the dog, and saw a lot more.  I can't wait for a real wolf pack to come down the river, and wipe these skinny guys out.  Such is life in a frozen fairy tale.

US NorthEast runs out of cheap natural gas

Reference

I was just going to leave this as a g+ post, but it's too good.  As we know (but not the usgus!), all the OK earthquakes are caused by shale gas fracking waste, because that contains surface water (meteoric) that is corrosive to the deep quartz holding the rocks together.

It had looked earlier that they would stop all that, but this winter will deplete all stocks in the US NE.  Canadians are exporting gas again.  Yeah for us!  It's ironic that the same winter has probably frozen up all their fracking, but look to frenetic activity come Spring.  I wonder if the cost of frack waste disposal is also a hockey stick....

The Saviour of Print Media

Poor old newspapers, they aren't having a good life in the new world.  Well, I have seen their happy future, if only they would grasp it.

This is what the Times calls an op-doc.  It's simple shadow-type animation with a well-written article.  Only newspapers could do it, if they have any staff left.  I'd love to see one about the OK earthquakes.

The boring old Economist would be great at this.  Imagine one about the current oil prices.  :)

Oklahoma Earthquake Couplet

If there is anything that is totally diagnostic of fluid flow earthquakes, it's the occurrence of a couplet.

That's two identical earthquakes.  Now, you would actually have to look at the seismograms, but that's the job of the bUS-GuS.  I was trying to think of a cute name for them after the twerky lady sang the famous song.  It's better than key-lee.  :)

The 'b' stands for 'big', as in Big Ugly Bureaucracy (bub).  You should have seen how hard I was on Nasa, one of the worst bubs.  But they reformed because they were killing people.  In fact, that's the only way a bub can ever reform itself, when it actually starts to kill people.

Bus-gus can never reform.  Too bad.

Global sea level rise

OMG, suddenly the Warmists have attacked Miami.

We do know that coastal sea level as defined by tide gauges jumps all over the place.

The US east coast has it's own problems, with isostatic rebound, passive continental margin sinking, and groundwater extraction.

Tectonics has a big role in sea levels.

It's not so huge.  Since sea level was always measured on passive coasts, it's been rising forever.  Satellite is only very recent.

So take a Chill Pill Mr. Warmist.  Relax on the beach.  :)  Both poles are now accumulating ice.  But wait!  Arctic ice is like a melting iceberg, or ice cube in the bathtub.  If the Greenland ice sheets melt as they do with every interglacial, the land pops up, and the ocean bottom goes down.  Really, I think this whole ice thing is rather hopeless for a scare story.

So let our interglacial play out, and enjoy Toronto being Florida.  Before that, however, we are due for a lot of ups and downs.  Enjoy Diversity!

Cute M4.4 earthquake out West

Continuing my theme of classic earthquakes, I really like this one.

Classic thrust.

With a large felt area, which is unusual for the West.

I really like this earthquake, because it aligns perfectly with my imaginary extension of the large strike-slip fault that zooms along the side of Vancouver Island.  This is probably right at the end, so that's why it is thrust.  If you squint real hard you can see a break through the mountains.  :)  But right below this, all the volcanoes start.  This fault is my candidate for a destructive M8 before the Cascadia subduction zones gives a peep.

Since I don't live there, I just continue to put my usual desultory effort in looking at these things.

Note:  All my deep faults are imaginary if the us-gus doesn't want to look for them.

Mid-Atlantic Ridge earthquake

Okay, this M7.1 is old news, but I was freezing my appendages off at 30 below.  Much like the Argentina earthquake was a beautiful example of subduction, this is a spreading ridge.  For everything that goes down, somewhere there must be something coming up.

This did not just happen on the spreading ridge, but on a transform or adjustment fault.

Thus, it was a mixed up shear and tension earthquake (oblique normal).  You can see it was on the E-W line and there was a bit of directivity, as people felt it in Ireland and Scotland, but not Labrador.  Our Earth is a wonderful nuclear reactor that must get rid of the excess heat, or risk a real melt-down.  At the subduction zones the oceanic crust is old, cold, and dense, sort of like the people at the old company.  :)

This stuff must sink down into the primordial ooze (compulsory retirement age).  At weak zones, the crust is pulled apart, and this is reflected in the earthquake mechanism.  I used to think there was ridge push, but then we'd have compressive mechanisms (maybe).  I just think everything is weak and oozy, just like Martin Short on that last special (yuck).

Friggin' Freezin' in the North

Now is the time to talk about freezing and Warming, while I'm waiting for my hair to dry so I can walk the dog.

So, here is the latest background oxygen microwave plot.  It gives the satellite measurement of the background microwave field, which can be correlated to the lower-atmosphere temperatures.  Sort of like looking at the Earth from distance.  The darn thing shows us slightly warmer, but well inside the uncertainty fuzz.

And this is the picture of wet, cloudy air.  The efficiency of the oceanic heat pipes (stable major currents) is a correlation between the oceanic water temperature, and these clouds.  If there is a high correlation, then we keep the heat in.  A low correlation means that warm water is exposed to clear nights.  Heavy clouds are great thermal blankets as we who have Arctic camped know all too well.

All of this must go into my thoughts of dog walking and whether we are going to have a warm summer.  So far, all my winter and summer observations have correlated excellently with the Warmist charts.  We've had mild winters for 20 years and hot summers.  The last few years have held flat at perfection for us.  But now my observations have showed a plunge, and this is not 'sympatico' with anything.

I'm thinking now that in a 'Time of Coolera' the heat pipes may be more or less efficient and I can't figure out which.  More efficient pipes may make us Arcticizers warmer in the short term.  Or not.  We can only wait.

Back from the cold

Had a nice weekend in a winterized cottage.  Even so, we haven't had such low temperatures for 20 years and the system was sorely tested.  The water kept frosting where the pipes were near the walls, so the hairdryers and heaters were out.  My dog went absolutely nuts in the deep snow, when we went out snowshoeing.  But, man, facing the wind on the open lake was something.  As we left today, we saw a fancy yellow helicopter zooming around low, so I wonder if somebody is missing.

Oklahoma is on another in-breath cycle, the activity got up to mid-3's on the weekend, should be a bunch of 4's coming soon, and we'll hit a new intensity high.

I am suggesting to the intelligent newspaper people to find out why the USGS has failed so badly here.  I suspect it's due to ancient compacts with the oil companies.  I got a hint of that when I was researching.

Humans have had a rough time of it

TV Show

In this show they are claiming that severe climate change happened within a lifetime.  Maybe a single drought, but general climate change can't be resolved to that level a million years ago.  That led me to search for some science.

Two-legged ape-like things have been scampering around the Earth for 8 million years.  Like the show says, if you put them all into one movie, you'd have the Hobbit.  Probably not much conversation, though.

On a scale that large we've had some pretty severe climate change.  That's because we're talking about massive plate tectonics movement.  This reference was good.

This is a really cool graph, wish I had one!  The warm and cold zones synch exactly with the Wilson Cycles, which are the opening and closing of the continents.  As I've always said, when the continents are all schmooshed together big things happen that make our current situation happy.  That's why I've always voted for low carbon sensitivity because the past would have completely baked us.  During warm periods giant reptiles rule, and in the cold it's the time for giant mammals.  It's all a matter of how the animals handle heat.

So, the Arctic ice sheets nailed themselves in place 50 million years ago, about the time T-rex said good-bye.  No meteor required.  We get cold because the deep sediments stop baking and the ocean currents become efficient heat pipes, just like the cooler on your processor.

Now we are into this bounce, but this started millions of years ago.  I've told you already, the bounce is determined by isostatic rebound.  It's this mess that messed with humanids.

Note that we only get ice sheets up in the North.  Can't do too much more to Antarctica.  The whole trade winds band tightens up.  The oceanic heat pipes dry up.  All of this knocked out the weaker two-legs, and gave rise to huge migrations, where you had to have some brains.  And you had to survive.

Of course, none of this can compare to the certain doom that we dumb humans are facing...blah.... blah.  I'm going up north soon to go cottaging at 40 below.  Now, that's survival!

Oklahoma earthquake traffic light system

Reference

The traffic light system in Oklahoma seems to be working.  I think the earthquake activity has gone down a fair bit, but we are due for another round of 4+'s.  When that happens most of these wells will have to close.  I suspect that has already happened closer to OK City.  Oh well, on to Kansas!

Update:  The whole thing is coming up again.  It breathes like a giant organism, and there is actually a lot physics behind that.  I just realized that they are drilling new holes faster than they are closing them.  Really, if you are shutting down wells then you have to close off that entire area.  Otherwise people put down a huge bore and pump the life out of it until they are closed.  I can't see that natural gas fracking will shut down that much, since they are competing with long pipelines.

Update2:  Oh darn, just thought of something.  Why aren't the disposal companies up in arms about this traffic light system?  They should have full-page ads condemning it.  Because it syncs exactly with the lifetime of a disposal well.  These things clog up and they move on, drilling a new one nearby.

M6.9 earthquake Argentina

A very deep subduction earthquake.

It has a perfect subduction fault plane solution.  It is so deep that the local intensities are less than an M3.6 in Oklahoma, but the frequencies are low so it could trigger landslides.

There have been a few here now.  I could barely see it on the local seismometers.  It is said that these deep earthquakes may be due to rapid phase changes, and not classical friction.  As such, they have no bearing on the chances for a tsunami M9.

The Enemy

There she is, the enemy of my Roomba.  Oh, she may look cute enough, but she sheds like dandelions in the Spring.  I've had my roomba 530 for years, upgrading the battery and the vacuum.  Every year or so The Enemy wins and the thing totally chokes up.

I have to take it apart and clean out the brush gears.  It's quite an involved job and I only recommend it for people who used to take apart old clocks when they were kids.  (These modern kids will never see gears).  All that gunk is cleaned out, greased, and put back together again.  Now it's ready to faithfully chase the dog around the room cleaning up all the fuzz.

Kansas M3.6 produces an Intensity 5

People should know that not all earthquakes are the same.  Some earthquakes of larger magnitudes do not produce such an intensity.  This was obviously a shallow thrust, and the town of Anthony was in the hammer zone.  Nobody can take a lot of these without the house falling apart.

In the Tulsa World article, it was pointed out that the insurance companies may never pay.  I'm saying they will never pay.  The homeowners will suffer a "Death of a Thousand Cuts".  Poor them.

People over in Tulsa who are feeling some of these small earthquakes may want to take out a good "Clueless Swiss" insurance policy.  There is a good chance of an M6 appearing out of nowhere, and anybody on swamp will get damage.

Oklahoma news articles finally get good

Article

I loved this article.  Their only 'fault' is that they don't mention me.  :)

Update:  Ziva has made a nice timeline, showing the standard "There ain't no sharks."  response.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/energy/quake-debate-timeline-shows-oklahoma-s-response-to-earthquakes/article_681a9aae-f24a-559c-9099-903d6a80846c.html

Can't wait for #3 in the three-part series.

Update2:  The third part has some more on earthquake insurance which will never pay out.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/earthquakes/earthquake-politics-we-don-t-work-in-a-vacuum-oklahoma/article_9cea5c50-246a-5f6d-8b98-3b7979430ca6.html

Significant Location Error in Irving Texas Earthquake Sequence

Article

I still don't think they're very good.  You really need a good velocity model for earthquake locations.  If they keep refining it, they'll get a narrow NE line along the megathrust.  That's opposed to Azle, which was NW line along the transfer fault.  When everything is perfect, they'll find the culprit at the top of the line, and he'll say "Who, me?  I didn't do nothing."  Same as Azle they'll find a rock water injection well that has been operating for years.  What they might not find is the substitution of frack waste.  Too bad.

Oklahoma M4.2 earthquake - shallow and widely felt

Ah, a few more injection wells put on 'Yellow Light'.  I wonder if they are really going to keep up this closing business as the 4's come in fast and furious.

Look at that felt area!

Oblique normal along the NE megathrust.

That whole upper zone is totally disorganized, and still able to pop off these 4+ earthquakes.  I have high hopes if they forget their little restrictions on M4 earthquakes, and allow the fractures to consolidate.

Anyway, up there they can aim the earthquakes at Kansas!  :)

M4.0 earthquakes start to shut wells in Oklahoma

Article

Wow, and I thought they would get to 5's at least.  The earthquake mechanism has advanced to the point where 4's are an every-day occurrence.  I didn't think they would take action on those.  That would explain why earthquakes have moved further north.  They might not be shutting down a lot of wells, but nobody is going to inject frack waste where there has been an M4.  These companies know perfectly well what is happening.

At this rate, the whole OK mechanism may shut down for waste injection.  I understand they have other places, but probably nothing near the volume for injecting straight into the basement.  They use the fiction that they are injecting into the fractured limestone right above the megathrust, but we know from the Bruce Black Hole what that means.  :)

Even this company claims they are only injecting rock water, but we know earthquakes are only activated with surface water.  I wish everybody would come 'clean' on this issue, but there is no hope there.

Anyway, frack waste injection will soon be chased out of there, and I wonder where it will go.

New USGS Seismic Hazard Map

I really hate to make fun of these things, since they are all-important and created by God-Kings.

Here goes:  What is it?  It is a map of Chance.  If you were to throw an Earthquake Dart at it, the redder zones would have a magic attraction, making it more likely that the dart would land near there.  It doesn't have to.

What are the units?  Honestly, all this futzing is only good to 1 digit (log or decade), but everybody likes to quote to 1 percent.  Epic battles have been fought over the exact placement of a line, sort of like climate science.  The Big U only works with acceleration because that's what they do in California.  I told them a million times that it doesn't work in the East, but do they listen?  :)

Even if you used the right units, (PGV), there is the question of what ground conditions.  You might want to uniformly use base rock, but the Miss. Valley doesn't have a rock in sight.

What is it good for?  Not much, since every dang small town has its own building code.  In Canada it is a bit more rational.  For example, they've bumped up Oklahoma.  Are they now going to put more nails in the framing?

But it is a pretty map, and totally centred on historical earthquakes.  Enjoy.

State of the Eastern Earthquake Union Address

Nothing like being snowed in to pump away at the keyboard.  I brought my Linux laptop to Montreal.  It is an old Asus which my son abandoned for a new super-slim one running Win.  He's addicted to monstrous Excel spreadsheets to solve everything, and needs the latest.  To me, this laptop is practically new and runs Linux like a Tesla on 'Insane'.

I'm sure that Win10 will cause another great 'shedding' of laptops.  So great for the economy, MS is almost better than The Fruit.

But I digress, this is summarizing the current state of earthquakes.

Texas Hot

Texas now has two new zones opening up.  I think this brings the total up to 10 (maybe).  As we know, they have these huge saltwater injection wells, just like OK.  They mainline the Precambrian at tremendous volumes but have never caused any problems.  It's only when they bring in frack waste that they start earthquakes.  When people complain, the Texas Conspiracy does a great job in eventually moving the waste to another hole, where the earthquakes start again.  These people are stoooopid, and dangerous.  Texas deserves them.

Oklahoma Cold

They've shoved the frack waste up north, and there might be a lot less of it.  Let Kansas get the shaking!  I'll change this opinion when we get some good thrusts again near the city.

Explanation Reviewed

Okay, here we go again.  Fracking waste, mainly for gas in shale, contains fresh surface water, and corrosive agents.  This stuff is brutal to the 'glue' holding the highly-stressed granites together.  The adhesion points, consisting of the strong silicates dissolve and break.  Each time you see a small earthquake, another zone has broken free.  Depending on the fractal states, these small earthquakes most likely build up to a bigger one.  Only the maximum earthquake can be said to cause a stress shadow (no more earthquakes for a while).  The little quakes have no role in making things safer.

New Madrid was a natural seep caused by shifts in the Miss. River, probably after the last glaciation.  It probably took thousands of years to build up to the maximum.  Now it is a dead fossil, but other zones can activate.  They require water, and dams do a nice job.  I have hopes for Virginia!

Beautiful deep Argentina subduction earthquake M6.3

Yeah for my Montreal boredom!  Snowed in, but there are earthquakes!

Very deep, people would only feel it if they are on swamps.

New USGS colour scheme.  Great subduction zone downward thrust.  The fault plane should be a bit more N-S.

Another M4 earthquake in Oklahoma

I'm stuck in Montreal again, being the driver to the one I live off of.  Winter has really struck with a giant storm, and 40 below wind chill.  Good thing we're staying in the hotel.

I'm bored so I'm writing this on another M4, the latest in a big swarm of 4's.  This has a smaller felt area, so I'm guessing it's a medium depth thrust.  I'm not so excited about this northern zone, since it is a dog's breakfast of shear and thrust earthquakes.  Unless the faults consolidate, I'm almost willing to put a limit on it of M5.  This is unlike my beautiful monster zone near O-town, which could have easily put out an M7.  But I think they've moved the frack waste north, or at least I hope so.  Like Texas, they read my stuff, and do everything secretly.

Texas has a new Whack-a-mole zone opening up.  It's fun to guess how big this will get before they secretly stop it.

Update:  Second Texas mystery zone may have opened up in the Panhandle.  Need some more earthquakes to be sure.  They sure are sloomy boostards.  :)