Busgus elevates earthquake odds to ridiculous levels

Reference

I looked it up and argued with people on my collection, but it is true.  They have knocked up the hazard by a factor of 50 for the next week because of this cluster.

They've always said that a cluster knocks up the odds by 1 to 10% for the next week.  I blame this typo on their new 'PR Wall of Suits'.  Nobody can get to a scientist now, with Trumpy scaring them to death.  So this just goes on and on.  The Wall will never admit they were wrong.

ps.  lots of articles tiptoeing around this now.  All of them state that a cluster only adds 1% to the odds of it happening anyway.  None of them go after the busgus.  They are too kind.  :)

Another fish story

I have the world's worst fishing dog.  I've told her again and again to not snap at the hook because it's 'bo-bo'.  Now she takes it as her job to warn everybody about it.  So I take up my fishing bag and rod, and she barks all the way down.  At the dock, through the very clear water, I see  the Godzilla Fish that lives under the dock.  He's wandering around.  So I start untangling my fishing line, and cast.  "Bark, bark, look out it's sharp!"

I dangle the bait in front of the fish.  He just looks at it.  Then he actually tilts his body up and looks at me.  "You're kidding, right?  The dog told me all about it. "  His continued to diss my artificial worm, and I gave up, to look for other fish.

Our dock fish have been trained not to fall for the artificial crap.  The only way I could catch a dock fish is to shoot the dog, and sneak up with a very light line, with a real worm totally covering the hook.  I actually caught one like that.  Somebody kept the dog busy.

Cottage Report

The season is winding down at the old shack.  We close up on Canadian Thanksgiving.  It's getting darn cold, the nights are near-freezing.  I'm stacking firewood, and clearing dead brush.  We had our nice summer, and this is more typical weather.

Funny fish stories

Two glorious Lake Trout from the lake

My cottage neighbour, whom I'll call E, gave me these fish.  He was up last week with 5 of his fishing buddies.  One brought a tournament bass boat, that can do something like 75 mph.  Anyway, they split up for fishing, and he went with one buddy.  He was pulling a smaller bass, when an absolutely huge bass tried to take the bait out of the other bass's mouth.  My friend was stunned, and immediately cast again.  The big bass hooked and there was a fight of his life (my friend is nearly all catch and release because his whole family hates fish).  Nearly every time these Small Mouth Bass leap they spit the hook.  So, E. was pointing his rod down, and survived two jumps.  He finally gets the fish up to the boat, and screams for his buddy for the net.  No response.  He looks and sees the buddy is texting.  He curses and swears for the net since this is the biggest bass he's every seen.  Buddy says "Do you mind?  I'm texting here.".  The fish leaps one more time and spits the hook.  DON'T TEXT AND FISH.



So, after he gives me the fish I go with him for the evening.  I leave my dog with his wife and their dog.  We go to the first point to fish.  After a while, I look in the distance, and there's Roxie the Wonder Dog working her way along the shore.  She then just sits on the shore and watches us.  We wanted to then to cross the lake.  Would the stupid dog swim?  Of course she would, so we pick her up and she then proceeds to become the "World's Worst Fishing Dog".  I don't think I can go fishing with E. any more.  :)

Deplorable

A little funny I thought up.

Recommended Samsung Note 7 Charger

First to need to program your Raspberry Pi to detect fire on its camera and shut off the charger.

But that isn't enough!  The battery shorts and fires under its own power, once it starts.  You need the Raspi to turn this on.

Then you can just watch it sizzle and melt.  No oxygen, no flame!


Do not run in a burning house and save your Note 7, like this guy.

Actually, he was saving his stupid MS laptop, because he didn't have a Chromebook.  :)

Oklahoma maintains very high earthquake rate

This is sad for me, but there is now a chance for the M7 before the election.  Will that make any difference?  At this rate, we expect several 4's a week, an m5 once a week, and a 6 once a month.  I have found that the higher magnitudes are 'jamming together'.  In other words, it requires very few 5's to allow a 6, and maybe less 6's for 7.

The physics behind this is that the fractal dimension changes with scale.  This could happen in granite, riddled by old faults.  The extreme case is that of 'characteristic' earthquakes, where there are only surprise 6's and 7's and nothing smaller.  Italy is something like that, and the smooth subduction faults.

ps. Natural gas futures are zooming.When El Nino finally leaves, we are going to freeze, and all  that nice gas makes OK shake.

ps2.  an m4 every day.  I remember long ago when an m3 was big deal.  :)

A day in the life of Canada, a day late

Throwing sticks in the Humber for the dog.  Yesterday was too miserable.  :)

Oklahoma is now a lost cause in Earthquake Land

For the past week, OK has become so active, it is beyond any scale of mine.  I've been watching this from the beginning with many jokes.  It was hilarious, all the denials, and useless action.  Now, like the usgs, I feel like pulling out.  It's just sad.

There is now no stopping the express train to an M7.  It will be horrible, and I never want to gloat over these things.  So, as long as this looks like a nightmare, I'm withdrawing from the whole thing.  No more jokes about Oakies, no more physics.  Maybe they'll make it to the gas freeze-up this year, and I'll start joking next year for a while.

ps. I'll still mention the highlights.

Dilation and the Magnetic Pulse

We do know there was a magnetic pulse 15 minutes before the last OK m6.  The birds caught it, but nobody knows exactly how they do it.  It is thought they can 'see' the magnetic fields, so that looking North is different than looking South.

Now, deep in the earth we only have quartz and water to work with.  We can assume the water is conductive.  There are no magnets, so that a magnetic disturbance has to come from a sudden electrical current.  The hypothesis is that fault has pre-slip to fix its plane, the preslip goes to maximum dilation, and at that point an underground 'lightning bolt'  goes through the entire potential slip surface.  A few minutes later, the fault ruptures.

The whole idea of a signal is very controversial.  Not all earthquakes should have it, since many are complex, and jagged, and are really many earthquakes linked up.  I think we need a perfectly smooth fault surface, under tremendous stress, and that's what we have in the East.  And underground lightning bolt would also explain earthquake lights, etc.

I can explain up to the conductive channel, but the voltage difference is killing me.  You need tens of thousands of volts.

These are the two sides of the fault, using pure quartz.  When they inject, they start the slow slip.

There is separation and the sides grind against each other, the quartz is compressed, which can produce voltage.  This has to go slowly, because water must infill the increasing gaps.  This is dilation.

After a lot of creaking and groaning, the fault is just before max dilation.

And this is what I think happens.  The big arrow points to the last sticking points.  They shear suddenly, releasing our lightning bolt.  But the fault doesn't rupture right away.  The volume has increased a little, and water needs to seep in (water is the great time delay)

For the main rupture, the fault hydroplanes.  That's why it is so powerful.

Can this give me my thousands of volts, and major amperage?  Who knows?  Like all my stuff, it's easy to test in the lab, but nobody will.  :(

ps. OMG I forgot that the piezoelectric effect is reversible, that an applied voltage deforms the crystal.  So, this could be a massive electron cascade.  Neat.

Summary of Toronto Seismic Activity

For some reason, the site was down when I did my article.  These are mostly 2.5's in the lake that nobody feels.  I would call them more of a 3 (single digit) when comparing to OK.  Note the very straight line at Hamilton.  That's because there are a lot of seismometers there to properly locate them.  Things get fuzzy the further out you go.

Earthquakes are like lightning

Reference

This pulse of bird droppings happened 15 minutes before the earthquake.  I've always wondered how the fault goes from static to dynamic friction, and follows a plane.  Now I know, it's like lightning making a plasma channel before it strikes.  Only in this case it is the final movements before dynamic friction, the whole plane slides slowly to the critical displacement.  At that point, dilation stops it, and it is in 'ready' mode for 15 minutes.  Then, boom.  This must give a magnetic signal that we can't pick up over the noise of everyday thunderstorms.  But birds can.  It's like picking up a conversation in a loud room, if somebody says your name.  We just have to figure it out.

ps.  if this gives a subtle signal, then the same signal (up by a factor of 10) hits the birds when the fault moves.  That's probably why they fly, they are about to get a slamming headache.

pps.  This could be solved by proposing the positive hypothesis.  Then you need a lot of EM and magnetic measurements, none in Ohio.  Then you can hit it two ways:  Model a current spreading out on the fault and calculate the magnetic signal.  Then extract the theoretical signal from the noise.  Or you could feed the signals to a neural machine, and treat it like voice recognition.  You'll never see a clean signal, but the birds know.

Linux - Going for Youtube Live - Gulf Stream is Dead

Google has killed Hangouts on Air, and we must go to Youtube Live.  There is no longer a Google Talk plugin that you can use and you have to go for a streaming program.  I chose OBS-Studio.  Lots of fun getting it to install, I wanted to use the latest, but no luck.

I finally used the Debian version, which is always older, but it works.  I'm using a Logitech webcam for the video and microphone, and that's a bitch.  You can make the choices inside obs.  Here is my final test.  The new version of obs has a better filter for the mike, here there is some noise.  Also, the lips are out of synch, but that's Linux for you.  I'm sure there's some horrible fix out there somewhere.

The whole point is to have a live broadcast when the M7 hits Oklahoma.  Then we might get some feedback live.

USGS Bails Out Of Oklahoma

Reference

“Without studying the specifics of the wastewater injection and oil and gas production in this area, the USGS cannot currently conclude whether or not this particular earthquake was caused by industrial-related, human activities,” the USGS said in a statement. “However, we do know that many earthquakes in Oklahoma have been triggered by wastewater fluid injection.”

The USGS will continue to process seismic data in the coming days and weeks “that will help answer this question,” it added.

So you heard them, they need to 'study the specifics', but they won't.  They'll just rehash the horrible records from cheap seismometers.  No hope there.

You may note that there is no longer some random person from Boulder talking.  The PR department has clamped down and is just issuing polished statements.  You wouldn't be able to get a scientist to squeak, if you whapped them with a stick.

They also severely muffled down the last earthquake to a 5.6.  That was right at the bottom of the estimates.  Had it been a 5.7, it would have been the 'biggest', and people would be demanding a response.

I call them the 'busgus', because I knew they would 'Take the bus, Gus.'  In this age where Trump will be president, they are lying low.  I'm sure they suddenly said "Holy Shit, there's a 7 coming, and we'll be holding the bag for 'not warning' a la Italian Seismologists.  Now, by disappearing, they can issue a statement something along the line that 'the local seismologists are responsible'.  Except there aren't any!  OK has kicked them out.

We should get an OK 'killer' before Hillary loses by putting every supporter to sleep.  These people won't make to the voting booths.  Then we'll see the extreme religious right blaming it all on those 'Liberals'.  :)

ps.  New M5 in the northern section.  The seismic energy rate now indicates the 7 by the end of the year.  Next thing we should be seeing are the far-field strain effects (distant small earthquakes).

ps2.  The buildings at the epicentre have all been red-tagged at 5 cm/s.  Had it been the Italian 20 cm/s you would have seen the same sights.

ps3.  In a polished press statement, the busgus avoided showing their egg face and put up the magnitude to 5.8.  Probably bowed to international pressure.

The Magnitude 7 earthquake that will hit Oklahoma

Now that we are regularly getting M6's in the Oklahoma zone, we might as well look at what an M7 will do.  This earthquake will hit before the Toronto M7, and it will hasten the '6' earthquake through massive stress changes in the centre of the continent.  I wouldn't be surprised if that earthquake started the whole East Coast going

People just don't understand exponentials and how they can creep up on you.  I really don't know how to explain them to these people.  I do know that they think an M5, 6, or 7 might only have a 10% difference between them, but that's bullcrap.  I know that the Oakies think religion will save them, but a lot of religious people have died in earthquakes.

I round all my magnitudes to a single digit, it isn't worth it to fight over a decimal point.  An M5 only cracks a circle of rock about 300 m in diameter.  A 6, about 3 km.

But a 7 is not longer a circle.  It flattens at the bottom of the crust, and becomes a rectangle 30 km long.  That produces the maximum PGV on the top.  An 8 is just a bunch of 7's 300 km long.  You only care about 9's because of the tsunami, and really big soil basins like Mexico City.  So a 7 is a big deal.

So, the big laugh is that all those surrounding states send their frack waste to OK because they got earthquakes themselves.  But the 7 will feel like an earthquake is right under them.  That's because the basement granite is like a giant bell, it doesn't matter where you strike, all the ants get knocked off.

The guiltiest and most evil of all states is Texas (OK is just deliberately ignorant).  I'll be glad when they are flattened.  They experienced earthquakes when they mixed frack water in with their deep water from oil wells, and then just stopped doing it.  Their oil people kept quiet, all the earthquakes stopped, and they will take that secret to their deaths.  I know what they did last summer!

So, all within a 200 km radius will experience the same motions.  The entire Mississippi Basin will be jello.  Although people on firm ground are good outside of 50 km, they'll have the no gas, no electricity problem with lots of fires.  I really won't go into all the other horrors, just read up on the New Madrid earthquakes.

ps.  This last earthquake has now been totally forgotten.  It's always enough to make The Earthquake Guy cry in his soup.  Everybody forgets until the next big one, then it's all crazy-crazy for a day.  The M7, however, will not be forgotten.

Huge M6 earthquake hits Oklahoma

No details yet, but it seems to be a deep normal, which is always underrated by the busgus.  Other sensors put it at 6.  This is consistent with the high rate we've seen every since oil and gas went up.  Although it has probably knocked things down, it is nothing if this were a shallow thrust that I expect soon.  It's good to be right all the time.  :)

ps.  I was only expecting this by the end of the year.  Maybe we'll still get another one.  Although I have said that a 6 will be a 'closer', it has to be a shallow thrust under OK city, or the oil tanks.  This one will do nothing, and fresh water injection will go on at a furious rate.  A deep normal earthquake has the least PGV for the magnitude.

pps.  a heck of a lot of aftershocks for this quake.  Maybe the next 6 will come sooner than I expect.  Normally, I expect things to calm down quickly.

more notes.  For some reason the busgus is keeping it at 5..6, even though there are a huge number of seismometers going up to 6.1.  There is a political reason for not breaking the 5.6 ceiling, because that would make it the biggest yet, and they've got everybody believing that the earthquakes are going down.

Google Citizen Scientists

Here's an idea that I pitched to Google.  Their president hasn't responded in an hour, so I throw it out to the world.  Like everybody else, you can take credit for it and make money.

A long time ago, we had Gentlemen Scientists (very sexist). These were rich people like Sir Isaac Newton, who didn't have to grub for a living.  The point is that they were alone in their richly appointed studies.  They could invent and change the world.  Then we had the steampunk era where individual inventors could come up with a new engine (or is that fiction?).

For the last hundred years or so, we only had big institutions who did all the science.  Very boring, they had to fill out reams of paper to do anything.  They just do incrementals.  The last thing we had from those places was global warming.  But why do these big places have an advantage?  They had big libraries, subscriptions to the pay wall, and lots of computing power, plus throw in a few nuclear reactors.

That's all changing.  No more giant mausoleums of paper.  No more paywall (almost).  Google has changed all that.  The only keeping individuals out is computing power.  My idea was to set up something to give free computing power to qualified people (like me) and remove the last barrier.  I can publish in the open journals.

I have a bee in the bonnet about stupid engineers and seismic analysis.  Obviously, if you are an insider, you cannot rock the boat.  But I run some big models to show them they are stupid.  This is something for grumpy retired scientists.

This could be big for them and would advertise their compute power.  I'll give them another 10 minutes and then go to Amazon.  :)

ps.  I haven't heard from anybody.  I guess that the Chinese will take over bland institutional science just they took over industry that hadn't changed in 30 years.  Good for them!

The earthquake that will destroy Toronto - Rational Discussion

This is only for those who wish to be rational, as I am putting on my engineer cap, which I find is mostly boring.  I did this piece in the style of all those other ridiculous pieces, but it all had good science in it.  The most difficult thing is discussing odds or probabilities.  Even worse, there is an uncertainty band on those odds.  I put everything in PGV as the chance per year, as my best estimate

All the big disasters are a PGV over the seismic capacity of the general building stock, at about 1 in 500 per year.  That's because nobody builds for that.  Our building code goes for that level, but just to avoid total pancaking.  The interior fixtures are never covered, nor does does anybody care about functionality.

I have found that the 40 year old assumptions about sinusoidal motions have been creating horrible situations.  Chile gave us a hint of that, but it was ignored.  Earthquakes such as Italy don't teach us anything, because their Maffie concrete capacity is about 5 cm/s.

Toronto completely ignores earthquake risk, yet their odds of a disaster are the same as anywhere else because the preparation is non-existent.  Sure, California seismic hazard is higher in terms of PGV, but so is their capacity.  Earthquakes hit the ignorant pretty hard, and most cities are extremely ignorant.

I have a thing about weird condos, and crammed subdivisions.  The condos will crack at their internal boundaries, and the tract housing will be Dresden firestorms.  They always assume a rapid fire department response.  Nope.

The Pickering nuclear plant will release radioactive steam with this earthquake.  It might give everybody a chest x-ray, but that's about it.  Candu reactors have lots of internal water, lots of good concrete, and thermosyphoning.  Nevertheless, the reactors won't restart for weeks, and we'll have no gas and no electricity in the winter.  Perhaps there are consequences.  :)

ps.  the odds are a 6 or 7 every 500 years.  OK has shown us that 6's and 7's are practically bedmates.