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Submarine Cables Could be Repurposed as Earthquake Detectors (economist.com)
In a paper published in Science, Giuseppe Marra, of Britain's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), proposes to shine a little light into the oceans by co-opting infrastructure built for an entirely different purpose. From a report: Dr Marra and his colleagues hope to use the planet's 1m-kilometre network of undersea fibre-optic cables, which carry the internet from continent to continent (see map), as a giant submarine sensor. Dr Marra is particularly interested in earthquakes. The dry bits of the planet are well-stocked with seismographs. The oceans are much less well covered, with only a handful of permanent sensors on the sea floor. This means that many small earthquakes go unrecorded because the vibrations they cause are too mild to be picked up by distant land-based sensors. The genesis of the idea is a good example of the way in which advances in one field of science can lead to new developments in other, apparently unrelated fields.
yeah, my DAMN balls, if they shake, u better quake
This is an implementation of Rayleigh Scattering technology, which has been around awhile and used for FO sensing of movement and/or temp changes. It has limitations, such as difficulty in determining exactly where the earthquake took place along the line, unless you do a lot of calibration which would require actually disturbing the lines to verify.
"How young Donald Trump was slapped and punched until he made his bed"
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/donald-trump-fellow-cadet-article-1.3401110
My last conversation with Donald Trump was at the New York Military Academy, where we were both cadets. It was 1964, the year he graduated. We were walking together near the baseball field where, he reminded me, he'd played exceptionally well. He demanded that I tell him the story of one of his greatest games.
"The bases were loaded," I told him. "We were losing by three. You hit the ball just over the third baseman's head. Neither the third baseman nor the left fielder could get to the ball in time. All four of our runs came in; we won the game."
"No," he said. "That's not the way it happened. I want you to remember this: I hit the ball out of the ballpark! Remember that. I hit it out of the ballpark!"
Ballpark? I thought. We were talking about a high school practice field. There was no park to hit a ball out of. And anyway, his hit was a blooper the fielders misplayed.
But I wasn't going to argue with Donald. What was the harm in a little embellishment, if it helped him survive New York Military Academy?
NYMA, the private boarding school where Trump's parents sent him and where mine sent me, could be a brutal place where grown men who were veterans of the real military ruled with threats and force.
Trump's first year, under the command of Major Theodore Dobias, was hellish. Dobias slapped and punched him until he learned to make his bed and polish his shoes — things that Donald, an aggressive little wiseguy, had at first refused to do.
At some point Dobias assumed that he had broken Trump and eased up. More probably, Trump had figured out Dobias' weak points and had begun to exploit them. He flattered the major and became one of his "winners" who was favored with privileges and praised.
As the Academy's unofficial PR man, Dobias even contributed to the Trump myth, eventually telling Rolling Stone that pro scouts vied to sign Trump. As with many things Dobias asserted about Trump, this story may or may not be true.
Besides sports, most of Donald's years at the Academy were unremarkable. In his junior year, he was a supply sergeant in charge of the World War II M1s rifles we all lugged around at parade. But even in this laid-back position he was brash and assertive.
A member of the school band recallsTrump throwing shoes at him and yelling at him to shut up when this young man stood too close to the barracks trumpeting Reveille. Rumor had it that he got away with stuff like this because his father donated large sums to the school.
In his senior year, Donald was promoted to captain of A Company. Unlike other cadet captains who took an interest in the lives of the adolescents in their charge, Trump commanded at a remove. Aside from a determination that cadets in his care would always polish their brass belt buckles and keep the spit-shine on their boots, come evening he'd retreat to his room.
My friend Peter Ticktin, who was an A Company platoon sergeant, emailed me recently to say he saw Trump as someone who kept his thoughts to himself and delegated his responsibilities. "DT put his trust in me," Ticktin wrote . "(Although trust) may be too strong (a word), as I was not a confidant as to his personal thoughts. No one was. He was much to himself. A good guy, but no one's real buddy."
Trump couldn't remain aloof after one of his minions allegedly hazed a younger cadet. Ignoring the unwritten barracks rule that no report to the adult authorities be made, this cadet finked to his parents, who demanded a meeting with the superintendent. It resulted in Donald's removal as captain.
Any other cadet caught in such a scandal would have been busted to a lower rank and exiled to a different barracks. But Donald was transferred, with no loss of rank, to what was probably intended as a desk job. (He called it a promotion.)
While Donald had not succeeded as a manager of young men
Wow, that's asking quite a bit of 39 inches of fiber optic cable.
I'd much rather see Donald J. Trump 'repurposed' as mulch.
I don't see why it wouldn't work. I guess they just didn't want to bust out the Optical Time Domain Reflectrometer nomenclature.
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... as stationary hydrophones to listen for ships above and beneath the surface.
Each vessel produces its own signature of vibrations caused by reefers, engines, screws, power source hum ...
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Well the ground of the Federal Supermax will be happy to accept the nutrients regardless of the garbage being that they composed.
We will be able to pinpoint the exact location of CmdrTaco
Typo: redirections = reflections