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I found the way that the USGS down in LA ended up implimenting Load Balancing even more informative then the fact that Michael went to check the information of the website. After all in the many quakes I've felt, I've always gone to the USGS Website once during and a number of times afterwards to find out both the epicenter (One was too damn close) and the magnitude. And in two cases the website was updating the start and end of the quake while I was reloading.

It's actually nice to see a government agency attempting to save money by implimenting an open source solution rather then going out and plopping down 10K in our tax dollars rashly. Hell I wish ALL Public Agencies did that.

sorry about old links :-)>

It seems like if you live in a fairly seismically active area, that people are pretty keen on the webpages. The USGS has a site showing earthquakes in California, located here. We had a decent sized earthquake here a few weeks ago in Big Bear at about 4:20 in the morning. It woke me up at the end and I couldn't be sure if there was an earthquake or not. So I got up, turned on the computer and sure enough, the site showed the earthquake immediately.

One of the cool things about that site is the fact that you can report what you felt in your area and they create a shake map based on the reports. Within 10 minutes there were already about 15,000 reports that people sent in and that number climbed quite a bit as the morning went on.

Part of my reason for logging onto the site after an earthquake is curiosity. I want to know where it was centered and how big it was. I think that has to do with a lot of other people's reasons for logging on as well.

Let's say the war costs an astronomical amount of $500,000,000,000. Surely, Kicking Iraq's butt would be cheaper than that, but let's use that for now.

And let's say that is repaid, over a year (a very short amortization), by gasoline purchases only. You can extract 19.5 US gallons from a barrel of oil (the rest of the 44 gallons is for different products.) The United States consumes 18,920,000 Barrels of oil per day.
So, to pay for a really expensive war in a year, you'd have to add $3.71 to the price of every gallon of gas, or about $0.92 to every litre/quart (close enough to call the same)

As for the 'cost of pollution,' how, exactly, do you put a price on that? Do you propose to set up huge facilities to process the air, and remove the waste? Send up some huge ozone-repairing blimps to the south pole? Have complete remedition facilities on board every vehicle? All these things are feasible, but certainly would drive prices no where near the vicinity of $1000/liter.

And where do we draw the line between sucking out our own pollution, and undoing nature's own work? Certainly natural cycles have had a much greater impact on weather thousands and millions of years ago (contiunuing today) than any human activities could hope to attain. Can our activities affect the weather? Certainly, especially locally.

More realistically, if the war cost half as much, and the cost was spread out over 10 years over all oil products, the added cost would be well within normal price fluctuations, Even with your 'cost of pollution' fantasy construct.

The NEIC gives you all the data you need to predict your own Earthquake as accurately as any other internet-diploma geologist.

The NEIC gives you all the data you need to predict your own Earthquake as accurately as any other internet-diploma geologist.

More people should look at wood burning these days.

No. Not on a global scale, because then it becomes non-sustainable.

Excessive wood burning is one of the major reasons for desertification in developing countries. They experience a population explosion while many people retain their agricultural/nomadic lifestyle. Too many eaten, trampled and burnt plants means rapid erosion.

If you plant one tree for every one you burn, it's OK, but this makes little economic sense, as the energy density of wood is too low and the costs (time, space) too high to warrant the effort in a developed society.

Here's how to hack any AOL account, for educational purposes only.

U.S. Geological Survey

U.S. Geological Survey

They are one of the most hit servers in the government. I think they can take a back page Slashdot linking.

1. A Federal pension
2. The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) which provides employees with a pre-tax savings plan similar to a 401(K); and
3. Coverage under the Social Security system.

What a nice project, to correlate (which does not prove causation*) ground and orbital studies. It must have been difficult -- which suggests skills acquired for future challenges.

On the more aesthetic side, "Earth as Art" is just starting out, but very encouraging.

USGS has done a Landsat study of environmental change and NASA's general collection.

Wasn't it Al Gore who proposed a live video feed from a satellite watching Earth. Please don't share your opinion on Gore or the cost -- but wouldn't that be a nice little channel to have? I could name about 20 cable channels I'd surrender to get it (small loss). You could be one of the first to detect the first nuclear conflict. See, I'm not all that optimistic.

And linked from my home page is the Earth Science Image of the Day with explanations.

There are a lot of amazing photos out there, I am always interested in hearing of more, especially if explicated. I'm glad to see them coming to increasingly creative use, beyond assessing crops and measuring ocean temperatures -- useful as these things are!

*semi-inside joke

Interesting idea. This could be an excellent way to map wilderness areas of the U.S. and other countries. Perhaps the butterflies could be programmed to traverse from the origin vehicle to a particular destination for recovery, but be given the autonomy to check out interesting terrain features if they see any. Since the butterflies could get right into the terrain, they could have good enough resolution to justify using them over the current USGS stereoscopic photo method for creating topographical maps. Maybe they could use a form of radar to map things in 3-D or stereoscopic cameras. Or program the units to land and acquire a GPS signal at specified intervals.

In a battle zone, perhaps the butterflies could be camouflaged to match the indigenous species, as long as they weren't too large. Or the butterflies could be programmed to stay a certain distance from each other to not arouse suspicion. Since each unit is a small portion of the swarm, the loss of a bunch of them might be acceptable. Cool!

Seems like a pretty interesting way to use technology to help the environment, which isn't something you see everyday.

You may not see it everyday, but perhaps your eyes aren't sufficiently open.

Think about big general trends: What aspect of modern life has the most significant impact on the size of woodlands and forests? It's the need to feed a growing population! From around 1850 to the turn of the 20th century, millions of acres of trees were cleared in order to make way for farmland.

Now take a look at this report from the USGS.

Looking at the text I calculate the following:

1850: ~13 acres of farmland per person
1990: ~1 acre of farmland per person

And, this is with the U.S. now having gobs of surplus agricultural production to help feed the rest of the world! True, the report shows that a significant portion of this farmland became (sub)urbia. But, that is how a growing population distributes itself. Imagine how much worse it would have been for the forests had we needed to maintain that 13ac/person.

And what allowed this miracle to happen? It wasn't people sitting up in trees, that's for sure. It was technology, including machinery, pesticides, irrigation, and lately, lots of information technology to help with more efficient planting and harvesting protocols.

All this, in addition to the fact that only rich societies can even afford to care about such luxuries as old-growth forests. To the vast majority of the world, such concerns are trivialities. In a real sense, it is only technology which allows these tree-sitters to exist at all.

The U.S. get the critical last fourth of its oil from the Middle East, te expensive fourth that drives our policy. The other 3/4, mostly domestic, is taken for granted. We also import from Nigeria and Venezuela, getting caught up in their politics, too. Then there's the rising star of Kazakhstan. It leads to conflicts of interest, to put it mildly.

The Times published a map a week or two ago showing int'l reserves and annual production by country -- wish I could find it, they did a nice job. Iraq has 1/10 of the reserves, and Saudi Arabia far more -- all easily extracted oil. (Another DOE chart.) Kuwait has about as much as Iraq, or Iran, and so on. Here is some of the data. Canada, like the U.S., doesn't have that long a future at current extraction rates. The USGS also has a detailed int'l map of projected reserves.

The Middle East, meanwhile, has a staggering amount of oil untapped. It makes me wonder why Iraq's Hussein doesn'y just kick back and get rich, buying the affection of his people. He has the oil. There's something missing, perhaps just his sanity.

The U.S. needs some long-term planning. One of these days we should just invade an oil-rich country and make a colony or something out of it. It fact, I think such plans are in the works as we speak.

Obviously I have an opinion or two... none of this means Canada is irrelevant, it's just too peaceful for us to get all worked up about and bomb or something. Disappointed?

The best vacation I ever had was on Hawaii. The Highlights were the Keck Observatory and Kilauea volcano and lava fields.

When we visited the Keck we drove from sealevel to 4,200 m (14000ft). We got a free guided tour of the Keck observatory and the NASA telescope. I don't know if they still do that. It was an awe inspiring experience.

Another day we spent hiking around the world's most active volcano. Near the end of the day we hiked to where the lava was flowing into the ocean. This was the most terrifying and exciting thing I have ever done. Better than any rollercoaster

Gallium is currently around $640/Kg

Indium is about $147/Kg

Nitrogen, as far as I know, can be obtained quite cheaply.

For comparison, silicon is about $1/Kg

commodity info

Your link is messed up -- it should be a .gov.

As mentioned in another post, the USGS webpage itself is unusable unless you're running Netscape 4 (windows or linux only) or IE for Windows.

I think it would be a good idea for as many people as possible to emailthe maintainer of the web page.

Unsurprising for the gov't to so thouroughly screw-up like this, especially with Interior Secretary Gale Norton at the helm. FWIW, she is facing contempt of court charges for lying in Federal court during a trial of gross mismanagement of the Native American Trust fund. Mismanagement by completely failing to secure a computer system...

Hell, why don't we all email Gale herself?!

In other news the website http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ has been crashed by unknown terriosts from the shadowy 'slashdot' organization. This massive 'Denial of Service' attack, know as the 'Slashdot Effect', is the orginizations trademark, much feared by webmasters and network engineers everywhere.

SD

Right Here.

http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/othrdata/migrat io/orient.htm

But will any geek actually get off his/her ass and look outside?

Screw all that "outside" nonsense, get all the mars you want right here, straight from the Mars Orbital Camera. Note, requires a special program to view the files, but it's free.

But will any geek actually get off his/her ass and look outside?

Screw all that "outside" nonsense, get all the mars you want right here, straight from the Mars Orbital Camera. Note, requires a special program to view the files, but it's free.

Ethanol combustion produces friendly CO2 gas

I guess California doesn't see C02 as being very friendly.

On July 22, California gov. Gray Davis signed a bill limiting C02 output of motor vehicles. And the federal government even claims C02 is killing the trees.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

2001 total production
Canada 2,582,787
USA 2,636,955

Canada has lots of cheap Hydro electric power which is required to smelt aluminium. Lots more stats at www.aluminium.org and a nice overview here Aluminium industry over the last 45 years. And a real nice summary with easy to read tables, aluminuim PDF

2001 total production
Canada 2,582,787
USA 2,636,955

Canada has lots of cheap Hydro electric power which is required to smelt aluminium. Lots more stats at www.aluminium.org and a nice overview here Aluminium industry over the last 45 years. And a real nice summary with easy to read tables, aluminuim PDF

Washington State has a significant history of major earthquakes. It is part of the pacific ring of fire. See the USGS site here But really, you have to ask yourself, what are you going to do when Mt Ranier blows and your server farrm is buried under 1 Million tons of liquid hot magma?

Washington State has a significant history of major earthquakes. It is part of the pacific ring of fire. See the USGS site here But really, you have to ask yourself, what are you going to do when Mt Ranier blows and your server farrm is buried under 1 Million tons of liquid hot magma?

Why would the CIA World Factbook offend anyone? it's a tremendously good resource.

One thing the US government is really good about is putting out lots of free data archives that it's spent money building. There are *excellent* resources available to the world:

The USGS puts out really great maps and elevation maps for free. Not something you can produce on your own easily.

NASA puts out some of my favorite stuff -- images, huge quantities of data.

The Farm Security Administration has some really nice old photographs.

The Library of Congress has tons of really nice stuff.

The Smithsonian is one of the greatest museums I can imagine.

The US government is one of the most steady and highest-quality provider of useful content (and ad-free!) available to the Internet.

I kind of wish there was some site that listed all the US government sites as a sort of tree...make it easier to browse through them.

A large amount of our water problems have to do with burning fossil fuels with heavy metals. Why? Plants have always been pretty at good at absorbing nasty stuff like arsenic, mercury, etc. We burn the coal/oil/whatever, and that stuff goes into the atmosphere, gets absorbed by clouds, and then gets into the water cycle. Then we find this stuff in the our water and fish.

It gets in the fish because algae and water lilys also absorb the metals pretty well. Then fish eat the algae...Note that if you live in the Northeast US (like I used to), you can't eat freshwater fish anymore. All the lakes (with a few exceptions) are polluted with mercury, even the ones far far away from industrial factories.

So modifying plants to absorb more heavy metals is just going to cause problems for 1) future generations (granted it takes a helluva long time for plants to die and make coal, but still...), and 2) current people who hunt for food (like when Mr. Deer comes over and nibbles on that arsenic-laden blueberry bush).

Since when is taking toxic material out of the ground and letting it sit on the surface (where rain washes it into rivers, animals eat it...people eat it) a good idea? Maybe it will keep it out of aquafers in the short term, but it is still going to cause more problems than it's worth.

An interesting chemical relationship exists between the sulfur dioxide and the hydrogen sulfide released by the volcano. These two gases react quickly (within minutes) with each other to produce sulfur particles and water vapor. Both of the products of this reaction are odorless and are less toxic than either H2S or SO2. Most of the hydrogen sulfide released in eruptive areas on Kilauea is consumed and is converted to sulfur particles by this process, because there is much more sulfur dioxide than hydrogen sulfide coming out of the volcano. This is why you seldom smell hydrogen sulfide at the summit caldera or along the eruptive east rift. The volcano has its own hydrogen sulfide abatement system! Geothermal areas, by contrast, have no large quantities of SO2 available for reaction, so any H2S released is removed by reaction with oxygen in the air to form sulfur dioxide, a process that takes a day or more.

Here's a corrected URL (there's a space in the original posting):

CVO Menu - Three Sisters Vicinity - West Uplift

You can report and view reports of earthquakes here.

It has been known for years that methane hydrates on the ocean floor might provide more energy than conventional fossil fuels. There's an interesting article on them from the US Geological Survey here

The fact is that the earth contains virtually unlimited supplies of energy that can be tapped into by man. And that is apart from the truly huge reservoir of nuclear power we can tap into. There is no energy shortage - not even an oil shortage - on this planet.

You can get it here

Look here.

I'm not sure if you can get the original Voyager OS source from there, but it's a starting point. :-)

Cheers, Ulli

Please take a few minutes staring at the Moon and reconsider. The many huge craters on it hint at the number of impacts which hit planets...and remember the lava-covered flat 'marias' used to have visible craters too. Also consider the Moon itself as evidence of the power of impacts. The Moon was blasted loose from the Earth by an impact.

You're probably underestimating the number of collisions, the violence of the collisions, and the effect of the low Mars gravity. Also, any rocks leaving Mars would be in an orbit similar to Mars -- near the ecliptic (the plane of all the planets). Rocks with a velocity slower than Mars (whether due to the impact or repeated close encounters with Mars) would head toward the Sun, crossing Earth's orbit. Space is very empty, but having the objects in similar planes and orbits greatly increases the chances of encounter.

There also are indications here on Earth of energetic impacts. If you look at the meteorite impact site maps, you'll see there have been many dozen of these impacts (most of Earth has not been mapped for impacts). These are impacts which were so violent that they changed the magnetic pattern in rocks "at some depth".

It's true that 5.9 isn't particularly big by west coast standards, but really really huge earthquakes do sometimes strike in surprising places. Example: "In the winter of 1811-12, the central Mississippi Valley was struck by three of the most powerful earthquakes in U.S. history." What's more, "Because of differences in the geology east and west of the Rocky Mountains, the effects of a magnitude 7 quake in the midcontinental United States could be far worse than those of the 1989 magnitude 7 Loma Prieta, California, earthquake."

So don't get complacent. Earthquakes in east coast states aren't as common, but they can be nearly as large and are often shallower (causing more surface damage); furthermore, the structures, people, and emergency systems are not as well prepared to handle these infrequent events as they are in places like California where they happen all the time.

According to those idiots at the USGS, "The northern hemisphere has positive latitudes. The southern hemisphere has negative latitudes. Longitudes are perpendicular to the Equator are range from -180 degrees (International Date Line) to +179.99999... degrees (just west of the International Date Line). Under this convention -- the western hemisphere has negative longitudes and the eastern hemisphere has positive longitudes."

Yeah. All Americans are dumb. Good call.

The main criteria were to find a seismically-stable, deep underground site.

It's near a fault line (YM lies just between the cluster in CA and the cluster in Utah - closer the the CA cluster IIRC). I guess that in politics, 50% is good enough.

Im sure the government also took into consideration the fact that the test site is essentially a nuclear wasteland for the most part anyway since this area was where the majority of the US nuclear bomb testing occurred up until about 10 years ago. Im not saying this is the Right Thing (hell, I live in Vegas...ok, Henderson, but it's close) but the gov't mentality seems to be "well, it worked before, why not do it again now?"

The UN performs thorough studies regarding the state of the environment. They recently released a new report. (The link goes to the press release, with a link to the full report at the top) It's really something you have to read to realise how much we've screwed up the planet. Some quotes:

"Twelve per cent or 1 183 of birds and nearly a quarter or 1 130 mammals are currently regarded as globally threatened."

"Just under a third of the world's fish stocks are now ranked as depleted, overexploited or recovering as a result of over-fishing fueled by subsidies estimated at up to US$20 billion annually."

"The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that forests, which cover around a third of the Earth's land surface or 3 866 million ha, have declined by 2.4 per cent since 1990."

Not all news in there is bad. In fact, a lot of it is good. But it should be better, a lot better.

Anyway, I strongly suggest reading the full report. It's very educational.

Some guy at National Geographic has been attaching camcorders he calls CritterCams to the backs of sea turtles, sharks, and other shit that swims around in hard to reach places (no comment).

It also has the arhive of just about all the digital Satellite and other image data that the Government's been collecting for the past 60 years. The EROS Data Center otutside Sioux Falls. Oh yeah, and they have a Beowolf Cluster there. :-)

Unfortunately, fissionable stuff is running out just as quickly as burnable.

True, since neither one is running out any time soon.

Breeder reactors could keep us going for millenia, and there's enough natural gas in the form of gas hydrates in the deep oceans to last several hundred years at least.

For Mr. Cite-Geek below,

Nuclear Fuel:
"Known uranium reserves are sufficient to supply the world's needs for many centuries"

"The use of
breeder reactors could extend the availibility of nuclear fission resources another 100,000 years."

Gas hydrates:

[Two regions off the Carolinas] contain more than 70 times the 1989 gas consumption of the United States

"Worldwide, estimates of the natural gas potential of methane hydrates approach 400 million trillion cubic feet -- a staggering figure compared to the 5,000 trillion cubic feet that make up the world's currently known gas reserves.

Let's see YOUR cites, Greenie.

I know Mars is the trendy spot in our solar system right now, with its beautiful Southwestern-style landscape, but can I hear an answer as to why we don't try building a base on the Moon first?

Both have very similar challenges involved; one just happens to be 300 days closer. Doesn't it make sense to start closest to us and work our way outward? Development on the Moon could give us crucial insights into how we should develop Mars, and besides: The Moon is really the only likely space tourism destination in our lifetimes.

The Sea of Tranquility, The Bay of Rainbows, The Ocean of Storms, the Lake of Dreams... if nothing else, the Moon is the most beautifully named object in our solar system. So can anyone give me a reason why we should colonize Mars before we colonize the Moon?

My software team develops and maintains a very complex system that generates user products from Level 0 data obtained from a certain Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Part of this spacecraft's main instrument is an ADC that converts reflected radiances in several spectral bands to digital values that are then either transmitted back to Earth-based receiving stations via X-band or satellite relay systems, or stored in a solid state recorder for later retrieval.

If Mr. Valenti believes that the ETM+ instrument's ADC needs watermark detection capabilities, then I suggest that we send him into low Earth orbit to do the installation personally. (Preferably, this would be a one-way ticket, of course.)

It wasn't too much to get excited about. I'm in Berkeley, and my monitor jiggled side-to-side a bit, but that was it.

I'm the system geek for the USGS earthquake web servers, and the quake.wr.usgs.gov site was slow last night. The site is served through Akamai EdgeSuite, but the origin servers were on their knees. Turns out there is a Perl cgi that displays real-time seismograms, and everyone dogpiled on that. Do you have any idea what 200+ separate instances of Perl running simultaneously on a 1997 Sun Netra looks like? It's not pretty. On the other hand, the 'Did you feel it' questionnaires are processed by a pair of Athlons running FreeBSD and mod_perl, and they had no problem processing the now-17,000+ incoming questionnaires.

Earthquakes provide their own Slashdot Effect on our servers. I wrote an article about this a few years ago after our server got squashed the first time. Web Servers, Earthquakes, and the Slashdot Effect

We're not using Squid any more since we signed up with Akamai, but we still get big traffic spikes whenever the ground shakes. I have a collection of them at http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/spikes/

Because no one lives outside of California?

You can't lie to me, I've seen I-80, there's no one out there.

But seriously, in the last 3 days there have now been 5 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater.

This earthquake was fun here, but a non-event where earthquakes as a whole go.

Because no one lives outside of California?

You can't lie to me, I've seen I-80, there's no one out there.

But seriously, in the last 3 days there have now been 5 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater.

This earthquake was fun here, but a non-event where earthquakes as a whole go.