Cheers to the End

I think I pushed the concept of a blog way beyond its expiry date (blog flogging).  It has been amazing that Internet Social Concepts have always had a short lifespan.  I started with Usenet, got myself in tremendous trouble, and then it died under truckloads of spam.  Then I read practically every novel I would want to read.  Then came Wikipedia, until it became frozen.  I did the Knol thing (quick death!).  I've put up videos on Youtube, and had years of blogging.  The last two have died under commercial exploitation.  I never did Facebook, which was designed from the beginning to harvest privacy.

I shall wait for the next thing, with great expectations.

New BSSA

Here are some interesting articles in the new BSSA  that somebody else can write about.


A Revised Earthquake Chronology for the last 4,000 Years Inferred from Varve-Bounded Debris-Flow Deposits beneath an Inlet near Victoria, British Columbia 
Andrée Blais-Stevens, Garry C. Rogers, and John J. Clague 


Effects of Seismicity Models and New Ground-Motion Prediction Equations on Seismic Hazard Assessment for Four Canadian Cities 
Gail M. Atkinson and Katsuichiro Goda 


Probabilistic Liquefaction Hazard Analysis for Four Canadian Cities 
Katsuichiro Goda, Gail M. Atkinson, Jim A. Hunter, Heather Crow, and Dariush Motazedian 


Near-Field Across-Fault Seismic Ground Motions 
Douglas Dreger, Gabriel Hurtado, Anil Chopra, and Shawn Larsen 


Nonlinear Site Response in Medium Magnitude Earthquakes near Parkfield, California 
Justin L. Rubinstein 


Ground-Motion Attenuation at Short Hypocentral Distances (<30 km) near Sudbury, Ontario 
Gail M. Atkinson, Nadia Kraeva, and Karen Assatourians 

Bye.

Accelerometers - Part 3

All my troubles with early seismometers and accelerometers can be explained with this figure.

To the left is the full dynamic range of earthquakes.  You really need to record that, if you want to get anywhere new with earthquakes.  My shitty 8 bit (something like 80 db) accelerometers could only record the very top of that range.  My old 'velocity coil' seismometers could only get the very bottom.  As well as the dynamic range, we have the frequency range, and again, these instruments were very limited.

That left the middle totally uncovered!  The coil seismometers only measured some jiggly-piggly form of velocity, and could never be related to the accelerometers, which measured low-frequency acceleration as defined on the great soil basins of California.

This was a mess.  As an example, consider the 1988 Saguenay earthquake.  This triggered tons of standard clockwork accelerometers that were placed willy-nilly in buildings.  The results were all over the map, with something like a factor of 10 between the highest and lowest at equivalent distances.  Totally useless.

-next, one day, when I feel like it, but nobody really likes this series, so I may fade out....