One of the design criteria for Kepler's field of view was to keep it clear of the solar system's plane of debris to avoid irrelevant false positive readings from occultations by asteroids, KBOs etc.
Arecibo was built too close to the equator to look at objects unlikely to be occulted by solar system objects. The US should have annexed an island off the coast of Greenland instead of Puerto Rico.
A star of G5 colour and 0.97 solar masses is not wildly older (or younger) than the Sun.
A metallicity of 0 is incredible, as is a V-magnitude of 0 ; therefore I deduce that 0.000 is a "rogue value" that indicates "no data" or "no credible data".
The Kepler field of view is on the border of Cygnus and Lyra and Draco. The telescope is permanently pointed at this field. The Wikipedia page tells you this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_Mission
Earth's core has nearly twice the density of its upper layers.
Earth as an average has a density (5.5SG) twice that of it's common surface materials (quartz, 2.6SG). The core has a density of over three times, possibly over four times, that of common surface materials.
To make a long story short, a planet could have a dense core and less dense material at the surface
Not by a lot. You'd have more water available because of the greater volume of "mantle" to de-gas ; it might be a "water-world" because of that. So you might have more hydrated surface rocks, but that would only lower the density of typical surface rocks by a few points.
The availability of rock to weather to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to control surface temperature to avoid boiling the oceans and turning the planet into a "super-Venus"... a pretty fine balance.
I make it 57 times the mass (assuming the same bulk density). HOWEVER, the density profile is likely to be different (to Earth's), as the core will be under higher pressure, and therefore have higher density. So to get to 2.4 times the radius, I'm thinking that the mass would be considerable greater than 57 earth masses.
Surface gravity would be affected in the same way, but less.
My bet would be that this is going to be a very "heavy" planet.
On the other hand, satellites and asteroids in the system...
Given artificial gravity and materials only marginally advanced from those we have now,
You know, I think that artificial gravity might be a useful mechanism for propelling my design for a flying car. It's probably a drop-in replacement for the current "flying pink unicorn" drive. But I think that the pink unicorn drive is closer to deployment in the field than the artificial gravity.
The big development problem is getting non-virgin geeks to test the drive for the human-breeder population.
You're conflating the quality of the content with the delivery mechanism.
You're also assuming that other people have the same tastes as you, which is unlikely to be true in general. Yet you're implying that you want your tastes imposed on them. Which is not very friendly. Next thing you know you'll be wanting to put adverts into programmes too.
For over a decade, I was dissatisfied with the content on TV, so I saved myself a lot of money and didn't have a TV. These days, the wife does insists that we have a TV, and I use the fast-forward button over the adverts except when I watch live (very rare). These solutions work for me without imposing my will on other people (except the wife).
why you should be afraid â" very afraid â" of the snowballing replicability of the App Store Model.
Why should I be afraid of this "App Store Model" again? I've never stored an app, or even, as far as I know, visited an app store. I'm not even sure if my phone would be able to take one, or why I should care - I tried to use it to access the Internet when I forst got it, and dismissed the idea after about 10 seconds : the screen is too small. I'll stick to plugging the laptop in if I need to access the internet.
'If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens,' warns Zittrain, 'we'll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we'll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.'
Isn't this is a direct re-quote of predictions of the death of the internet and personal computing from the early 1990s expansion of AOL and other "portals"? Oh, I well remember the way the "walled gardens" took over and protected us from the Y2K bug.
I for one welcome our new walled garden overlords, to replace our old walled garden overlords.
Not yet. It is currently breeding. In the depths. Festering.
Tentacles are optional.
As Sting once put it :
"Many miles away
Something crawls to the surface
Of a dark Scottish loch"
(Which, despite their common origins in foetid industrial landscape wreckage, is not a premonitionary reference to The Creature from the Black Lagoon', a fascinating stem terrestrial tetrapod.)
In my opinion, there are clearly some precursors to some earthquakes. There is a huge variety of precursors to choose from for any given fault.
I would need to see it demonstrated that the same precursors are effective along extended sections of particular faults for extended periods of time. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that changes in the wall rock nature would mean that, where the wall rocks are different, different physical processes are the limiting processes for the stress at which the fault slips. Therefore, as the wall rocks vary, the limiting processes vary, and therefore the precursors (if any) vary. That is, for a particular fault, the nature of the precursors can vary with position (on the fault, as well as depth and confining pressure). I can also see that things will change with time - for example the accumulation of fault gouge / mylonite on a fault plane is going to change the roughness of the fault plane, and therefore the confining pressure to frictional force relation.
I think that it's inevitable that someday in the distant future we will be able to say "circumstances are prime for an earthquake", and be able to issue some kind of earthquake watches or warnings, just like the weather.
I certainly wouldn't go as far as to say "inevitable" ; "possible" I might go to. But that possibility would only apply to, as best a class of fault planes with common characteristics of wall rock, confining pressure, normal contact pressure (and probably accumulated slip distance - to account for mylonite formation etc). A different fault a kilometre away (in different orientation, wall rock or slip history) could perfectly well require it's own, different, prediction.
Politicians need to work to keep people from panicking from such a warning; instead we should be prepared.
People aren't very good at not panicking. Which is why, at my work, we have safety drills (fire on board ; abandon ship by helicopter ; abandon by lifeboat ; man overboard ; poison gas ; collision with un-powered vessel) at frequent intervals : to drive conditioned, conservative responses into people's guts, not into their heads. In this respect, politicians are, at best, no better than the man on the Clapham Omnibus.
I know that the Japanese (and I'd suspect the Icelanders too) have regular municipal earthquake preparedness drills. Which seems to have a beneficial effect. I wonder - does Hawaii do regular tsunami drills. Different societies have differing degrees of acceptance of such time-consuming, expensive and scary efforts. I don't think that the UK would swallow such drills (but with an average of a couple of people killed per century, it's hardly a pressing concern) ; California might. What would a Kansan (Kansasan?) who moved to California make of such a parochial difference?
I'm sure that there are a lot of behavioural matters that could be improved on ; compared to the technical difficulties and inherent complexity of the question of earthquake prediction (short term, regionally precise prediction), they are low-hanging fruit. Medium-hanging fruit dwell on the "building engineering" tree ("earthquakes don't kill people ; falling buildings kill people" - is a truism, but a close approximation to the truth nonetheless). SAFOD ; the Parkfield experiments ; the continuing research into ionospheric current indicators, are higher-hanging fruit, which may be noxious or nutritious, and are waving around on the branches so much, it's not even really clear which tree they're on. Worth pursuing ; but the lower-hanging fruit will have faster effects, more reliably.
However, if you RTFA, and particularly RTFPaper, you'll see that the authors have proposed a causal mechanism for these anecdotes. Which renders it more amenable to test. Unfortunately, the long record of poor and failed animal-prediction ideas bodes poorly for their predictive power.
Good post, balanced, sober and realistic. Well worth the effort of your writing it.
There is probably a solution out there somewhere, but it will take many more years of research to get to, if it's even possible. Some people say it isn't.
There is possibly a solution out there, but I know of no law of nature that requires there to be a reliable precursor signal, let alone a single, reliable, universally applicable signal.
It is plausible that particular faults may have reliable precursors along particular segments, but that a different fault would have different local circumstances, resulting in that particular precursor being useless. For example, a fault between crystalline basement blocks could well have a strong resistivity response in advance of fracture ; but 5km along the fault, you could have it in water-wet sedimentary cover, with a completely different resistivity response to accumulating stress.
In short, you may have to study and understand every single fault, and develop a specific prediction plan for each segment of that fault. And the unknown faults, like the blind thrust that "went" in a late-last-century Californian quake? That's a Rumsfeldian (?) "known unknown."
The problem of false positives and false negatives plagues the field. Which is not being helped by the prosecution of the Italian seismologists. You wouldn't catch me entering the field (I'm an oilfield geologist - pays quite nicely, thank you).
See my post above for earthquake mitigation comments, and also comments on the expected death toll for the next Ganges valley mega-quake.
Concerning this particular work... I'm reading T.F.Paper... which discusses groudwater changes recorded over Izmit 1999 (a friend of mine slept through that earthquake after her eclipse-chasing holiday ; she's never lived it down), carbon monoxide emissions from the ground (Gujarat, 2001 ; 0.25ppmv - that might be visible on a diver's CO meter?) , a suggestion of (electronic) hole formation and movement into the atmosphere to explain the diverse phenomena... well it's a rational hypothesis.
BUT... it depends on there being a linkage between the highly strained region of rock and the surface. Which with dry(-ish) crystalline basement, I can believe. But put a cover of sediments, particularly several kilometres of alternating mud-rock and sandstone/ limestones on top of your strained fault surface, and ask for it to transmit material (ions, holes, gases from oxidised organic matter) at rates of several kilometres per day? That's not going to work very well, IMHO.
Anyway... it's a proposal. Lets put it to the test. Did this family of phenomena work for Parkfield? Strange - they make precisely *no* mention of Parkfield. Which is peculiar, given the amount of data collected. Trouble is, the data isn't nice and clean ; there's a nice sort-of-weekly trend in pore pressure, for example.
It doesn't look likely to fly to me. You're the seismology bod - are you convinced?
we in the Pacific NW of the US are due for a real monster of a subduction quake someday, the hardship and loss of life will be quite extreme,
BTW, whatever the loss of life when the Cascadia fault lets go... it's almost certain to be dwarfed by the next "big one" in the Ganges valley area. The historical earthquake records are comparable, and the timescale to the next "big one" is likely to be similar. The population at risk in the Ganges area is considerably higher, and building standards and infrastructure are much poorer. Off the back of an envelope, tens of millions of deaths are entirely credible.
While I understand your concerns about your back yard being shaken up, in terms of body-count, the Californian "big one" and the Cascadia "big one" put together simply don't come into consideration compared to the payoff (in terms of people-not-killed) from successfully predicting the Ganges "big one" and managing the consequences more optimally than is likely.
Just move. If it's a serious concern to you, move. If it's not such a serious concern, then look to moving away from soft (shake-amplifying) ground to a higher, bedrock based area (this will almost certainly improve your likelihood of not being killed by floods, dam bursts, or lahars from some of the Cascadia volcanoes - you've got to pay attention to them too, in your region). Make sure that your house has a week or two of rations in "dry store" (expect to lose all electrical power, so you're going to be eating the freezer contents first). Do you like camping? Keep your sleeping bags in the house and in good condition ; your stove(s) to hand with several weeks worth of fuel ; expect to need to survive for a couple of mid-winter weeks with minimal external assistance. Identify water sources ; store purification supplies. Keep diarrhoea treatment drugs in the house too.
Well done ; you're now better equipped to survive than 99% of your neighbours. Prepare some recipes for "long pig" and you can benefit from their lack of forethought and have some fresh meat when they do die.
we in the Pacific NW of the US are due for a real monster of a subduction quake someday, the hardship and loss of life will be quite extreme,
Quite correct.
and some advance notice would be welcome, to say the least.
here is your advance notice : at some point in the next half-millennium, the Pacific NW coast of America is going to suffer a major (8+, possibly 9+ moment magnitude) earthquake. At that time, being somewhere else would be a very good idea.
Feel free to choose when you want to leave.
I know that you want something more precise ; at the moment there is no technique that can deliver, reliably, higher precision than the advance notice I've given above. I'm sorry, but Nature is not obligated to provide that information and there is no (known) law of nature that obligates nature to reveal that information. All techniques that are in use for higher precision earthquake prediction have a high false positive rate and a high false negative rate ; in short, they're statistically so close to useless that you'd be better off using a good quality random number generator.
This is not good news (for you), but it is honest.
You [Murdoch, pere et fils] should be paying the occasional visit to your managing editors and ask, "Where are we getting this?"
In the case of Murdoch pere, who has worked in the newspaper industry from the bottom up, there is no plausible defence ; for Murdoch fils, he has (AFAIK) never worked in a newspaper, but has only ever worked as a paper-shuffling manager. So he has a pathetically weak defence of "I'm a manager ; I've never been trained in the common ethics and best practices of journalism." (How he explains not knowing about normal human ethics is another question ; he could probably take the "look at my father" defence on that one.)
There has always been the ability of the government to enquire, which they've done a poor job of, just how the news knows some things. Dave's doing his best CYA,
Yes, Clean-boy Dave has worked hard to shield Murdoch pere et fils from the consequences of their actions. This begs obvious questions.
but it keeps going along. What are you going to do about foreign ownership of a large part of your media, Dave? Learning anything important, Dave?
The first obvious question is "what does Dave know that Murdoch, pere et fils also know (and that Dave knows that they know)?"
My bet is that something nasty, and probably severely actionable, happened at the Knobs Restaurant-Smashing Club when Dave was a student, and has so-far been covered up.
Actually, Murdoch, pere is no idiot ; probably he doesn't trust his son with this sort of bombshell. If I had a son, I'd think twice about letting him know "where the bodies are buried" (as the standing joke goes ; not that I'm implying that I suspect Clean-boy Dave of being involved in actually digging graves).
On a related topic, I wonder what the contents of insurance.aes256 are?
When you look in depth and get involved with the messy details, drawing a clear distinction between "animal" and "plant" gets difficult. Yeast being one fine example of a hard-to-classify organism. The whole kingdom of fungi being another. (Yeast are not fungi : no cell-wall chitin, nor those funny not-quite-flagella whose name escapes me at the moment.)
A clearer distinction can be made between heterotrophs (which eat other organisms to get their energy and material needs met) and autotrophs (which can survive on inorganic chemicals only, some being powered by photosynthesis, others being powered by a wild variety of chemistries). But they're much too long words for popular consumption.
(It's also not a clear separation ; no shortage of organisms can switch between heterotrophic and autotrophic lifestyles during different parts of their life cycles. Going back to the coral point, when corals bleach that's the coral polyps going form a partly autotrophic lifestyle to a full heterotrophic lifestyle. And they can go back, depending on conditions.)
I haven't seen a recent survey ; what proportion of Americans have passports this decade and have travelled to the outside world? What proportion actually know that there is a world outside Gilead? (This is a ha-ha-but-serious point.)
BUT, many of the shallow-water dwelling, hermatypic (reef-forming) corals have symbiotic algae of various species living in amongst their flesh. The algae photosynthesise and release the resultant sugars (and possibly other interesting chemicals) into the body walls of the coral polyps (the individual animals). The corals can get a significant proportion of their energetic needs from this source, which allows them to out-grow other organisms on the reef, which is why they're such a highly visible part of the fauna.
You may well have heard of "coral bleaching"? This is a common response of corals to excessive water temperatures, when they expel their symbiotic algae. Without the algae, they don't have the energetic boost that enables them to out-grow their competitors (and the organisms that eat corals too), with obviously bad consequences for the reef as a whole.
For such seemingly simple organisms, there's a lot of complexity in corals.
(BTW, someone else in this part of the thread seems to think that having sexual reproduction is what defines being an animal. I've an orchid flowering in the corner of the room that would disagree with that ; if it was the right time of year for bees to be flying, the bees might dispute the suggestion too.)
Our first thought was we had sideswiped an elk or someone had shot the window.
It's scary that you think that a large beast like an elk could sneak up on you while you're driving without you noticing. Was it you watching the DVDs, or the kids? It's also a bit scary that having a window shot out is one of the first things you'd think of. It must be an interesting war zone you live in ; I've considered job offers in Somalia, but I've never considered taking my kids (not that I have any, of course) to live there while I'm at work.
It's also a bit worrying that you'd installed what sounds like a rats-nest of cabling yourself and had left it possible to get caught in the door, hadn't checked for appropriate fusing (not that that seems to be the problem here) etc. Are you sure that you're sufficiently electrically competent to have carried out this installation? Cable routing can be as important a part of an installation as connecting the right conductors together (and not connecting the wrong ones). That's why there are regulations about it, at least in industry.
Why does US companies think they can thump on everyone else?
Errr, because it's one US company talking to another US company, while the original agreement may well have been between one German company and another German company.
I haven't seen a recent survey ; what proportion of Americans have passports this decade and have travelled to the outside world? What proportion actually know that there is a world outside Gilead? (This is a ha-ha-but-serious point.)
Sometimes I wish England would stop dicking about in EU and actually commit
Speaking as someone who lives in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but who no longer lives in England, I've spent 4.5 of the last 6 years (since I got married, 6 years ago) trying to persuade the wife that if we're looking to move from our current flat, then we should look seriously at moving to somewhere in the EU, not on the borders as Britain is at the moment.
(And no, I would not for one second consider moving back to Engerlandddd!)
Slashdot Mirror
Arecibo was built too close to the equator to look at objects unlikely to be occulted by solar system objects. The US should have annexed an island off the coast of Greenland instead of Puerto Rico.
A metallicity of 0 is incredible, as is a V-magnitude of 0 ; therefore I deduce that 0.000 is a "rogue value" that indicates "no data" or "no credible data".
The Kepler field of view is on the border of Cygnus and Lyra and Draco. The telescope is permanently pointed at this field. The Wikipedia page tells you this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_Mission
Are you sure you have enough unobtanium for that?
Will you arrange them into a Kemplerer rosette?
Earth as an average has a density (5.5SG) twice that of it's common surface materials (quartz, 2.6SG). The core has a density of over three times, possibly over four times, that of common surface materials.
Not by a lot. You'd have more water available because of the greater volume of "mantle" to de-gas ; it might be a "water-world" because of that. So you might have more hydrated surface rocks, but that would only lower the density of typical surface rocks by a few points.
The availability of rock to weather to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to control surface temperature to avoid boiling the oceans and turning the planet into a "super-Venus" ... a pretty fine balance.
Surface gravity would be affected in the same way, but less.
My bet would be that this is going to be a very "heavy" planet.
On the other hand, satellites and asteroids in the system ...
You know, I think that artificial gravity might be a useful mechanism for propelling my design for a flying car. It's probably a drop-in replacement for the current "flying pink unicorn" drive. But I think that the pink unicorn drive is closer to deployment in the field than the artificial gravity.
The big development problem is getting non-virgin geeks to test the drive for the human-breeder population.
You're also assuming that other people have the same tastes as you, which is unlikely to be true in general. Yet you're implying that you want your tastes imposed on them. Which is not very friendly. Next thing you know you'll be wanting to put adverts into programmes too.
For over a decade, I was dissatisfied with the content on TV, so I saved myself a lot of money and didn't have a TV. These days, the wife does insists that we have a TV, and I use the fast-forward button over the adverts except when I watch live (very rare). These solutions work for me without imposing my will on other people (except the wife).
Why should I be afraid of this "App Store Model" again? I've never stored an app, or even, as far as I know, visited an app store. I'm not even sure if my phone would be able to take one, or why I should care - I tried to use it to access the Internet when I forst got it, and dismissed the idea after about 10 seconds : the screen is too small. I'll stick to plugging the laptop in if I need to access the internet.
Isn't this is a direct re-quote of predictions of the death of the internet and personal computing from the early 1990s expansion of AOL and other "portals"? Oh, I well remember the way the "walled gardens" took over and protected us from the Y2K bug.
I for one welcome our new walled garden overlords, to replace our old walled garden overlords.
In the depths.
Festering.
Tentacles are optional.
As Sting once put it :
"Many miles away
Something crawls to the surface
Of a dark Scottish loch"
(Which, despite their common origins in foetid industrial landscape wreckage, is not a premonitionary reference to The Creature from the Black Lagoon', a fascinating stem terrestrial tetrapod.)
"just sayin, y'know"
I would need to see it demonstrated that the same precursors are effective along extended sections of particular faults for extended periods of time. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that changes in the wall rock nature would mean that, where the wall rocks are different, different physical processes are the limiting processes for the stress at which the fault slips. Therefore, as the wall rocks vary, the limiting processes vary, and therefore the precursors (if any) vary. That is, for a particular fault, the nature of the precursors can vary with position (on the fault, as well as depth and confining pressure). I can also see that things will change with time - for example the accumulation of fault gouge / mylonite on a fault plane is going to change the roughness of the fault plane, and therefore the confining pressure to frictional force relation.
I certainly wouldn't go as far as to say "inevitable" ; "possible" I might go to. But that possibility would only apply to, as best a class of fault planes with common characteristics of wall rock, confining pressure, normal contact pressure (and probably accumulated slip distance - to account for mylonite formation etc). A different fault a kilometre away (in different orientation, wall rock or slip history) could perfectly well require it's own, different, prediction.
People aren't very good at not panicking. Which is why, at my work, we have safety drills (fire on board ; abandon ship by helicopter ; abandon by lifeboat ; man overboard ; poison gas ; collision with un-powered vessel) at frequent intervals : to drive conditioned, conservative responses into people's guts, not into their heads. In this respect, politicians are, at best, no better than the man on the Clapham Omnibus.
I know that the Japanese (and I'd suspect the Icelanders too) have regular municipal earthquake preparedness drills. Which seems to have a beneficial effect. I wonder - does Hawaii do regular tsunami drills. Different societies have differing degrees of acceptance of such time-consuming, expensive and scary efforts. I don't think that the UK would swallow such drills (but with an average of a couple of people killed per century, it's hardly a pressing concern) ; California might. What would a Kansan (Kansasan?) who moved to California make of such a parochial difference?
I'm sure that there are a lot of behavioural matters that could be improved on ; compared to the technical difficulties and inherent complexity of the question of earthquake prediction (short term, regionally precise prediction), they are low-hanging fruit. Medium-hanging fruit dwell on the "building engineering" tree ("earthquakes don't kill people ; falling buildings kill people" - is a truism, but a close approximation to the truth nonetheless). SAFOD ; the Parkfield experiments ; the continuing research into ionospheric current indicators, are higher-hanging fruit, which may be noxious or nutritious, and are waving around on the branches so much, it's not even really clear which tree they're on. Worth pursuing ; but the lower-hanging fruit will have faster effects, more reliably.
However, if you RTFA, and particularly RTFPaper, you'll see that the authors have proposed a causal mechanism for these anecdotes. Which renders it more amenable to test. Unfortunately, the long record of poor and failed animal-prediction ideas bodes poorly for their predictive power.
There is possibly a solution out there, but I know of no law of nature that requires there to be a reliable precursor signal, let alone a single, reliable, universally applicable signal.
It is plausible that particular faults may have reliable precursors along particular segments, but that a different fault would have different local circumstances, resulting in that particular precursor being useless. For example, a fault between crystalline basement blocks could well have a strong resistivity response in advance of fracture ; but 5km along the fault, you could have it in water-wet sedimentary cover, with a completely different resistivity response to accumulating stress.
In short, you may have to study and understand every single fault, and develop a specific prediction plan for each segment of that fault. And the unknown faults, like the blind thrust that "went" in a late-last-century Californian quake? That's a Rumsfeldian (?) "known unknown."
The problem of false positives and false negatives plagues the field. Which is not being helped by the prosecution of the Italian seismologists. You wouldn't catch me entering the field (I'm an oilfield geologist - pays quite nicely, thank you).
See my post above for earthquake mitigation comments, and also comments on the expected death toll for the next Ganges valley mega-quake.
Concerning this particular work ... I'm reading T.F.Paper ... which discusses groudwater changes recorded over Izmit 1999 (a friend of mine slept through that earthquake after her eclipse-chasing holiday ; she's never lived it down), carbon monoxide emissions from the ground (Gujarat, 2001 ; 0.25ppmv - that might be visible on a diver's CO meter?) , a suggestion of (electronic) hole formation and movement into the atmosphere to explain the diverse phenomena ... well it's a rational hypothesis.
BUT ... it depends on there being a linkage between the highly strained region of rock and the surface. Which with dry(-ish) crystalline basement, I can believe. But put a cover of sediments, particularly several kilometres of alternating mud-rock and sandstone/ limestones on top of your strained fault surface, and ask for it to transmit material (ions, holes, gases from oxidised organic matter) at rates of several kilometres per day? That's not going to work very well, IMHO.
Anyway ... it's a proposal. Lets put it to the test. Did this family of phenomena work for Parkfield? Strange - they make precisely *no* mention of Parkfield. Which is peculiar, given the amount of data collected. Trouble is, the data isn't nice and clean ; there's a nice sort-of-weekly trend in pore pressure, for example.
It doesn't look likely to fly to me. You're the seismology bod - are you convinced?
BTW, whatever the loss of life when the Cascadia fault lets go ... it's almost certain to be dwarfed by the next "big one" in the Ganges valley area. The historical earthquake records are comparable, and the timescale to the next "big one" is likely to be similar. The population at risk in the Ganges area is considerably higher, and building standards and infrastructure are much poorer. Off the back of an envelope, tens of millions of deaths are entirely credible.
While I understand your concerns about your back yard being shaken up, in terms of body-count, the Californian "big one" and the Cascadia "big one" put together simply don't come into consideration compared to the payoff (in terms of people-not-killed) from successfully predicting the Ganges "big one" and managing the consequences more optimally than is likely.
Just move. If it's a serious concern to you, move. If it's not such a serious concern, then look to moving away from soft (shake-amplifying) ground to a higher, bedrock based area (this will almost certainly improve your likelihood of not being killed by floods, dam bursts, or lahars from some of the Cascadia volcanoes - you've got to pay attention to them too, in your region). Make sure that your house has a week or two of rations in "dry store" (expect to lose all electrical power, so you're going to be eating the freezer contents first). Do you like camping? Keep your sleeping bags in the house and in good condition ; your stove(s) to hand with several weeks worth of fuel ; expect to need to survive for a couple of mid-winter weeks with minimal external assistance. Identify water sources ; store purification supplies. Keep diarrhoea treatment drugs in the house too.
Well done ; you're now better equipped to survive than 99% of your neighbours. Prepare some recipes for "long pig" and you can benefit from their lack of forethought and have some fresh meat when they do die.
Quite correct.
here is your advance notice : at some point in the next half-millennium, the Pacific NW coast of America is going to suffer a major (8+, possibly 9+ moment magnitude) earthquake. At that time, being somewhere else would be a very good idea.
Feel free to choose when you want to leave.
I know that you want something more precise ; at the moment there is no technique that can deliver, reliably, higher precision than the advance notice I've given above. I'm sorry, but Nature is not obligated to provide that information and there is no (known) law of nature that obligates nature to reveal that information. All techniques that are in use for higher precision earthquake prediction have a high false positive rate and a high false negative rate ; in short, they're statistically so close to useless that you'd be better off using a good quality random number generator.
This is not good news (for you), but it is honest.
Got to test those nukes somewhere, after all. It's not as if New York has any any important inhabitants or cultural artefacts.
In the case of Murdoch pere, who has worked in the newspaper industry from the bottom up, there is no plausible defence ; for Murdoch fils, he has (AFAIK) never worked in a newspaper, but has only ever worked as a paper-shuffling manager. So he has a pathetically weak defence of "I'm a manager ; I've never been trained in the common ethics and best practices of journalism." (How he explains not knowing about normal human ethics is another question ; he could probably take the "look at my father" defence on that one.)
Yes, Clean-boy Dave has worked hard to shield Murdoch pere et fils from the consequences of their actions. This begs obvious questions.
The first obvious question is "what does Dave know that Murdoch, pere et fils also know (and that Dave knows that they know)?"
My bet is that something nasty, and probably severely actionable, happened at the Knobs Restaurant-Smashing Club when Dave was a student, and has so-far been covered up.
Actually, Murdoch, pere is no idiot ; probably he doesn't trust his son with this sort of bombshell. If I had a son, I'd think twice about letting him know "where the bodies are buried" (as the standing joke goes ; not that I'm implying that I suspect Clean-boy Dave of being involved in actually digging graves).
On a related topic, I wonder what the contents of insurance.aes256 are?
A clearer distinction can be made between heterotrophs (which eat other organisms to get their energy and material needs met) and autotrophs (which can survive on inorganic chemicals only, some being powered by photosynthesis, others being powered by a wild variety of chemistries). But they're much too long words for popular consumption.
(It's also not a clear separation ; no shortage of organisms can switch between heterotrophic and autotrophic lifestyles during different parts of their life cycles. Going back to the coral point, when corals bleach that's the coral polyps going form a partly autotrophic lifestyle to a full heterotrophic lifestyle. And they can go back, depending on conditions.)
BUT, many of the shallow-water dwelling, hermatypic (reef-forming) corals have symbiotic algae of various species living in amongst their flesh. The algae photosynthesise and release the resultant sugars (and possibly other interesting chemicals) into the body walls of the coral polyps (the individual animals). The corals can get a significant proportion of their energetic needs from this source, which allows them to out-grow other organisms on the reef, which is why they're such a highly visible part of the fauna.
You may well have heard of "coral bleaching"? This is a common response of corals to excessive water temperatures, when they expel their symbiotic algae. Without the algae, they don't have the energetic boost that enables them to out-grow their competitors (and the organisms that eat corals too), with obviously bad consequences for the reef as a whole.
For such seemingly simple organisms, there's a lot of complexity in corals.
(BTW, someone else in this part of the thread seems to think that having sexual reproduction is what defines being an animal. I've an orchid flowering in the corner of the room that would disagree with that ; if it was the right time of year for bees to be flying, the bees might dispute the suggestion too.)
It's scary that you think that a large beast like an elk could sneak up on you while you're driving without you noticing. Was it you watching the DVDs, or the kids?
It's also a bit scary that having a window shot out is one of the first things you'd think of. It must be an interesting war zone you live in ; I've considered job offers in Somalia, but I've never considered taking my kids (not that I have any, of course) to live there while I'm at work.
It's also a bit worrying that you'd installed what sounds like a rats-nest of cabling yourself and had left it possible to get caught in the door, hadn't checked for appropriate fusing (not that that seems to be the problem here) etc. Are you sure that you're sufficiently electrically competent to have carried out this installation? Cable routing can be as important a part of an installation as connecting the right conductors together (and not connecting the wrong ones). That's why there are regulations about it, at least in industry.
Errr, because it's one US company talking to another US company, while the original agreement may well have been between one German company and another German company.
I haven't seen a recent survey ; what proportion of Americans have passports this decade and have travelled to the outside world? What proportion actually know that there is a world outside Gilead? (This is a ha-ha-but-serious point.)
FTFY
Homeopathy is bunk. Homeopaths and homeopathy-supporters are either (a) cruel scammers or (b) deluded or confused about reality.
Speaking as someone who lives in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but who no longer lives in England, I've spent 4.5 of the last 6 years (since I got married, 6 years ago) trying to persuade the wife that if we're looking to move from our current flat, then we should look seriously at moving to somewhere in the EU, not on the borders as Britain is at the moment.
(And no, I would not for one second consider moving back to Engerlandddd!)