Intelligent things that will never happen in 2017

Happy New Year everybody.  If you are looking for intelligent things to happen in 2017, save your breath.  The toast tonight will be to stupidity, may it ever reign.  :)

Intelligent Things

Canada will establish a premier nuclear research at Port Hope, giving up on loser Chalk River forever.  They will use the Korean design for the Maple reactor and actually have it work.  They will pioneer waste disposal in real rock, and give up on the Bruce Black Hole.

Somebody who knows basic physics will finally set global warming into its deserved grave, especially as world temperatures plummet.

Oklahoma will finally treat the freshwater frack waste before they get the full New Madrid series of m7's and 8's.

Trumpypants will have an epiphany on the road to Damascus.

Realtors will finally report that Toronto and Vancouver housing prices are plunging by 50%.

Linux - Jamming a full ATX power supply into a micro ATX case

These cases are supposed to take a more powerful atx power supply.  I like to rate the power supply as twice what I need.  I had to mod this case a little bit and stick out the power supply to make room for the AMD wraith cooler.  I still love it!

The only way would be a micro atx power supply (maybe), or a special water cooler.  All of which is more expensive.  This is the Cooler Master Elite Lan case.  With the power supply fully in, it would block even a regular amd cooler.

ps. the motherboard wouldn't post, no matter what I did.  I'm getting a replacement.

Jonathan Asmis and Cyrene Wu Engaged

He's the famous son who's taking Silicon Valley by storm.  :)  She's the famous project engineer who's building all those weird buildings in the same place. Don't feel bad if you never heard of them, they aren't on FB.

Google Home World's Best Party Machine

"Ok, Google, play some jazz.'  'Ok Google, don't play that crap jazz, play some hits.'  'Ok Google, make it louder.'  'Ok Google, make it quieter.'

This went on for the whole after-Christmas party.  I can't wait for New Years!  Everybody went by and changed the music.  It has a decent speaker for the living, dining room, and kitchen, and we had a mixture of old and young.  Better than a DJ!

Next, it needs to know all the rules for the board game Archipelago.

Bad Christmas Singing

We all need a little fun.

Merry Christmas Everybody

Now that trumpypants was elected, I can say that to everybody.  :)  It is meant well, and we shall put the word 'Christmas' in a non-offensive category.

That said, it's all about the toys!  I got a Google Home, which was snuck over the border by my son.  Google was expecting people to do this, because the required app is now on the Canadian Google Play store, if there is such a thing.  My son was expecting to go through a proxy.  It's lots of fun for the first 5 minutes when everybody is yelling.  I have a feeling these things will go the way of the smart watch, but who knows?

With that, we got some wifi light bulbs.  I can put them somewhere and tell Google to 'Turn off the damn lights!', like I yell at my twenty-somethings, but Google will listen.  :)

For my new computer, I'm finally abandoning the standard tower, and going for small format with 2.5 inch disks.  I've used the same two cases for a long time now, and one of them is going to the steel mill.  Progress is wonderful.

The Oklahoma earthquakes are off and on, so I think everybody will enjoy the trumpy inaug party where all the poutinologists of the free world will come together.  I hope the trains run on time.  :)

ps.  our first-ever goose for Christmas.

Linux - Waiting for Boxing Day

I have come to the conclusion that my very old Athlon 6 processor, and my even older nvidia card can't cut it in the modern world.  The new graphics desktops just freeze it randomly.  Right now I am using tightvnc to hook up to my slightly more modern a series processors.  My computer seems to survive this, and it's easier than rehooking everything.  Besides, I have a large disk on this machine, and I have to make sure it is working

I have decided I will go micro-atx and the latest amd A series.  I will reuse my ssd and move the 2 tb disk to the other machine.  That will make the new machine, my 'fun' machine, where I constantly screw it up with the latest Linux things.  The other one will be basically a disk farm.

**twas a bug before Christmas.  The qt5 updates seem to have fixed it (fingers crossed).  I still want a new toy!

**Belay that order, ensign.  I can still make it freeze under heavy load.

Ontario Seismicity in Review 2016

Southern Ontario has seismicity that mirrors Oklahoma but at a natural rate.  But if they started to disturb the Precambrian water, like with nuclear waste repository at Bruce, then it would act up.  At a natural rate, we would expect an M7 every thousand years or so, but it was probably a thousand years since the last one.  As I have said, 'We don't give a sh*t about no earthquakes.'.  As such, we have a seismic capacity somewhere around Italian rubble houses.  I have written many scenarios for our next M7, and let it rest at that.

The Toronto megathrust and hanging wall zone are very clear, and are activated by water from the lakes.  The Buffalo zone practically runs into the Toronto hanging wall, and makes a nice line.  If you use a topography map, you can trace these things right down to New Madrid and Oklahoma.  They are characterized by a broken and weathered zone (hanging wall), right next to a solid wall that forms a ridge or cliff (footwall).

This year, we finally get a picture of the last megathrust to the West, the famous Grenville Front.  Now, the geologist with the Bruce black hole pooh-poohs this by saying it's off into the lake, but it is the same as the others, and has a hanging wall zone.  It's just that this one is on dry land, and has little opportunity for a natural seep.  Down in New Madrid, we have the river, and in Oklahoma, we have injection.

New Madrid is no threat for another thousand years, but OK is nearly tomorrow, and Toronto will get a good hunk of grease from OK, and will let go soon after that.  If you are a tiny bit worried about the 1 in 500 per year chance of destruction, take a pill, and move to the footwall.  :)  Otherwise, enjoy your happy life downtown.  If you live in a cheap condo, insure for the whole value, and know that you'll walk away from it.

**I just read that the condo corp is responsible for earthquake insurance.  You are responsible for contents, water damage, etc, car being flooded, etc.  I would add living expenses, and figure that that they walk away from the building.

LInux - Reinstalling for the disk drives

When I last upgraded the motherboard, it had this fancy AHCI that Linux didn't yet support, so I used the IDE emulation.  Zoom to last few days when the computer has been driving me nuts by randomly seizing up.  I  tried to reinstall and it kept seizing on the install.  That's when I knew something was wrong.  I thought it was heat so I vacuum all the dust out, and that was a good thing, but it wasn't it.  Then I switched the disk drive in the bios to ahci and that was it.  Obviously, the old has to be thrown out.  :)  Now I've got to go through all the crap about a new installation.

**oh pooh.  It's the new kde5.  The bug came back again when I upgraded to 'testing'.  I'm stuck on an old kernel and old kde for a while.  You always have to reinstall to go back.

*upgrading my kernel now.  I hate living in the 'stone age'.  I'll wait a week before upgrading to 'testing'.  It did give me all sorts of messages, and next time I'll read them.  :)

**all fixed, the order of things is important, and I don't know what I did.  :)

***not good, not good.  My old processors can't handle new graphics.  Time for new computer guts.

Magnitude 8 earthquakes, just hanging out

These earthquakes are the 'joy riders' or 'surfer dudes' of plate margins.  They can cluster and mean nothing.  However, they do set up the 9's.  Here you can see the irregular plate margin and you know that it never come up with anything more than an m8.5  An m9 is 10 times longer than those little splotches.

So, nothing super-duper is coming.  It sucks for the locals in stone houses, but they'll learn.

Another totally ignored letter to Donut Trump

Donald Trump

Excuse my typos.  Please go after the warmists with something that will throw them for a loop.  It's called the Scientific Method, and you should bring it back from the grave.

It's the process of casting a testable hypothesis, which can succeed or fail based on experiments.  Those can even be thought experiments as pushed by Einstein himself, but the experiments have to be good physics.

Here is your favourite, global warming.

Global Warming

We propose the hypothesis that the temperature of the earth is totally controlled by levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and no other means.  The physics (or mechanism) is that the atmosphere acts as a glass greenhouse, and carbon dioxide levels control the amount of infra-red radiation going back into space.

Method of Testing

The hypothesis can be tested by several means.  The first is tracking the future temperature and co2 levels.  As a blanket, a linear increase in co2 can only lead to temperature rising by the square.  Since increasing temperature releases more co2 from the oceans, this will lead to a square co2 and cubic temperature.  There is no back-off from this runaway reaction.  Look in the past when co2 has risen.  Did all life die?

The physics or physical mechanism can also be tested.  In clear air, shoot a laser to a satellite and back.  Can you see the absorption?  Is it increasing in time?  Measure the die-off of the daily sun temperature in clear air.  Is it slowing as co2 increases?  Study clear air convection since the hypothesis states that such heat transfer is less than 10% that of radiation.

These are absolute, any variance from the results expected of the hypothesis invalidates it.  Under no circumstances should there be continuous modifications, due to new information.

**I just found out that this is posted to FB, so I have to give the answers.

-temperature is flatlining, probably soon to go down, no cubic
-all life didn't die, witness me writing this blog
-absolutely no measurement confirms the infra-red effect
-convection is 99.9.....% of atmospheric heat transfer

Why I love Donald Trump

Reference

Every election, the US re-enacts the Civil War.  This time, the right wing won, and it is better than just leaving them in the sidelines.  Now they can totally screw up, and leave everybody alone for the next cycle.

What this article doesn't realize is that conspiracy theories and fake news, are the only tools of the powerless to get into power.  All these people are power-mad, left and right.  Now that they are in power, anything they say will lead to mass shootings, or trillion dollar losses on the stock market.  They'll see power slipping away and will correct themselves.

With the Bush-league, the greatest nutty conspiracy theory was 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'.  Even I and the Economist believed that one.  And the lefties have 'Global Warming' which is just the same.  All of them lead to power and riches.

This is the normal cycle of the world.  Everybody should stop worrying for a week and have a nice Solstice Holiday.  (I think the Peaceful Muslims made the biggest mistake of their lives going after Christmas, and it led to Trump.  I hope they realize that and issue a new statement)

Russia attacks the Fish

Lots of referral spam has hit my blog, all from Russia.  I am now on their hit list.  :)  I knew I shouldn't have used his real name.  Now I will call it Poutinology, with a phoney meaning of 'studying fries with gravy and curds'.  They won't pick that up on their search engines!  Really, they have taken over the world anyway, why would they be so petty?  :)

Amazing double El Nino ends droughts in California and Toronto

Wow, I've only been able to monitor wet air and currents for a while now, but we are into an amazing time.

Clouds       Currents

The Gulf Stream is pumping warm air into the Arctic, which whips around Greenland, and comes back at us.  In the Pacific, the north Pacific current is dead, and the El2 is backwashing right to Central America.  Normally, we get high plumes which hit the Yukon and come down at us in the form of an Alberta Clipper.  Not this year.

These low, straight west, plumes are soaking California, warming up the mudslides, and then hitting us with huge snow storms.  We are lucky that we are not getting a simultaneous Gulf of Mexico plume.  :)

Remember that with physics, and not philosophy, water has a specific heat orders above that of air, and the ocean currents control our weather, not carbon.

**really, trumpypants should give me money.  :)

Linux - Setting up a dynamic dns

Say you're a new Secretary of State and you want to set up your own personal email server in your house, like every other predecessor.  You want to be secure from your Putinist friends, but you are a cheap bastard.  Then you need dynamic dns.  This gets around the fact that your local phone company will force you to pay through the nose for a fixed IP address.  That's when you get an IP address for your very own so you can set up your own domain, like altrightsec.com.  You need that for a mail server.  Because, honestly, who trusts the government with their black helicopters?

Just get the cheapo service where they randomly switch the ip address on you.  Then a fancy openwrt router approved by moscowsnowy himself, where you can run a client.  That checks every 5 seconds what ip address you currently have and sends it to dynamic ip host.

I'm going with duckdns because they are supported by openwrt and linux.  Also, they have a g+ community and everything.  I finally convinced some relatives to ditch ms, and I'll be supporting them remotely.  All the servers will be Linux.  I haven't decided on the tv box.  Those cheapie Android boxes can never be updated.  Maybe a chromebox supporting android.  Who knows?  Chromecast?

Oklahoma earthquakes go into freeze-up

I had thought there would be one more kick at the can, because of trumpies, but there isn't.  Freeze-up means that there are no more trucks of freshwater frack waste heading to OK.  It usually stays quiet until April or May.  They'll claim great victory, and people will plan a huge increase in fracking for the Spring.

End of social-media war with Amazon

I call an end to my tempest in a teacup.  Ammie has proven itself to be a true Putinista, immune to any outside influence.  I have a friend who programs for them in Seattle, probably bots, so I love them all.

Merry Christmas to all, and as long as I get cheap stuff delivered immediately, I'll love you forever.  :)  I'm glad you have finally figured out the way to do business in Canada.

I'm probably losing my touch.  I've only had a few great wars, but most of them have fizzled out.  But Hope Springs Eternal.  :)  I refuse to use fake news on FB.  Now that's a weapon that actually gets people killed.

**Now, back to my Christmas Sabbatical.  :)

Putinistas in Ontario

In Political Science, the political spectrum is represented by a big circle.

I'm not allowed to say the old word that used be on the bottom so we replace it with the New Nastis.  At the bottom everything is the same because it is only sustained by Totalitarianism, which is a long word, and best replaced by Putinism.

It's funny thing that all organizations are sliding down the circle.  I  blame it on social media, nobody can withstand the stupidity of FB, and so they slide.  The first thing they all do is put in an opaque PR department.  Everybody does this now.  My old company had a massive slide almost all the way down.  I used to call it Stalinism, but now we know what it is.

People just let it go by believing in fake news, and not caring if all they see is a bland face of PR.  We know who pioneered propaganda techniques and the Big Lie.

But there are long-term consequences.  For government, it is a shattered economy as everybody flees high taxes and power rates.  For a company, it is credibility when something goes wrong.  Also, things will go wrong more often as they boot out the intellectuals and replace everybody with bots, human or otherwise.

Everything shatters at the bottom, so the circle is self-correcting.  Might not be in my lifetime.  :)

ps.  Putin is now going for genocide.  Trumpypants can only be a wannabe next to him.  The original had several wannabes.

The Kirkian Hacking of Amazon

First Hypothesis - Holding.   That Ammie does not employ anybody anymore after the big accusations of Putinism for management (The New Nasti-ism).  Especially in Canada, where they would have to be nice, and pay severance and maternity leave, stuff like that.

New Hypothesis.  I'm getting increasingly frantic bot-mail that I'm getting a refund for the item that I did not receive.  I have a horrible vision that I will see 10 refunds and it will be impossible to return it.  This has led me to think of the Original Star Trek, where Captain Kirk always took over computers by talking non-sequiturs, that made the computer smoke and blabber "Does not compute!".

So, the hypothesis is that you can hack into Amazon just by sending messages to their bots.  Instead of smoke, you will get a message "Full Root Access Granted".  Naturally, I'm not going to do this, because it's too much work, but eager beavers could give it a try.  :)

Linux - Kernel 4.9 working well

It's fun to be able to compile new kernels again.  This is the 'big' 4.9 release.  You can keep the compile much shorter with the 'localmodconfig' trick.  The great thing about these latest Linux releases is that my computer keeps getting faster.  The 'time to use' for rebooting is incredibly fast.  And everything is working.

Putinism Takes Over the US

Putin has defined the New Nasti-ism.  Modern Nastis are following the book written by the original bunch.  Be friendly to big corporations, grant monopolies, and let them run roughshod over everybody.  Anybody who gets in the way can be eliminated.

This will be great political science which will be studied for years.  Right now, Heil Hrump is assembling a team that will outdo the originals.  However, he will never achieve writing History, because of all that constitutional stuff.

The Perils of Buying with Amazon

So, I love shopping with Ammie.  I'm a big reviewer and I get stuff.  But there is one horrible trap you can sucked into without having a clue why.

When you order from a third party, you have no idea if they are in Canada, the US, or China.  Ammie now washes its hands of any such dealings.
****
Hello,

We are sorry to hear that you did not receive your merchandise for Order 702-4557307-5919427. Please understand that Amazon.ca has no way to fulfill an order which you placed with a third party merchant on our site. We can, however, guarantee you a refund through an A-to-z Claim.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience you may have experienced as a result of this issue.  The vast majority of orders from sellers are trouble-free, but for the occasional one that doesn't work out, we are happy to employ the A-to-z Guarantee and as a result a full refund is been issued. We hope that this solution works for you.

If you have legal questions or concerns, please contact our Legal team at this address:

Amazon.com
Legal Dept.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226
Fax: 206-266-7010

We regret that we cannot correspond with you further about this issue.

Sincerely,

---
Chetan
Account Specialist
A-to-z Guarantee Program

***********

I ordered something, had no clue where it was from and Border Services seized it.  They sent me a nasty note, stating that I was the importer of record, and I was responsible for its disposal.  I desperately tried to contact them, and then contacted everybody at Amazon, stating that since I never received it, it isn't my concern.  No such luck.  They have abandoned me, as you see by the letter.  I will now wait for the next letter from Border Services, and then sue.  They use American lawyers and have no clue about obligations in Canada.  I can get the costs up into the thousands, and any arbitrator will award costs because Amazon is so opaque about this.

I don't know what you will want to do.  For now, I am checking whether a company is US, and I might not order from them.  But it is very difficult to do.

**This will become a fine study of companies who follow putinomics, like Google and Ammie.  If you are nasty to your employees, and kill off all the bright ones, then there is nobody to deal reasonably with these small issues.  Ammie has nobody in Canada with both intelligence and power, they do all their thinking with bots, so they don't have to deal with Canadian labour laws, like maternity leave.  :)  I may escalate this through my MP and federal consumer protection.  It will become a great nationalistic cry "Don't treat us like Americans!"  :)

***This is the start of social-media war.  I've had lots of these and it is always to mutual destruction, and great entertainment.  You can help me by trying to get through their bots.  Any success will be reported here.

pps.  The hypothesis is that there are no Canadians working there that can rub two brains together.  The experiment, to be conducted by you, is to go to Customer Service, pick other, other, other, and ask the question "Are your facilities friendly to baby seals?"  The Canadian answer would be "No baby seals have ever been injured in our facilities.".  The bots will blow up.  :)

ppps And the American Putinists will answer "Who gives a f*ck about baby seals?"  That answer is worth extra points.

Oh Happy Day, as they say in Rome.  We have the coffee roaster back.

And it's at the price I bought it!  Some may have remembered my article on Home Roasted Coffee.  This is the roaster, but I couldn't recommend the third party sellers at a lot more.

Get this for Christmas, if it is in stock by then.  Do make dark roast!  That bakes out all the caffeine and other goodness, and if you stick with light-medium roast, you will live forever!  :)  (fake news).  Read my review and get the Amazon warranty.

This is the best because that thing solid for me, but has a poor warranty.  I think you get problems with dark coffee.  :)

Use the links to the side, to give me money.

**even though it says they are getting it in, buy it now so they get it faster.

Christmas Sabbatical

I find I'm getting to hyped up about general stupidity.  This is dangerous to anybody, but it causes me to post nasty things to no audience whatsoever.  I'll stop a bit and get the readership to zero again (from 1).  This is also the time it bothers me that I vent into the air, and nobody reads.

All my happy friends and relations don't get anything I write.  I do that on purpose, but I do hope that one day people will read, since I'm always right.  :)  For now, stupidity reigns supreme, as it always does.  I just have to get back into the mood where I can laugh at that.

Good-bye, and thanks for no fish.  :)

** I'm coming back a little bit on mild topics.

Google is So Tight it Squeaks

Another grabber headline to get them to react.  They have never done 'social' very well because they are all anti-social and very nasty nerds.  They cut me off adsense forever with no pardon ever.  Such trumpies!  So, as an organization, Mr. G is a Scrooge for Christmas.

Amazon pays me generously for helping them out.  I help out Mr. G all the time, but do I get anything?  Their Map G-Guides points are pitiful joke.  Kill yourself for a buck!  No way!

And now Mr. G is in big trouble with the whole world because he is evil and taking over everything.  Yet, there is hope for Scrooge at Christmas.

Mr.  G, you will be visited by three ghosts.

Christmas past - you were a happy little organization, out to change the world, and to not be evil.  What happened to that?  You should cry.

Christmas present - You are a cheap bastard.  Little Timmy is about to die.  Geofish has a scrawny turkey because you are so cheap.  Crowds are outside the gates, demanding your head.

Christmas future - you visit the grave of little Timmy.  And then your own grave. Nobody misses you, and they fight over your scraps.  The gravestone reads:  Here lies somebody, we can't remember, who couldn't do anything social because they were so cheap.

But you can wake up in the morning!  Cast off your cheapness, and follow all my suggestions.  It's a new dawn (oxymoron, Disney).  :)

**whoops, I may have falsely accused Disney of committing an oxymoron without a license, but they are really nasty (you know what you did!)

**Mr. G has a nasty PR department that only whitewashes things after they are in the news by the last remaining newspapers, which Mr. G killed.  :)

Engineering - Tinkering with Exponentials

It is human nature to think of everything in linear terms -- going another 10% requires 10% more effort.  Budgets are always like this, anybody who doesn't do math or physics wallows in it.  Oklahoma will soon learn the power of exponentials, and so will these guys by the river.

Today, they are tinkering with lowering a mini-excavator into the quicksand pit.  They think they can work their way around the sewer.  But the hydraulic head increases linearly, and the permeability with quicksand drops exponentially.  This gives a big exponential for total water flowing in.  In other words, they try to go an extra foot, the water comes in like a torrent.

I would like to say that this is only confined to 'handyman specials' but it isn't.  Many engineers are caught up in this.  Look at seismic 'upgrading'.  It only goes up one intensity level (double PGV), but the uncertainties are 3 intensity levels.  Upgrading is useless, but it looks good.  Put everything on screw piles!  :)  These are lessons only learned by body count.  :(

**The exponent aspect of water flow was my big objection with the Bruce Black Hole, now thankfully in Liberal Limbo.

Canada does well on Science

Reference

Yeah Canada!  We rule Palo Alto for creating wealth for trumpies.  We're stinky on business, so all the bright ones have to go to California.  But why is that?  We have to get into the physics, or fundamental forces at play.

Nearly all science and engineering talent has come from the second generation (children of immigrants).  Lots of exceptions, but I cry 'Trumpies!'.  Horrible weather must have something to do with it, as well, since Finland is high, and nobody wants to go there.

Third generation (and beyond) all want to become corporate lawyers, or go into the horrible Canadian banking industry.  There, they choke the life out of the country.

Australia has almost no immigration, and good weather.  Pity.  The US will go all trumpy and start to fail, and Canada will own California.  :)

Google becomes a hate propaganda publisher

Reference

We should charge Google with hate-pushing, but they can do what they want in the US.  Actually, I've just said all this just to get their attention.  They react quickly to news articles, so they should set up a bunch of Google Stars, just like their Maps Guides.  I'm willing to do it as long as Sergey takes up my suggestion of Google Scientists.  He's putting millions into big parties for 80 year olds, how about something that will work?

It's kind of neat how everybody fools Googs.  All the people selling phoney stuff put up a huge number of phoney sites such as "This stuff sucks', and if you do a search, all you get on the first page are the pages with the misleading headlines.  And every web site now has ads for 'click bait'.  And my wife asks me for the umpteenth time when I'm falling asleep  -- "Can you have a virus on Android?" because she's looking at FB, and it always flashes 'You have a virus!"

This is just the Internet.  All the stupid people have gone on now, and the media is whining about how they are misled, and it's goog's job to de-stupidfy them.  Can't happen.  The previous (and now dead) newspapers did a sterling job in presenting the 'truth' like gorming.  Ha!

Oklahoma is setting up for the tank-buster earthquake

Now, I could state all the usual qualifications, but I follow trumpypants.  There have been a lot of shallow thrusts under Cushing, as well as distant 'strain gauge' earthquakes.  This sets us up for an m6 shallow thrust under the tanks.  Whoooeee.  The busgus has stated that the number of earthquakes will soon approach zero while the size of each one goes to infinity, so it's nothing to worry about.

I'm saying the same thing -- nothing for me to worry about, I've budgeted for $10 a litre gas, mainly by not using the car.  :)

Dance recital time

Time for the annual dance recital at Dance to the Rhythm.  This is very happy family of all types, and some very good dancers.  My daughter instructs there.

Continuing a world without physics

Reference

This goes on an on about 30 trillion tons of human structures.  Wow, that must be a big number!  Why not compare it to the mass of water in air - 13 Giga-tons.  Compare it to a shaving of rock off all the land mass.  Compare it to what the glaciers moved.  Compare it to the weight of vegetation.

This is pure philosophy-science.  The article basically say we are destroying the earth.  Blah.  So that cockroaches can run over everything?

One nice thing about concrete cities, they have less radioactivity than freshly ploughed earth.  :)

I'm with trumpy-pants on all this.  :)

Linux - yeah, you can compile your kernel again!

In what has to be the stupidest Linux trick yet, they all went for kernel hardening, and forgot to fix the gcc compiler to work.  We had months without being able to compile a new kernel.  I like to do it just for fun, nobody really has to do it.  Nevertheless, I looked everywhere for a solution.  Now gcc6 is finally fixed.

Geotechnical Engineering - Quicksand

I've seen a lot of excavations in Toronto have that most dreaded of problems - quicksand.  This is when the hydraulic gradients are so large as to lift sand particles, making a thick soup.

This excavation has been stalled at this exact point for weeks.  And they have a pump going all weekend.  All they do is walk around with worried looks.  I haven't asked anyone because they'd be looking for an extra few million dollars for freezing.

The excavation is for jacking in a sewer liner.  It is deep and has to be very stable because men will constantly be working in it.  They could have paid an extra 10 bucks when they were doing the soil drilling, for a pumping test, but I guess they didn't.  An old-school geotechnical engineer would have seen it right way, but nobody employs them any more.

It's just the delay that is costly.  The contractor will sue for extras, so he's okay.  This is just consistent with all the other jobs on the river.  :)

Natural gas prices zoom

This has been my one reliable indicator of Oklahoma earthquake activity.  It's always right, except now at the end of the year, there is the issue of gas-frack freeze-up.  In any normal year, I'd say we'd have to wait until May to restart the season, but it is so warm that they may still be fresh-water fracking for a while yet.

Meanwhile, OK is perking up again for another big one.  These natgas prices will help things along.

El Nino going into second peak - global warming party

This is the El Nino that won't die.  Normally, we'd be plunged into extreme cold right now, what I call the 'hangover' effect.  Not happening!

I always avidly wait for this monthly graph.  The famous 1997 El Nino, until now called the greatest ever, came and went in a single sharp pulse.  That's what they're supposed to do with our sample size of 1.  California desperately needs these every 7 years.  Everything is screwed up now.

You can see it on the ocean current map.  Pacific island backwash is still happening, the northern currents are dead.  All the Arctic cold air is descending on Russia.  I don't know when we'll get our Canada back!  Of course, all the gormers have forgotten 'Big El' and just pack this into their beliefs.

Meanwhile the Arctic is refusing to freeze up, and the warmies are having a field day.

You can see that 2016 is not following the usual curve.  Trimpy-pants is going to get an earful this year.  He should invest in basic ocean and atmospheric physics to shut them up.  :)

Oklahoma earthquakes no longer a worry for the USGS

Reference

In order to run away from trimp, the busgus has put a gun to zoback's head to declare victory and run home.  They used every trick in the book, techniques made famous by the gormings.  We won't go into them here, you're either in the Scientific Method Choir or you aren't.

This is the all-clear to stop watery oil extraction, and go full-blast into fracking.  Canadians should invest heavily into heavy oil stocks.  'Nuff said, signing out.

MAKE AMERICA FRACK AGAIN!

Can anybody make a t-shirt or a hat Christmas ornament?

Toronto Houses of Doom

My single point of reference has become two.  I don't think I'll get any more because the agents hide everything.  We won't get any real news for another month or two.

The house up the street which was a pure spec play, since all they did was fix it up, and try to sell it empty, has withdrawn from the market.  They, like everybody, hope for a Happy Spring.  Ain't gonna happen.

Tromp has tromped all over the bond market, and all the hot money is going into US stocks.  Canada is looking at free oil, and a vanishing loonie.  The big Oklahoma earthquakes better come soon, but after trimp scraps all the oil tankers.  Then they'll have to buy Canadian dirty oil, which is a lot cleaner than earthquake oil.  :)

Without the hot money the Housing Emperor has no clothes.  My relatives will be fine to move to Huntsville in the Spring because the whole country will be in a panic.  If somebody offers you a 20% discount on your house, and you are strung out, take it!

There will be no news in condo-land because the paper developments will just disappear 'until Spring'.

Dear Donald Tromp

Dear Don, I know you want to increase fracking by 100 times or so.  Then you can leave the whole Middle East to your Ruskie buddy.  But I'm warning you, you'll unleash disaster for the whole Midwest if you don't do a bit of physics.  And I really can't see you and the missus commiserating and organizing relief efforts.  You never gave to charity in your life, and she would get her shoes scuffed.

Best that you nip this whole earthquake thing in the bud.  I can do it for a mere million dollars, petty change compared to all the money you'll make as president.  We just have to treat the water a little bit and all the earthquakes will go away, and you can frack to your heart's content.

Oklahoma earthquakes switch to the high rate

And the strain field is setting off New Madrid.  I had predicted earlier that we'll get a 6 before Christmas, but if this keeps up, who knows?  The busgus just have a huge estimate for the Texas oil shale, and you know how they get that oil.  Also, Queen Mary, gov of OK, may be in charge of the busgus, or maybe Sarah herself.  Big Newt hates the busgus.  Get the CV's polished up, boys.

Thermal camera not great for houses

Every winky-dinky house consultant will try to impress you with a thermal camera.

Now that thermal cameras come with phones, we can all do it, and find that's it's useless.  Nearly all heat loss trouble comes from air leakage inward.  Then it goes out the chimney.  Putting more insulation in the roof doesn't do much.  I got the first big improvement from replacing the upper windows and the front door.  Get casements only, no sliders.  Casements and the magnetic door seal like a fridge.

Then the next big improvement, back door and basement windows hardly made any difference.  The physics probably involves the cold air directly hitting the floor and going to the furnace.  I also leave some ventilation for the furnace.  If all is good, then you never need a humidifier, normal showers and dishwashing is enough.

Save your money, go directly for a window change.  Physics rules!

Monster accelerometer - address translator

That's my very messy breadboard for an address translator.

http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/datasheet/4317fa.pdf

Took me forever!  But keeps the brain alzie-free.  :)  Now I can pile on as many super-cheap accelerometers as I want.  Yeah!  I should be able to come up with something that pinpoints the real farter, and not the dog.  :)

For Future Generations

Dear Diary, today is November 18, 2016.  You won't believe it as you freeze in another ice age advance, that today it's 18oC, and we are having lunch on the patio.  You're patio is probably enclosed, now that you  have hardly any summer.  I feel sorry for you, but ha, ha, people today think that global warming is here forever.  They forget we are in a temporary interglacial.

Yours truly,  -- Warm Man.

IT'S OFFICIAL - TORONTO HOUSING PRICES HAVE DROPPED 30%

Oh man, I love 'daily mail' headlines.  This is 'official' by me, and me only.  It's from the Unionville situation.  Only the bargain hunters are offering now, they are hoping that 30% is enough, and not going to 50%.  I had suggested to the cbc that they should look at this, but they'll never touch it.  They'll wait for the agents to report, and they never will.

All the bank stress tests are at 20% - Ha!  This is 'blood in the streets' time, which my cheap investor friend always said was time to buy.  I think we are going for a big dip, because everybody is so strung out.  In a month all the big new condo projects will fold.  The foreign buyers will walk away from their deposits, leaving the banks with the empty bag.

** if you are upset, don't believe me.  :)

ps.  We believe they may have walked away from the shoddy fix and sell job back of us.  And so it begins.

pps.  Whoops!  Just a different intensity of effort.

Final - the single offer ended at 20%  The hot money is gone, the crowd seems more like income investors, so the price will go with the rents.

New Zealand Marching Faults

These earthquakes are along an unmapped 'blind thrust' fault.  They are the absolute worst faults in the world.  This last earthquake had all the settlements on the footwall, so it wasn't bad, except on deep soil.  The next one will be worse.

Napier is all soil, and it's on the hanging wall.  If that section goes, it's total wipe-out.  Fortunately, the marching order isn't 'cast in stone'.  Could be in a couple of years (most likely), or not in our lifetimes.  If I were there, I'd start putting everything on screw piles.

The Beast

I got this free with Vine, and here is my review.

I shall call this camera ‘The Beast’, since it’s so thick and heavy.  Don’t worry about microphone or speaker quality, this magnum should never leave it’s shoulder harness.  It’s generally equivalent to my old Nexus 4.

But that is not its intention -- this a camera for the Professional Engineer.  A contractor or a worker would be better off with a Nexus 5x and an Otter case.  No, this phone was made for one thing -- it’s unbelievable thermal FLIR camera.  A separate thermal camera of this quality is over $10,000 on Amazon.

I am a retired engineer, so it is appropriate that I test this camera.  Almost any ‘trouble’ that a field engineer might come across has a thermal signature.  In the first picture I can tell immediately that my dog is healthy by the black (cold) nose.  I did a video, since that was impossible with the old thermal cameras.  The second is my pressure cooker, looking fine.

Of course you can do houses, but there is so much more.  I spent half an hour trying to find hot resistors on a board.  Had to use my fingers - Ouch!  You can easily find hot bearings.

But I am a geotechnical engineer.  All potential failures would have a thermal sign.  Lining on a tunnel about to collapse?  Easily spotted.  Dam or slope having seepage?  Spotted.

This phone is worth ten times the cost for those who need it.  I still wouldn’t drop it, though.  That sucker could knock off a toe!

Pressure cooker

Teapot

Dog

Oven, don't touch the top!

Moving dog

Nuclear plant design considered seismically robust

Reference

I think we need this in the modern world.  It should operate through 30 cm/s, and should be such solid ground that the pgv can't even get that high.  It's important that all the ancillary equipment (electricity and such) also meets that standard.

Before I retired, I was on a nuclear CSA group.  I wanted to go this route, declaring a pgv for the design, so that the old company could just buy a reactor.  Unfortunately, massive self interest prevented this.  I never went back.

The new Darlington refurb is ignoring seismic, they are just replacing with the same old junk, from the 40 year old seismic study.  This is the exact opposite.

New Zealand Rock and Soil Difference

Going through the NZ plots is giving me a headache.  Obviously, they like to keep their secrets.  I found two plots with very high accelerations for the pgv.  This means they are on rock, unlike the earlier ones I showed which are on soil

Such clean signals, no complexity in the mechanism here, no double event.  So although you might expect damage at 0.2g, the pgv is low, so no damage.  Until I see maps, I'll never prove this, but I'll bet they'll have no correlation with pga and damage.  Only pgv will work.  Smart people know this, but lots don't.

ps.  the earthquakes are marching up that hidden fault.  Next one a bit higher.  A few more, then the m9, but maybe in 30 years.

pps.  This is Wellington on soil

Note, the longer displacement plot - lots of low frequencies.

ps3 - a station on the middle of the fault hit 1.2g but no pgv yet.  Most likely on rock.

New Zealand fault follows topography, and not mapped fault

This is what I've been saying for years.  The mapped faults that the busgus loves are the losers of the earthquake world.  No earthquake would be caught dead riding them.  The real stuff is deep and can only be imaged with seismic reflection.  Barring that, you can get hints from topography.  The footwall is solid rock and forms a line, the hanging wall is broken up and most likely eroded away.  These faults cannot be 'mapped' on the surface.

This is the perfect example, but we have a lot of this around Toronto, and the whole ENA.  Anyway, I'm not after those 'surface fault' guys, they'll soon be gone by the hand of my friend - Mr. DumpyTrumpy.  :)

New Zealand strong ground motion

Error - only 8 cm/s

Looks like nothing closer than 80 km, PGV is 80 cm/s.  I would have loved to see a recording on top of the thrust hammer zone, but alas.

It's not well organized yet.  The PGV is enough to destroy well-built houses and soft-story condos.

Whoops, didn't read that right, only 8 cm/s.  Forget all that.  I need the map that shows the readings in relation to the fault.

ps.  Wellington, along the fault, is 30 cm/s, which is about right to knock down brick buildings.

Another instrument for earthquake country

I'm putting together my 'Octocore' accelerometer, but I have added a magnetometer for earthquake lights, magnetic pulses, bird scarings, etc.

A beautiful chip and it follows the accelerometers in getting the signal to the raspi3.

Here is a video of the signal when I wave a small magnet around.

The noise is probably from the computers and such.  Nevertheless, this is something that could record what is causing earthquake lights and bird flights.  Nobody else seems to be interested in this sort of physics.  I am proposing that there is a clear magnetic signal before a big earthquake like this, and having tons of these instruments around is the only way to figure it out.  I'm hoping that the doomed Clintons will be interested.  :)  Trumpie wouldn't know physics if something fell on his head.  Anyway, this is my dream.

I'm also adding this to make an interesting signal for future development.  I'm not getting any seismic signal up in boring old Toronto, unless it's the thumps from the housing market collapsing.  :)

 

Toronto's last housing crash

I remember every detail because it was so painful for me.  We had our starter house near High Park, with two kids and one almost popping out.  We wanted a bigger house and looked for months.  The price of our little house at the top of the boom was $265 thou.  No offers.  The big crash was in progress.  I kept reducing the price, knowing that the bigger houses were also crashing.  I aggressively reduced right down to $200, and got an offer from new buyers who were going to split the house.  With this in hand, we went after a house priced at $300, and had the agent nail them about the crash, and they hadn't sold in a year.

We made the deals and survived the crash.  On the other hand our investment guy decided to go all Kruger on us and dumped a rental investment on us that was worthless, and we lost a lot of money.  Got most of it back with a lawsuit, and income tax.  Yeah!  This was the life of a crash.

Extrapolations of a Housing Crash

This is it boys, this is war!

Last month a standard Unionville house was going for $2.3 million, with people killing each other with offers.

Today -- no offers.

Let's look at physics of froth, and a crash.  It all has to do with hot money, which is the oxygen for a wet wood burner.  It's only 20% of a market, but it's enough.  Hot money (hm) is defined as very twitchy international money, which is probably also very dirty.  Hot money piles in and whooshes out very quickly, even down to a few days.  Every country and every commodity has suffered from this.  hm comes in when money is made very quickly with no questions asked, like the tulip bubble.

BC started the crash when they went all poopie over hm.  The feds were suddenly looking at bc realtors who were laundries for huge amounts of dirty money from China.  This was the first shoe.  The second shoe dropped when they declared war by their tax.

The final nail in the coffin for Toronto was with election of Trump.  This was now major war against China. Hm not only stopped dead, but the worst thing is that hm is always willing to take a haircut to get out, mainly because they got other places to go.  So for Toronto housing, we first get all the oxygen cut off, they then take away all the dry wood.  This is an immediate 20% price cut.

When this happened with the big US crash, the central bank dropped interest rates by more than a factor of 2.  This allowed people to keep their houses with a 20% cut, and soon hm was coming back, and then everybody and their dog stretched themselves with houses.

We don't have that interest rate leeway.  Toronto housing will drop 20% but then what?  There are things to look for:  frothy condos, all glass, all balconies, costing a couple mill.  The last one sold out Before Trump (bt), but you look for the next one.  Don't forget that they sell when it's all paper, so they can just fold up their tents and walk away.  It's hard to find out these things.

The big crash all depends on the distress of people caught between houses without conditional offers, which was the norm this past year.  This will crash the prices 50%.  This will take months to figure out.  Right now, people are in shock, and holding on to their high prices.  The first thing is that sales volumes will drop tremendously, like in BC.

And all you young people, don't be happy that prices will drop.  The last couple of years, the only things hiring young people have been the banks for processing housing loans.  Ha!  The banks will soon be calling in all their business loans to cover housing.

This a Trump Earthquake.  The real earthquake will be in Oklahoma, and then Toronto will get worried about earthquakes.  Nobody will touch a cheapo condo because it is a seismic death trap.  Price goes to zero.

***as usual, if this bothers you, believe the real estate agents.  I'm always wrong.  :)

M7.4 earthquake near Christchurch, NZ

Reports are now coming in that it has an intensity of 9.  That's major damage.  However, most of Christchurch is reporting a 5, which isn't much.  Everything that can be knocked down there, has been knocked down.  I can't find the mechanism yet, but it looks like a shallow strike-slip.  It will be an interesting earthquake since I'm sure they laid down more accelerometers, and there may be brick buildings that have been seismically upgraded using standard methods.  The first earthquakes shattered the myth that this actually works, but everybody still does it.  I hope they lifted some brick buildings on screw piles, I'd love to see what this does.

NEWS!  Boosted up to 7.8

This is a rare subduction zone upward thrust.  Mostly they are large displacement downwards.

You never see this.  That's why we are getting Intensity 9's, which is as high as you can get with housing.  For the 10's and higher you need to see things thrown in the air.

ps. the best videos so far.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJeEAPTBPQg

earthquake lights  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hIQaJg3lVM

Toronto housing market crashes and dies

I like to make extrapolations from a single point.  A relative's house in Unionville was expected to have riots in the street, and so many offers you couldn't stuff them in.  But nothing.  This is the definitive sign that Toronto is crashing.  When the big wall goes up we'll all freeze in the dark.  That's what the foreign Chinese are thinking, and now staying away, putting their money into the Euro.

I predicted Oklahoma earthquakes with their very first one.  I just forget that I'm wrong 90% of the time.  But you heard it here first.  Toronto has crashed.  :)

Hearts are Trump

From Jane Austen, this is my collection for all things trumpy.  I am hiding from the search engines, and I never want to be a 'featured collection' again.  Such a nightmare trying to police a collection with 35,000 people.  If that happens again to any of my collections, I'm killing it.

Today's news is the death of the EPA, which was the only agency capable of stopping all the oil tanks in Cushing from draining or blowing up.  Next is the busgus.  That gives the Oklahoma Earthquake Mechanism a big smile.  Although gorming is destroyed, which good, the earthquake thing is bad.  You can be sure that physics will never be important here.  :)

Oklahoma starts to go all red

OK earthquakes are picking up again, just when I thought they would hibernate for the winter.  I suspect that everybody is going nuts with fracking, with you-know-who in the captain's chair.

Plus we've got New Madrid perking up.  All of this activity means I'm calling for a big quake before Christmas.  I'm still high on my last successful prediction, that I'll say it's a 6, simply because that's more interesting than another 5.  Been there, done that.

But for a 6 to be interesting, it has to be a shallow one, those deep-sixes we've had are forgettable.  Since this is all sarcasm anyway, I'm calling for a shallow 6 that will knock down at least 3 abandoned downtown cores, composed of ridiculously tall, thin brick walls.  Nobody will be killed because nobody lives there.  :)

ps. the EPA is gone.  Opec will soon be gone.  This express train is on the rails!

Home Roasted Coffee

I cannot rave on enough about the home-roasted coffee.  This was the coffee that brought on the Reformation, and took us out of philosophy-science.  We've been had by commercial coffee roasters.  There must have been some conspiracy since the 50's to siphon out caffeine for coke.  With a couple of cups I'm bouncing to the ceiling, I have tons of intellectual energy, and no old-man snooze today.  I went out for a big hike and lunch.  Wooo hoo!  Nobody would have accepted gorming if they were drinking this stuff.  I expect it will be illegal soon.  :(  Hope I can sleep.

I bought the last of the only coffee roaster that sort of works.  They're all on it because it blows up a lot.  This will be squashed by starbooks and declared illegal by the dea.  I can't stop writing.....  aaaahhh!

I'm also turning on my Chinese Laser Christmas lights today.  Apparently, if you take off the casing, the 3 lasers can burn through the house.  It's only the diffraction gratings that are saving you and air traffic.  Now, with the coffee, I feel like taking it apart.....

** all sarcasm

But soon trumpies will kill all the lawyers, so I don't have to put on the following legal things.

Do not read while holding an electric hairdryer in the bathtub.

Do not read while skydiving.

Do not read while drinking extremely hot coffee, unless it's home-roasted.

Do not read while microwaving the cat.

**********

ps. The starbooks also started the belief that dark roast was stronger and more caffeine.  Hogwash!  Dark roasting takes out all the caffeine, so they might as well suck it all out before the roast.  Hear that, Tims?

pps.  Tomorrow I'm drinking less coffee...

and extra ps.  For almost a year, this has been one of my most popular posts, Here is the Amazon link

It's really cheap right now.  July 14, 2017

Trump's first 100 days

Besides harassing the women, he should also attack all the sacred cows that hobble the US.

Mortgage deductability.  Distorts the housing market.  He should promise lower income taxes instead.

Medicare - Why should the old people get a gold-plated healthcare system?  It should be that nobody gets any healthcare.  Less taxes mean that you buy your own.

Agriculture - The hell with the damn farmers.

Big walls of everything - Protectionism for all.  Canada will do well to drop all tariffs on its own.  No more tit for tat.

Global warming - He should state my scientific objections.  Get rid of the EPA

USGS - get rid of them.  What did they ever do?

Unions - get rid of them.

Middle East - give it to Russia, they'll soon go bankrupt.  It's a poisoned chalice.

FBI - get rid of Homeland Security and all the thousand little agencies.  Put the FBI Director in charge of everything.  After all, he earned it by giving Trump the election.

He doesn't really have that much power, just a bully pulpit.  If he strikes at both dem and rep sacred cows at once, he can show that he really is an independent, looking for change.

ps.  get rid of the DEA, legalize all drugs with tax, use that to pay for the wall.  Abolish the IRS and no income tax, the drugs will pay.  No entitlements, and no fed agencies.

Kill the Global Warming Garbage

Yeah, we can go all trumpy now.  Everybody buy huge pickup trucks with shotgun racks.  Gasoline is free!

I can now go out of the closet.  I used to say that gorming has no physics, but they hijacked the word 'science'.  I can put on my bumper sticker 'My Science Follows the Scientific Method'.  I'm going to take back the original meaning of the word.

Actually, that meaning only dates from the Reformation, when humanity came out of the Dark Ages.  Before that, Science, was philosphy.  I'll call that Philosophical Science, or PS.  That followed ancients like Aristotle. Their ps was observing correlations and making obvious, folksy conclusions.  And then they dared anybody to try to knock it off the pedestal.  We got the Sun around the Earth thing, and 'Ether is space'.  They would conclude that a small ball, when dropped, fell slower than a big one, and they would never experiment because the 'ps was in', with a 99% consensus.

AAAHH!  I'm killing this article.  It only leads to torture by the Gorming Inquisition.  I never wrote it and it doesn't exist.      ....and yet it does.

US votes for more earthquakes

Yeah, trumpynose has won!  In celebration, Oklahoma just produced an m4 earthquake with most complex mechanism ever.

I don't know what that is, oblique strike-slip, with both normal and thrust?  It's a mess, just like the future.

So, Poutine takes over all the oil countries, but the US has fracking, which will increase tremendously.  No more of that 'climate change' garbage, it has no physics.

I was saying that OK earthquakes were going into their winter hibernation, who knows now?

ps.  My concept of a 'closer earthquake', which is the earthquake that shuts down all injection and all fracking, has been bumped up to the full apocalyptic New Madrid Sequence.

ps2.  Usgus (busgus) on the way out, or they'll think that, making sure they never say anything.  You couldn't get any of them to say anything before, now you won't even find them.  :)

Attention all Oklahoma Civil Engineers

Red tag all the damaged buildings.  Do not approve any damaged brick building for re-occupancy.  Remember Christchurch where they approved the office building and it pancaked in the next quake, killing everybody.  Unless you plan on suicide real soon, do not be the scape-goat.  This was 15 cm/s, the next quake will be bigger, you can count on that.

Civil servants are approving the bridges by sniffing them or some such thing.  They'll always be okay, because it goes through 10 levels of approval, and nobody is accountable.  Red tag everything.  :)

I would only approve if I had done a seismic noise test before and after.  There was also that building in Taiwan, damaged and approved, made out of tin cans.  Lots of people died in that, after another quake.

Cushing Earthquake Strong Ground motion is in

Yeah, we got ourselves 15 cm/s (corrected) and half a g (high frequency, doesn't count), and a complex earthquake.  That's two, two, two earthquakes in one!  That makes the damage a bit higher for the magnitude, but two earthquakes only changes a decimal place on the magnitude, and I always round to a single digit because of these messes.  An m5 is nothing to the coming m7.

A single clean earthquake gives a simple velocity pulse.  I don't think the birdies would fly because they see magnetic fields with their eyes, and they were asleep.  My instruments would have caught that pulse.  Also, they catch the pulses in Tulsa with the big EM setup, but they're staying out of this.

This won't crack the oil tanks, but it would sure as heck weaken them for the next quake.  Now they'll shut the wells again, which they did before, only to let them open in a week or two.  Such fun with the rightie trumpies.  :)

Also the new OK seismologist is supposed to be there.  Is he under his desk?

CORRECTION

The airport got 15 cm/s.  That's almost the worst shaking of the big Japan earthquake.  That for sure damaged the tanks, but who can tell if it isn't totally ruptured.  The will go on as if nothing happened.

You can't see the doubling as much here.  But like I said these jump up by factors of 10, not 10%  :)

ps.  Had they done a seismic noise test on those brick buildings, they could now do another one to see if it had softened up.  As it is, they'll have a guy, probably worse than the guy who approved that Christchurch building, look for cracks and such.  Then he'll say it's all wunderbar.  Actually, in litigious US they'll never find that guy.  Maybe Boak will do it with his 'simple geology person' expertise.  :)

Oklahoma continues to be hammered by earthquakes everywhere

I suppose that for a proper election day earthquake, everybody has to feel it.

On top of the m5, we got two more m4's with intensities of 4 and 5.  That's enough to wake you up.  I still can't find any day shots of Cushing.  Are the covering up, eh trumps?

Linux - annual reinstall

On my main machine, I always use the latest kernel, and 'testing' packages.  This works well for a year, and then you start to get errors that have been recorded since 2005.  That's the time to completely reinstall a new Debian.  I use the 'live' install with all firmware (non-free).  I just did it, and now I'm converting all over to 'testing'.  It helps to have disk drives for backup, then you don't lose all your configuration.

So, if you start getting stupid errors, then it's time to bite the bullet.  My other machine running stable never needs this.

ps.  AAAH!  I'm dying.  This is my 5th reinstall today.  I want to do so much, like a new kernel, going to testing, etc, that's it's constantly blowing up.  The order is important here, and I can't remember anything from last time.  :(

pps.  Here's the final recipe for future reference.

Get Debian Live install, KDE, with non-free and firmware.

get aptitude.  install build-essentials and kernel package, and ncurses5-dev

build latest kernel, use 'kitchen sink' default -- make menuconfig

test things, reboot

Plug everything in, activate nfs, and 'make localmodconfig'  -- takes out an hour or two off compiling

compile again, reboot

test, reboot, go to recovery mode

change 'sources.list' to 'testing', aptitude update, aptitude full-upgrade.

reboot, test.

install samba, and tons of other misc. programs.

Oklahoma has a fine election earthquake

No wonder I was having trouble sleeping.  Little did I know there was a big OK earthquake, m5, int 6.  This was a shallow oblique strike-slip, with a normal component.

Felt by thousands, this earthquake may 'rig' the election.  It is a reminder that trumpyism will get you bigger ones.  This probably didn't do anything to the oil tanks, we have to wait for a shallow thrust m6 for that, but that's just the next step.

This did set off a whole bunch of earthquakes throughout the mechanism, including poor old Kansas who think they can avoid trouble.  Not a chance.  This general instability indicates that we are lot closer to the m7 than we think.  :)

There are the two OK accelerometers at Cushing.  The probably only read 1 cm/s PGV.

ADD:  Lots of damage in Cushing.  Records aren't out yet, but now I'm guessing 5 cm/s.  The oil tanks will need 20.

Soft story damage.  Ok, maybe 10.  Check the tanks!