Where Big Companies go to Die

Reference

HP is splitting again.  Pretty soon, there won't be much left.  In the last 30 years they've only been good a printers, and how long it that going to live?  It's like Kodak and film.  40 years ago they were the super-hot company for engineers.  I remember their ridiculous reverse Polish notation calculators, and they forced everybody to learn that.  After that, they missed every major trend, except for Adobe printers.

Their motto was "No Standards", so everything they made was incompatible with anything else.  They were loved at the old company who put in all big HP servers, and all HP PC's.  I fought with them a lot, so I'm glad to see them go to the elephant graveyard.

ps.  Some like to blame the Crazy Lady who is now running for president.  I think they were just overtaken by the world, especially commodity parts.  They were the old custom gun makers of England against Samuel Colt and precision interchangeable parts.

Toronto Startup War of the Kittens

Apparently, during the Uber Kitten event, all the cool startups were fighting for Twitter points.  My son helped line them up for Studeo.  They are now in the top rank on the Kitten Index.  Employees in the banks were gnashing their teeth.  All the taunts can be found on Twitter.

Summary of Southern Ontario Earthquakes

I throw this up every year or so.  You'll notice the influence of the two megathrusts under Lake Ontario.  The gap between Hamilton and Cleveland is due to a huge Precambrian basin, shown in the reflection seismic.  The Hamilton fault is strongly defined.  These earthquakes continue to show a strong affinity to water, and are generally at a fraction of the rate of Oklahoma.  The rare earthquake (1 in 500) is a 6+.  The 'destructo' is an M7.  This class of earthquake is strongly shown in the sediments.

Stiletto Stampede

Reference

I just did this on my Earthquakes g+ collection, but it deserves a wider audience.

Secondary school l'istituto Tecnico Industriale di Avezzano, in L'Aquila, Italy, has reportedly banned wedges, flip-flops and high heels measuring over 1.6 inches. 

They are firmly in the Italian School of Earthquake Response, which is to run in panic with your hands waving about.  Perhaps they should learn Ducks with Covers, and await their death in a crummy stone-rubble Maffie school.  :)

Nevertheless, I think stampeding will kill many more people than buildings, but in Italy, who knows?

Time for bold new plans, Justin

Where is Canada's place in the world?  What can we do to make an impact and get oodles of money?  Obviously Big J would want to invest in roads and transit, but does that actually do anything?

These are some of the big things:

Turn Toronto into Palo Alto.  We have the tech talent, and the big underground downtown.  All we need to do is turn our expertise in penny mining stocks to tech startups.  We don't have to actually kill the big banks, they are dying anyway.

Turn Alberta into the geological capital of the world.  Let them improve my Geofish water treatment.  Go hybrid and fuel cell.  Off oil.

Go with my plan for Port Hope.  That is the ugliest place in the world.  Turn it into Neutron City, with world class nuclear research.

Vancouver has enough Asian money, and Montreal is hopeless, so we just worry about the East Coast.  I think they have to research cannabis.

:)

ps.  This is classic old macro-economic issue of 'Guns or Butter?'.  Deficit money should be spent on Guns, and then income from that to spent on Butter.  Justin has a majority and can do something bold in the next year before all his useless ministers drag him into scandal.  The alternative is spread the butter very thinly over every square mile.

Afghanistan blind thrust earthquake M7.5

It shows pure thrust, which I know is directed upward.

I'm surprised my Wikipedia article is still alive, although much improved.  A long time ago (at work), I did a huge amount of this.

Nepal was like this.  Within the valley no structure can survive since the pgv hits 2 m/s.  This is the ideal place for my idea of container houses.  For the other valleys, nothing will hit this one for a few hundred years.

Nepal was a bigger version, much closer to the 'Big Squoosh' of India.  The nearest strong motion device registered 100 cm/s.

Add:  We have to guess on the pgv, no instrument could survive.  It would have to be on a huge screw pile, and then it wouldn't give the true surface pgv.

Add2:  Ha, it was 200 km deep!  Should have read that.  Still a thrust, so it probably just put out 20 cm/s over a large area.

An Afternoon of Donuts and Wine

My son got a hootload of Air Miles points from Uber the other day, and got these $50 event tickets - an afternoon of donuts and wine tasting at The Rolling Pin.

We took Uber there, and I have a bone to pick.  My son mucked up Uber Select and Uber Black which we thought was a little step up, but Uber Black uses airport limos with a slight smoky smell, and cost me $40 to get there.  On the way back, he used his credit on Uberx, with a nicer car, and $22.  Lesson learned.

The event was magnificent, very friendly, like family.  We sat with a couple planning an Italian wedding so she was staring at all the wedding cake models they have, and their baker designer does wedding cakes.  The other half of the two owners was Vanessa, and she liked me as 'The Crazy One'.  I think she was crazy, too.

So there was a big plan.  Each donut was paired with a wine from Vineland Estates.  This first one had a sparkling white that went very well with the donut.  After that, I was in a sugar haze.

Their major invention, for which they won a prize, was to use a plastic laboratory pipette for instant injection of an alcoholic syrup.  Apparently it will be all the rage in Toronto soon.

When we left we got a goody bag.  (no advertised carry-donut).  When I got home I sipped an extremely dry red wine to sop up sugar.

This event will never be repeated, but Pass The Table makes up new ones all the time.

As for the rest of you, save all your sugar points * for the week and go to the Rolling Pin for a funky donut.  Vanessa is absolutely crazy, and you'll have a good time.

* learn to drink your coffee black, eat broccoli, and dry red wine.

ps.  I'm married, so I can't propose to Vanessa.  She must get a million a day.  :)

pps.  Right now I'm DYING of sugar overload!

ppps:  Recovered in the morning, lots of black coffee.

Addition:  Vanessa is very sorry for the missing donut.  I don't know if I'll every be able to make for amends, so I've done this.

We must bury the Scientific Method

All politics is local

All science is political

I finally concede that the Scientific Method (sm) is dead and we should bury it.  The last great sm-er was J. Tuzo Wilson, and he regularly gloried in all times he was wrong.  For him, it was a journey.

We now live in a world where you can never admit you were wrong.  Except for the start-ups in Palo Alto, where business failure is a badge of honour.  For the rest of the world, all money comes from political forces, where it is death to admit failure.

SM requires that you put forth a hypothesis that can succeed or fail against future (unknown) testing.  If you have many successes, the hypothesis is promoted to a theory.  A theory can still be proven wrong.

The modern way is to put up a hypothesis that can never fail (Consensus Science).  Instead, you 'synthesize' a theory from available data.  You may modify it as new information comes, but it is never wrong.

I am a hardcore sm-er but who cares about me?  I found it useful when you were actually doing active investigations.  For example, in my Rouge River Fault studies, I put forward the hypothesis that the marker horizon was as flat as a billiard table, slightly  tilted for the regional dip.  The investigation was designed to conclusively prove or deny it.  

Consensus Science is fluid and dynamic.  No great temperature rise?  Then bring in the oceans, even though you didn't before.  Can you imagine any PR department for a university admitting to a failed hypothesis?  Can you see the USGS doing such a thing?

No, the Scientific Method is dead, long live Consensus Science.

Thank god I'll be dead soon.  :)

Massive hurricane fed by full El Nino backwash

So, it has started.  Perhaps this lunge will be persistent.  We shall soon see Callie slipping away in mud.  Perhaps this storm will go to West Texas.  All is well in the world.  :)

Add:  It is a great irony that these hurricanes are the more magnificent heat dumps we have.  It's like having a little electric room heater.  You can have no fan on, and it gets hot in the corner.  Or you can turn on the fan and warm up the whole room.  The heat loss for the room is greater, but you feel warmer.

All over

That didn't last long.  I'm glad that nobody noticed.  Earthquakes are generally dead right now.  Here's what was driving me nuts, but I finally fixed the old hottub.

Oklahoma is starting to spark again, and they are calling Cushing a national security threat, which I called quite a while ago.

Depression Sabatical

I've gone totally manic in posting, and I'm now falling off the cliff.  I am an Intellectual Depressive.  That makes me brilliant but not suited for political life.  I can't explain to anybody why I write so much, and sometimes that gets to me.  I used to get a bottle of wine now and then from horrible Google ads, but they found my readers were fiddling, and cut me off forever.

When I do this, everybody sends condolences, and assure me that they actually read this stuff.  I am grateful to the very few, but this is not an attention-getting device.

Those who want the truth about earthquakes can go and read ..... er, nothing.  It's all bullshit.  You can read the PR from the old company and that will make you warm and fuzzy.  Have fun.

My Nexus 5x review

I got it yesterday.  Stupid thing needs a nano sim card, so I have to go and buy one.  It's exactly the same as the old Nexus except for the super-neat fingerprint reader.  Android Pay isn't in Canada, so this isn't that important.  It has rapid charging where I can't tell any difference.  I'm hoping to use it for navigation, which means super-expensive monopoly Canadian data, and I'm hoping the fast charger can keep up the charge.  The old N5 drained like a stuck pig when navigating in remote areas, and the charger couldn't keep up.

I will use the improved camera on my next trip.  I'll try it on the walk this morning.  Since I'm colourblind in red-green I won't notice anything, and web resolution is sufficient.  I'm sure these cameras (just like the phones) are hitting a saturation point (just like PC's) where Internet restrictions make more improvements unnecessary.  Chromebook phones are just around the corner.  The Fruit had better come up with something completely different.

Oh, and I needed to buy a usb-c converter cable, and a fast-charge car thing.  Very cheap on Ammie.

Yeah, Yustains will legally be available in Canada

I have decided to give a new term to that which will soon come to Canada, legally, the bane of Hooperism.  He did real well pushing that wagon in Toronto, beside the Fords.  I'll make another term - Ford Powder, and Crack Ford.  This white power should not be legalized, since it is just used at parties to drink more.

We'll soon have Yustains growing at the cottage.  It should be sold at the LCBO with a lot of tax, which will make the desperate Ontario Libs happy.  It becomes difficult for the Toronto wine bar scene, since it shouldn't be vaped.  That would expose the servers, and the designated driver.  I foresee 'Brownie Bars'.  Everything will have to be graded with the major Yustaboids labelled.  Innovation will come in the ratios, a high level of Yustaboid2 will let you watch Blue Jay games.  High levels of all 3 will let you watch the Leafs.

I'm so happy this will come in my old age.  I can see myself puffing on my Yustapipe.  I just have to see if my horrible allergy developed 30 years ago is still active.  One little bit and I was down with a migraine.

Add:  Yeah, just got my Nexus 5x!

The Western Quebec Earthquake Zone - Ottawa earthquake M3.1

This is a totally natural, 100% organic earthquake zone, with a rate of about 1% Oklahoma, and slightly above Toronto.  The mechanisms in the East are all the same;  essentially they are all water drains.  But the wq zone has an added strain rate due to glacial rebound.

Recall that our ice ages are on a 10,000 year cycle because they sink the land like a thumb pressed on a beachball.  The ice melts when it hits bottom and then the land rises again.  This causes a shear strain rate, the maximum of which is right at the centre of the old ice sheet.

Although the seismic rate is low, the seismic risk is high, since nobody is prepared for earthquakes, and the whole place is infested with goopy clay.  Perhaps now people will care about Ottawa because of the election.  :)  We could easily expect an M6 thrust right under the city, which is the 'everday' earthquake, about 1 in 100 per year.  A much larger earthquake is the standard 'city destructor' at 1 in 500.  These are the same odds for destroying Toronto, and causing a nuclear disaster.  Nearly all 'earthquake cities' live with these odds of destruction, and nobody ever considers an earthquake at these odds.  Too bad.  :(

 **hope -- perhaps with the new guy, we'll have real change.  :)

Dirty Old Amazon

Reference

Just got something from them today.  But that doesn't mean I think they are acting like a typical nasty company.

The pushback from the company more than two months after the Times published its story illustrates the level to which Amazon is trying to correct the narrative that depicted Amazon as a brutal place to work.

 Nearly 2 months late, and written by a super PR guy, and all he did was trash the people who spoke.  This was the modus operandi of the old company, and I was sick of it.  I condemn Amazon in light of my experience.  They could have run one of the those independent surveys, which the old company did until they found themselves on the bottom of the world.  Now Amazon is there.  :)

Amazon has to fight this 'perception', even though it may be true, because a brain will cost them three times as much.  I know someone going there who was hired before all this, is he having second thoughts?  Wait, is that a high-speed charger with auto control?  :)

 Add:  This sounds like something Pootine would say about conditions for journalists.  "Moreover, the people you talked to have now been eliminated, so their opinions don't matter."  Only people on the true outs with a vindictive, vicious organization would talk, the others would be worried about references, and Amie is too young to have crazy retirees!  I don't have to worry about Polonium Tea.

Add2:  Maybe it will take him 2 months to respond to me!  I can only hope.

Add3:  The horrendous cost of living is the only abuse at Google.  :)

Letter to Trudeau

I'm so confident that you'll win that I'm writing this letter in advance.  I was just as confident with my last 649 ticket.  Nevertheless, here is the letter.

Please, please make the nuclear regulator competent again.  We will forget that it was Liberal Ralfie, whom you still love, that brought in Farmer Keen to start decimating the place.  Harper just finished the job, turning it into total Toadie-Ville.

There will be consequences for having nobody at the wheel, and not very nice ones.  We are susceptible to a nuclear disaster at the 1 in 500 per annum probability level, when we should ride out a 1 in 10,000 earthquake, and only be at 1 in a million per annum for a nuclear release.  If you put a bit of transparency into the running of nuclear plants, you would see it.

PS.  Wow, who would have thought a majority?

Climate Change -- Lives of billions hang on a thread

This is the real climate change, not the soda pop fizzers.  Due to geology and plate tectonics our northern lives hang on a thread.  This news might stop immigrants.  :)

You have to click on the large version.  This is the week's ocean current map (find it yourself!).  It's a great video that leaves my Linux chuffing with heat.  In it you can see a strong lunge of El Nino, which, if it keeps up, means mudslides for Callie.  Of even more interest, is a 10% leakage off the tip of South America.

Now here's the knife edge, or thread of life.  There's no reason for El Nino to keep a regular 7 year cycle.  It regularly turns off for 100 years or more.  If that happens then all of Callie must desalinate with nuclear plants.  If the Atlantic equatorial current shift south, then we Canadians are aiming blowtorches at advancing walls of ice.  At least the Europeans will stop whining about their shrinking glaciers.  How about one big glacier, huh?  Bunch of crazies.  **

I always like writing about this, but my opinions are tomorrow's fish wrap.  :)

**Not just crazy -- TOTALLY EVIL CRAZY.  What sort of Nasti organization could keep that diesel thing secret for so long.  Look for the bodies!

***(I have no European readers :)

Water-Induced Earthquakes Rule the Week

Once again, in a boring week, water-drain earthquakes rule the world.  I have developed my hypothesis by combining rock mechanics with seismology.  Nobody else does this, since the world is too specialized, and everybody in science depends on hand-to-mouth political funding.  That's sad.

For myself, I have elevated it to a theory which has been proven time and time again.  I can be arrogant about this, since I am the only one, and totally isolated from the closed world of the Pay Wall.  :)  Others do not have this freedom, always worried about the fat old white farts who have tenure.

Earthquake mechanics is a philosophical science, since we can't actually can't go down there and look.  I use lab physics, and mining observations to construct my theory, but other people can come up with bizarre ideas.  Like all such science (climate), the discussions can become vicious, and always have been.

So I stay outside, safe in my bubble of no readers.  :)  It's fun.

Uber Takes Toronto

Yesterday, my son pigged out on free Uber stuff.  It started with a free lunch delivered by Uber eats.  In the evening, he and his downtown friends found that there were special Uber cars (top line) giving away Air Miles cards.  They would wait until the special cars were free and then book them for a little trip.  They got hundreds of dollars.

Uber lives on causing downtown congestion for free.  This is a massive economic externality which should be captured.  It's because the cities have tried to capture this by taxi medallions, which is horrible and won't stand in court.  They can give all the bylaw tickets they want, but they'll all be squashed.

Uber will go all out in creating new congestion.  Soon you'll see mobile uber restaurants and hotels rented by the hour.  There is nothing to stop them.

The only solution is to release the taxis, and create a uniform congestion charge.  This can be done with smart phones, no need for a major corrupt computer infrastructure.  In fact, that's a great idea for a Palo Alto startup!  Give the cities a means to fight Uber free-riding.  Of course, nobody running cities has any brains.  Too bad.  :)

Also, all this Uber stuff means that young people will sell a kidney to get a job downtown!

Yeah Bluejays

I'm such a big fan.

Cottage Report - The Closing

It was a beautiful weekend for closing.  The cottage has lake access only, and you don't want to be on a motor boat in November.  The pump has to be closed and everything drained.  All boats put away, and everything tucked up.  This was the weekend for evenings by the fire, and listening to the audiobook of the The Martian.  If you ever want to have a good sleep, listen to this for an hour or two.  It's 10 hours long, so plenty of restful nights.  Mind numbing detail.  After a while, I was getting restless because of a few large conceptual holes, but everybody else liked it.  Great for cold nights!

The colours aren't at their peak yet, maples are barely orange.

Oklahoma earthquake - M4.4, possibly up to M5.8

A long time since I wrote something about OK in the main blog.  This is a deep normal earthquake with only an Intensity of 5 right above it.  Distant stations reported a high magnitude, but the local effects were light, so they downgraded it.

ROSF

66.32

46.4

a

e

P

2015/10/10 09:31:32.2

-0.3

T

99.8

1.80

mb 5.7

LDG

LDG

∅

QUIF

66.59

46.8

a

e

P

2015/10/10 09:31:34.0

-0.2

T

73.3

1.52

mb 5.7

LDG

LDG

∅

SGMF

66.78

46.3

a

e

P

2015/10/10 09:31:35.1

-0.3

T

120.1

1.92

mb 5.8

LDG

LDG

∅

GRR

67.69

45.5

a

e

P

2015/10/10 09:31:40.9

-0.3

T

79.1

1.96

mb 5.6

LDG

LDG

∅

FLN

67.72

45.0

a

e

P

2015/10/10 09:31:41.3

0.0

T

13.1

0.48

mb 5.4

LDG

LDG

∅

LDF

I love when this happens, and this is the biggest discrepancy yet.

There is a huge felt area.  Had this been a thrust, you would have seen something.

Add.  Ok, I'm at the cottage now and have snagged a cell connection.  It will only last a few minutes.  This was an 'upside down' earthquake in that the main hammer went down to the centre of the earth.  The stations that reported an almost 6 are probably on the other side of the world.  With this earthquake, I predict the 'closer' will come within a year.  That's the earthquake which either destroys the city, or blows up all the oil tanks.

Add2 - Followed by a 4.5 strike-slip near Cushing.  I'm in the land of no internet, so I can't do much on this one.

Harper Deserves to be Kicked Out

Reference

Can we go now?

So Harper didn't know about this either?  Just like Duffy-burger?  There are now so many of these things, that I don't think you can say "But he is so competent."

*they picked out Syrian refugees that wouldn't barf on him in a photo shoot.  You can see here how happy they are.

Diesels and Nuclear Plants

I see there has been a lot of activity looking up my old posts about the old company, and a certain eastern nuclear plant, that I drove by today, on the way back from the cottage.

Then I thought about vw and their shitty diesels that everybody loved because they were cheap and peppy.  The physics would make all these things impossible and still pass the epa test.  They cheated the physics in software by making the performance a slug, and who would notice that on a test frame?  I hope they now calculate the performance by computer, and compare it to a real drive.  This is a multi-billion dollar scandal, since who wants a slug car, which is what they'll have to do.

It makes me think about my multi-billion dollar scandal that happened years ago.  They arbitrarily picked acceleration, velocity and displacement for the seismic basis of the nuclear plant with no physics.  When put together in simulation, nothing could survive it.  Any test run honestly broke the equipment, and almost broke the testing machine.  Yet it all passed.

Years later, we ran into this pixie dust when we reran the old computer runs.  Couldn't get close to what was in the report.  My friend who actually ran the analysis went on to sweep floors and he is happy.  I dropped my long-running campaign to get the seismic design basis changed, and they kicked me out.  The are still using this for the upgrades, and they will need the pixie dust.  :)

ps.  Not a corporate decision

WASHINGTON - Volkswagen's cheating on emissions with the use of software in diesel cars was not a corporate decision, but something that "individuals did," its U.S. chief executive told lawmakers on Thursday.

Ha, ha.  these things are always 'individuals'.  The corporation tolerates it, and shoots anybody who finds out.  Bet you there are a lot of bodies, just like certain other places.

ps2.  To be a corporate decision, somebody would have drafted a proposal for the president and board.

Proposal to Cheat on Emission Tests

We, in Engineering, have come to the conclusion that we can never get the tdi 'naked' diesel to pass emission tests and propose that we modify the software to pass tests.  Our motivation is that we were told we would all be fired or sent to Siberia, if we couldn't do it.  As this is a multi-billion dollar decision, we ask for full board approval.  

Do you see this happening?

ps3.  I'm thinking that the only way to tell if you are on a testing frame is to throw in an accelerometer.  That's another buck for approval.  :)

ps4.  There are a heck of a lot of these things that I ran across.  All have my blood on them.  :)

Gulf Stream becomes confused

The main thing that keeps us Northern people warm are the giant oceanic plumes like the Gulf Stream.

We are lucky by plate tectonics that there is a perfect ramp with South America deflecting the warm water up to Britain.  We, in Canada, mainly benefit from the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific plumes.  For some reason, the Gulf Stream plume is confused and may not be working at full capacity.  There is a bit of a backwash.  In my fertile imagination, I think of the main equatorial current shifting a bit more south and missing the ramp completely.  That would be a true mini ice age for the North.

My working hypothesis is that we enter our Snowball Earth phase when all the continents are well separated.  At that point, the oceanic heat pumps work to dump heat towards the poles.  My problem is demonstrated here, in that an efficient heat pump like the Gulf Stream would make the Arctic warmer.  I can only conclude that all the heat is deflected to the south.

PS.  The Gulf of Mexico is heated by this current, as well.  Should it turn off, we would get continental glaciation up here in Canada.  It wouldn't be successful because the land is depressed by the last glaciation.  But in 5000 years, if it turns off, we get another ice age.  If the equatorial current dips below the South American prow, we would just get another mini-ice age.

Cottage Report - Friggin Freezing

This is the weekend before final closing.  We have lake only access, so I had to push the boat against a NE gale at near freezing temps.  The water is drawn down 4 feet, so I had to tilt the motor way up to leave the dock.  Right now we are surviving in the uninsulated shack with a nice fire.  This place is a summer thing, and tomorrow it'll take a day to split firewood for a day.

Still, the colours are just starting, and next weekend they should be at a peak.  It's great weather to put everything to bed and not miss it, since I would never want to be here any later.  Although it is nice to think of a sunny winter day with white fluffy snow, there is a lot of really nasty weather to get there.  :)

El Nino Beaten Back Again

The El Nino backwash made one lunge earlier, which flooded Los Angeles.  Now it has been beaten back to sit under Hawaii.  This mass of hot water affects our NA weather by sucking in hurricanes, and mucking with October chills.  As well, it is spinning typhoons to China.

We must wait for another lunge to Central America to have any effect on the Callie drought.  I think until then we should only call it a Baby El.  :)  Many other good prospects have failed at this point.