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Zipingpu Dam May Have Triggered the Sichuan Quake
bfwebster writes "An article in the Telegraph (UK) raises an interesting question: was the massive (7.9) Sichuan earthquake that wracked China last year and left millions homeless caused by ground stresses following the completion of the Zipingpu dam? As the article notes, 'The 511-ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicenter, of the Sichuan earthquake. Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have affected the pressure on the fault line underneath, possibly unleashing a chain of ruptures that led to the quake.'" The Sichuan region is earthquake-prone, but has not seen anything as large as the 7.9-magnitude quake for perhaps millions of years. The Chinese government denies any connection between the dam and the earthquake and seems to be actively obstructing the access of scientists who want to investigate. The article concludes, "There is a history of earthquakes triggered by dams, including several caused by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the US, but none of such a magnitude."
...earthquakes KILL you!
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Those dam quakes always screwing everything up!
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
As with all things geological, there are a lot of unknown variables, hence the "could", "might" and other diluting terms.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well, it's either have the earthquake now or have it later. Take your pick.
I feel a bad movie based on this where need to blow up dam to stop a super quake from happening is coming.
Chinese officials will conclude that the scientific findings are acurrate and convincing, will acknowledge that the dam did cause the quake, will apologize sincerely, and resign in disgrace. The replacements will then close down the dam, making sure to dismantle it in an ecologically sensible way, doing the least disruption to the surrounding communities as well, and every victim of the quake will be compensated accordingly. You know, much as it would happen here.
You really have to love government humility and responsibility.
This is the country that strictly enforces a one-child-per-family law, and you think the Chinese government actually wants more people to take care of?
Haven't we known for 40 years now that injecting water into a fault can trigger a quake?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes (the famous arctic explorer, among other things) was actually kicked out of the SAS for destroying a dam using stolen explosives. You can google for more detailed accounts of the story, but here's one:
http://www.independent.co.uk/student/career-planning/getting-job/my-first-job-explorer-sir-ranulph-fiennes-was-an-sas-officer-420601.html
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
let's say they know dams cause earthquakes. ok, so there will be some minor earthquakes. but 7.9? no one is going to predict anything that large
still, let's assume the dam is still the trigger for the 7.9 earthquake. emphasis on trigger. its going to happen someday anyway
if they never built the dam, we'd be talking about the 7.9 or 8.3 sichuan earthquake of 2031 or 2102
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Dear Member of Common Sense Brigade,
"When I fuck with nature, nature fucks with some poor bastard who'll never be able to touch me."
Sincerely, World Governments and Corporations
Would a 7.9 quake, although large by earthquake standards, even leave evidence that lasted more than, say, 1000 years? You might be able to tell if you took a cross section of the entire fault line, I suppose, but not all fault lines are known. A L.A. city geologist found a previously unknown (but not currently active) fault under the house of a friend of mine when he was having some drainage work done; new ones are discovered all the time.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
When you build on a fault line, nature is going to give you a big fucking shake sometime.
Building a dam nearby might bring the event forward a bit, but it's going to happen anyway.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Just move along...
--I like turtles...
Triggering a quake by building such a huge dam is not cost-effective. The Chinese could have gotten the same quake for less money by getting everyone to climb up on a chair and jump at the same time.
Don't worry, I'll find a way.
Sincerely, Nature
Every natural disaster has a disproportionate effect on the poor! That's just one of the many, many reasons why it sucks to be poor!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
like this one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHPikUPlRD8
That monumental earth-shattering project is much larger in scope. It is 315 miles from the Sichuan earthquake's epicenter but in any case, if this phenomenon is true perhaps it may not have been related to this earthquake but will wreak havoc one day. Of course, they can just keep denying anything and not worry about the dam impact.
The real interest here is that the dam survived the quake, right?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You do realize that a dam is a source of clean energy, right? Ever heard of hydro-electric power? Turbines?
If this is true, then just wait until the Three Gorges begins to top off (it has been filling for years now and has some time to go.)
This earthquake killed less than 100,000 people.
In 1931, the flooding of a different river (the Yellow river) killed 3.7 millions. And thirty years before that, another flood in China killed 1 million people.
Flooding kills poor people. Dams prevent flooding.
Why did this take so long to get into mainstream media? According to a well-hidden footnote on Wikipedia it was in Science on January 16. I read about it a week ago in a German newspaper.
hehehe zipping poo hehehe
Hahahaha - Zipping Poo... Best name for a dam ever!
No dam for you!
$ make available
Flooding kills poor people.
Most natural disasters affect the poor more than any others. The more wealthy usually have either better living conditions that can survive the event, or the means to leave the area. Or both.
Like you said -- dams prevent flooding (until they fail). Which just means the poor escape one disaster and replace it with another. It still sucks to be poor. Always has, always will.
Katrina, for example. Still wondering if help wouldn't have been more efficient and fast if the people there were rich, influential. Top Gear went there a year after and it still looked like a war zone. Not as if the US doesn't have any money, there's apparently enough to bail out some high-salaried bankers, it's just that the investments are disproportionate to the poor.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Sorry folks.
They would have been better off if they hadn't elected the idiot Mayor and Governor.
People like to blame FEMA but FEMA did they typical job. The local and state governments where criminal.
It was the local government that failed to use the school buses to evacuate the people. Heck they even left them in the flood plane. My city has been hit by three storms. The School buses are always moved to stageing areas near shelters. The state government put police out side New Orleans to keep the people IN after the storm.
Heck the state didn't even have shelters for all the people. Texas had to provide shelters.
What really ticks me off is people forget about Mississippi. They took the worst hit for Katrina. They had a HUGE store surge that took out whole sections of their coast line. They had many homes whipped out but you don't see people up in arms because their state and local governments where a lot more effective.
What is the worst part. That idiot moron of a mayor GOT REELECTED!!!!!!!!!!!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Not sure that I would want to be located downstream from a chinese built dam.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Did anyone else read that as Zipping Poo Dam?
"This earthquake killed a lot of people and ruined the lives of countless others. That effect was disproportionate on the poor."
Chinese poor have always been expendable. They are easily replaced, and their rulers have always understood this.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
that if we reomve a dam, as many people think we should do, would that also precipitate an earthquake? After all, we'd be changing the stresses on the fault.
Fascinating subject; I never knew before this that a dam could actually cause an earthquake. Makes sense when you think about it but I never thought about it since I've had little to do with dams aside from getting most of my power from them.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
What is the worst part. That idiot moron of a mayor GOT REELECTED!!!!!!!!!!!
And, bringing it around full circle, electing terrible leadership is a consequence of being poor and uneducated. The people re-electing the mayor bought the line that the federal government was primarily responsible for the mishandling, and probably made a Bush joke or two... not understanding what role the state and federal governments were supposed to play.
The feds should be thanked for cleaning up the mess Louisiana got itself into.
Dams don't prevent flooding. They just move it somewhere else.
Kid-proof tablet..
Maybe they can get this drilling crew on the mission to save the day!
All humour aside, most people have no clue about the energy levels and destructive power available to natural forces, just on our world. (ie:water) Even engineers can fall prey to their preconceptions at times, if they are not diligent. Water is a powerful force, in scale.
Most people perceive the Earth as a solid/stable surface to build on(dig to 'bedrock' for the foundation, etc...), frequently forgetting Earth more resembles a poultry egg: relatively thin shell covering/encasing a liquid center...and just as fragile on scale.
At our most terrible destructive level available technologically to humans today, we are still just 'wannabe' punks in the big picture. Actually, I would argue that communication tech is the most powerful weapon/tech we have devised to date.
*(IAANB) I Am A NASA Brat![clarification of subject line]-just could not pass this one up. And NOT trying to pick on engineers, who have demanding job requirements, but there is a good reason to put erasers on pencils! :-)
Sorry if this was more than you bargained for trying to make a 'funny', but you did raise a valid point! :-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Oh yeah, only Jackie Chan and Jet Li can save us now. Sounds like Kung Fu gold.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Yes but records only go back for a few thousand years, when the hall of records was mysteriously destroyed somehow.
(with apologies to the Simpsons)
If adding tons of water within days is enough to threaten the stability of a fault, obviously removing tons of water within minutes is the safest way to fix the problem. Yes, I can see the movie industry (which once depicted people being pursued by cold air) falling for that.
Dams don't prevent flooding. They just move it somewhere else.
Right, and we know exactly where that somewhere else is (right behind the dam) and we don't build houses there anymore because it's a lake.
Dams prevent catastrophic, uncontrolled flooding by buffering the surge in a lake and letting it out slowly. The Ohio River no longer floods because of the hundreds of artificial lakes created in its watershed, for instance.
Do you have ESP?
Well, it's a Wonderful thing We've never Witnessed a gov't like that in the USA. Knock on Wood.
Table-ized A.I.
I purchased some of those pounds of which you speak with USD, this past summer. It had an impact on my wallet, I assure you.
Good day!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
They had a HUGE store surge
Store surges! Mississippi should patent that. The Feds could fund the R&D to make it scalable. Then it could be licensed to Macy's, Target, Home Depot & Co. for a percentage of the increase in sales. The Federal R&D funds could be repaid with the profits.
--
Well, shiver me timbers! The Grammar Nazis' left me in charge and here be this juicy morsel. I are the Pirate of unintentionally humorous abuse of words. Argg! Set sail, mateys! We be boarding Dubya next!
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
You're right. I was replying to the parent (who's now been modded down into oblivion). I should have said "Flooding kills poor people too." The original assertion made by the parent about "the poor" is actually what made me want to respond to him in the first place. And I agree that it didn't have any relevance to his original point.
Another couple of counter points that I forgot to make to the original parent:
First, a nuclear plant has to be near the area it serves (since it transmission lines lose too much power over long distances) and it would have to be near water (since it's essentially a steam engine where water is turned into steam to propel its turbines), and so if you build a nuclear power plant near where the dam is (or near where the Min river is and where the population centers are), you may end up building it right on top of that major fault line where the 9.0+ earthquake occurred (which isn't too recommended by the Japanese who have just abandoned their largest nuclear power plant after they recently discovered out there was a fault line right under it)
And last but not least, building a desalination plant in the mountains away from the sea and away from the salt water doesn't make sense. You need salt water in order to desalinate it. In the mountain, you'll probably need to mine it in order to extract the salt. And also, making water flow up a mountain over a very long distance is much harder than making it flow down that same mountain. And never mind that desalination is already prohibitively expensive for even most people without fresh water -- living near actual sea-water.
I think you were thinking of water levies. A water levy is essentially a Dam that's parallel to the water flow. Water levies are designed to push your problems down to your neighbors downstream, thereby amplifying exponentially the possible death toll and the destruction that's caused downstream, and also decreasing your neighbors ability to predict flooding based on historical data.
On the other hand, a Dam (at least the Chinese Dam on the Min River that survived that earthquake) was built to intersect the river and dampen the spikes in its water flow. And even when such a Dam overflows, it still saves lives, because it delays the flooding that's about to come by giving an advanced warning. In that case, it increases predictability and the ability to save lives.
It took FEMA 5 days to get drinkable water to the super dome. I don't care what else was going on, this is unforgivable.
If this is the best FEMA can do, they need to be disbanded and either replaced, or forgotten about.
If FEMA can't get something as simple as water to people in need what good are they?
It's the fault of everyone who bought and/or built a home, business,e etc. at or below sea level, and also the politicians who didn't follow the Army Corps of Engineers' recommendations for the levy. Add an inadequate levy to land below sea level and you're just inviting catastrophe.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Of course, preventing flooding of flood plains wrecks the ecology and in many cases has resulted in the severe degradation of the arable land downstream.
A more sensible solution would be to not build towns and cities in flood plains. But it's a bit late for that.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
Paleoseismology as you described is actually quite difficult. In the case of the San Andreas, you can't really look at off-set streams and such. You can rarely discern more than one or two events along such offsets, and once you do, it is very difficult to determine the age of the offset. You can get the amount that it's moved, yes, but not the timing. Worse, since you don't know the timing, you don't know if the offset is from one or more events.
The way it's done for strike-slip faults like the San Andreas is to look at a cross-section perpendicular to the fault, looking for layers of material off-set (or suddenly changing thickness, etc.) along the fault. The best way to date those layers is through carbon-14 dating of organic material, which can give you accuracy only within ~1-200 years - and that's assuming that the organic material you date is not from elsewhere, is not from 200 year old trees, etc. If an event offsets every layer from the bottom up to a certain point, you date the top layer that it cuts through to get a maximum age, and the layer that it didn't cut through is the minimum age.
You can imagine the difficulty and ambiguous nature of this. The individual layers that you have to recognize and date are on the scale of centimeters to decimeters - I've seen some of the areas that were used, the famous one being along Pallet Creek which is along the San Andreas northeast of LA (I have a picture of it - well, it is a picture of a girl standing in front of it - here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguinchris/3037578910/) Here, luckily there was constant, relatively rapid deposition of material. In most places this is not the case, so any record of movement on the fault is eroded away.
For the San Andreas, we have a partial record going back ~1500 years. There really is no reliable way to reach back further than that - the record isn't normally visible in older rock units. Looking at the larger-scale structures is interesting by itself but doesn't tell you anything about when specifically there was movement. The fault system in the Sichuan region is fairly well understood - it is a kind of combination strike-slip/thrust fault (see http://quake.mit.edu/~changli/wenchuan.html for some nice diagrams.) But I want to call BS on the idea that they have any idea how frequently major earthquakes have happened there - and even if they do, the idea that it is "perhaps millions of years" since the last one is ridiculous no matter what.
And then, when you *do* figure out a approximate year for an earthquake, how do you determine how big it was? Again, extremely difficult! The best estimates come from comparing old written records of destruction with those from modern earthquakes - nothing scientific at all!
What's being done extensively with the San Andreas is physics-based computer modeling - we have some idea of the force building up, and combining that with records of historical earthquakes we can make an estimate of a major earthquake every ~150 years. But even for this, the best-studied earthquake area, it's not much more than a guess.
I don't know as much about the Teton fault (other than that it is a normal fault, not a thrust fault as you stated ;) ) but I'll comment on the idea of a "magnitude 7 earthquake every 400-700 years." These kinds of estimates are based on the very difficult work I described earlier (and I'm not sure how much has been done for the Teton fault) and whatever geologist came up with that would probably admit it is a simple guess without much to base it on. I mean, think of it - is knowing there's a large earthquake every 400-700 years really all that useful anyway?
By the way, I assume any dating of the Teton fault would be done this way: when new patches of rock are exposed along the fault as you described, they start getting hit by cosmogenic radiation. By measuring the amount of cosmogenic radio isoto
The article and summary are misleading to the extent that they talk about the "weight of water" possibly causing the quake. The scientists involved also, almost certainly, do not suspect the weight of the water, as such, was the cause.
The weight of water was utterly irrelevant compared to the weight of the rock beneath and around the dam and the fault. Water has a density of about 1 gram per cubic centimeter. Common crustal rock (usually) has a density in the vicinity of 2.7 grams per cubic centimeter, and there's a hell of a lot more rock than water; remember the earthquake occurred at a depth of twelve miles. The simple added weight would not be noticeable at depth.
What may have happened, as it is the mechanism by which dams may cause earthquakes, is pooling a large amount of water in the vicinity of the fault may have changed the pore fluid pressure in the rock. The increase in pore fluid pressure would have the effect of reducing the net confining pressure on the fault, while the differential stress remained the same, allowing the fault to slip more easily.
The easiest way to think about this is to imagine the pressure the rock had been exerting in all directions to lock the fault together -- to keep it from moving. There's some component of stress that is pushing the two sides of the fault in different directions, but the rock is being squeezed too tightly to move.
Now when more (incompressible) water is added to the system the differential stress remains the same, but the effective pressure locking the fault in place is reduced on account of the higher water pressure in the rock's pore spaces. The shear stress may then be great enough to allow the fault to slip, causing an earthquake.
I have no idea whether this was a factor in this particular earthquake, but it has caused earthquakes ranging from unnoticeable to more significant in other parts of the world, even in tectonically quiet regions. For example, the water level in the Aswan High Dam is supposedly correlated with minor background seismic activity.
\addbot anarki 5
It's the fault of everyone who bought and/or built a home, business,e etc. at or below sea level,
Hey! Leave the Dutch out of it, I say!
I feel a bad movie based on this where need to blow up dam to stop a super quake from happening is coming.
A super-flood to stop a super-quake?
Eclipse PDE and Me
clean nuke power
Ha, ha. ha. Clean nuke power, clean coal, clean tooth fairy.
It could indeed have helped. There was a proposal a few years ago to inject water into faults, the idea being that this would lubricate the faults and trigger quakes sooner. That, of course, means more smaller quakes, rather than fewer really big ones.
You do realize that first in the series of quakes thus facilitated would potentially be a really big one (unless injecting water starts right after the last big "dry" one), don't you?
Of these muthafuckin' QUAKES on this muthafuckin' (fault)PLANE!!!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
by ensuring that instead of being released by four 5.6 earquakes, it was released all in one go. For the bungee-cord analogy, if you LET GO for a bit, the bungee cord will jump more quickly and cover more ground than if your grip just wasn't really enough. If you'd kept hold it might slip, stop, slip, stop several times but never, since you had SOME tension on the cord, reach the speed and acceleration of the scenario where you let go.
Every natural disaster has a disproportionate effect on the poor!,
Not avalanches. ;-)
I'm have doubts about waterspouts, too.
Of course, these exceptions just prove your rule.
Who really gives a dam?
About 20 years ago a US Geological Survey scientist noted the associated of several large California earthquakes and large oil production. He cited the same principles as in the this dam case and showed some calculations. But its hard to rule out other factors and prove this conclusively.
The 511-ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line
China (and by the way the rest of the world except USA, Burma and Liberia) uses the metric system. Your numbers sound like chinese to me and most of the world population.
>Dams prevent catastrophic, uncontrolled flooding by buffering the surge in a lake and letting it out slowly.
As long as they're big enough. If they're not, a rapidly increasing flood of water, that if left uncontrolled might rise at 2 feet an hour, flooding many houses, could be turned into a 20 foot high wall of water, debris, and rock from washed-out dams that kills 145 people rather than just destroying a bunch of houses.
Every "flood control structure" on that river got ripped out. A flood that had almost the same rainfall 40 years earlier didn't kill anyone because it took two hours to go from heavy runoff to full flood. My friends that were down in the canyon in the 1976 flood said the front wave of the flood was moving at about 60mph and consisted mostly of a mass of mobile homes (with the occupants still in them.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
All spelling and grammar errors are intentional. Grammar Nazis' need entertainment.
i guess that you think that they need a lot of entertainment because you are using the wrong fucking words in that shitty post. you must have a learning disorder to confuse "whipped" with "wiped". do yourself a favor, get firefox 3 and enable spell check.
There are a lot of earthquakes in Japan, perhaps these were caused by the 2 atomic bombs that made the land more vulnerable?
*sarcasm off*
Poor people have always been expendable. They are easily replaced, and their rulers have always understood this.
Fixed that for you.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Or not.
Do some science and get an answer to the question.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Look, if one person attacks each grammar/spelling mistake, this is gonna take all day. Do it in one post or don't do it at all.
Everyone we will be stageing passengers to board the flood plane shortly. There will be free items given away on board as there has been a store surge. Takeoff may be delayed since the runway lights where whipped out by an insane Indiana Jones fan earlier. They typical job of replacing them doesn't take long, but the workshop doors are frozen shut and it may take some time to get the service truck out side. What is the good part. You will all be in Hawaii in just a few hours!!!!!
(Good post LWATCDR, but you left yourself wide open :P)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's when a damn doesn't let it out slowly that you have a problem ;)
Uh, that link doesn't mention anything about a washed out dam. It looks like that was just a conventional flood. (Or the article was wrong.)
But, obviously I agree that if you're going to build a dam it is important to do it right. I have a suspicion that people are going to look at the three gorges dam with shock and horror once it is full from what I've read about their quality issues.
That wasn't a great discussion of the flood. When I drove up the canyon that afternoon, before the flood, I stopped and took pictures of 5 of the dams, flood control structures, and diversions in the canyon, and talked to the guy who lived at Viestenz-Smith hydroelectric power plant about running big power-generating equipment. The next day they were all gone: the entire canyon was about a meter wider and two meters deeper than it had been. The only thing left of the power plant was two of the generator magnets and the concrete beneath them. As I recall, the guy I talked to, his body was identified by the fingerprints on one hand, because that arm was all the body they found.
I can't find any good pictures anywhere online, though.
So what they learned was: the big dam in Estes, above the canyon, survived, because it was big enough to absorb the surge of water from one watershed involved. All the structures below that were overwhelmed by water from other watersheds, and what that ended up doing was turning a fairly rapid increase of water, into a moving dam, essentially, with the waterfront restrained by all the crap it had ripped out. It would slam into the next dam/flood control structure, fill it, overtop it, pour over the lip, and erode it extremely quickly, adding to the pulse nature of the flood. When it exited the mouth of the canyon, a house hung up on and ripped out an aqueduct more than 30 feet above the riverbed.
Since that time, they've only rebuilt one dam and they built it a lot bigger. The idea is: you better know you can contain the whole flood (and if you can't your structure better fail gracefully rather than catastrophically.)
There's a great book called The Control Of Nature, by John McPhee, that has a chapter (1/3 of the book) about flood control on the lower Mississippi and how much more complicated it is than just building dams: how a dam here can mean more flooding over there, or worse flooding over there, or NO flooding over there. It's just hard to know without excellent modelling and a good historical record. Hence the cautionary principle: it's usually better to do nothing, and keep people from living in the area, than to build something that you *think* can prevent disasters and then find out you're wrong.
Of course, if people are already living there, it's a lot trickier. China doesn't have a problem just displacing large groups of people, so it's easier for them.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Uh. no. I was volunteering at the Red Cross during Katrina and kept up closely with what was going on. While there is definitely blame to placed on the mayor and governor (and those that decided to ride out the storm because every other storm hadn't been a problem), FEMA royally screwed the pooch on Katrina. They did not do their typical job. They dropped the ball an a huge scale. The feds should be smacked upside the head for incompetency.
It's sad that crap like this gets modded insightful. Were you there? No. I can tell by how astoundingly wrong you are. You're just some armchair 'expert' commenting on crap you honestly know nothing about and rated by other morons. You remind me of a creationist. You know nothing but some BS you were half-taught, and you half made up yourself, and people thing you're intelligent for making it up.
Umm... Why wasn't their drinking water there on day zero? Why wasn't it their on day one. Why didn't the national guard under the Governor have it there?
It always takes Fema a few days to get to a site. The first 48 hours are the responsibility of the local government. The first five days the state. Remember that New Orleans only got a near miss by the storm. The real damage was in Mississippi. Whole towns where destroyed. Sorry folks but I have a few friends in our local emergency management. Before the storm happened I got to hear them talking about what a disaster New Orleans and all of Louisiana was and still is.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.