The Fukushima disaster was a lot more than an earthquake. It was a tsunami!! Levitate your house off its foundation? Just makes it easier to wash away! You've got a house-boat and surf-board now.
The Fukushima plant is on the coast. not every home in Japan is in a coastal Tsunami inundation zone. But even if it is, if this system keeps your house from being destroyed, it might give you enough time to evacuate before the Tsunami hits.
This assume the foundation will be in the "exact" same location as before the earthquake and there is no upwards shift in the ground.
Not to mention that if you don't mount the air compressor and backup generator high enough, the tsunami will take out your fail safe.
Have you not learned anything Japan?
Not every house in Japan in in a Tsunami inundation zone. And even for those that are, if this keeps you alive long enough to escape your house and evacuate before the Tsunami hits, it still seems like a win.
It doesn't matter if the foundation ends up in exactly the same place after the quake, even if it's shifted a meter or two to the side, the house will rest unevenly on the foundation until it's recentered. Which seems a lot better than having the rubble that used to be your house sitting perfectly centered on the foundation.
Not every solution will meet every need. This solution protects against a particular type of earthquake, for quakes that have significant vertical motion, this would not be very effective and might even be detrimental.
The only real reason to reject cycling is because it is unfair to your co workers to smell that bad all day long. If i could shower at or atleast close to work then i would be all for it. Smelling bad may be acceptable in some places but not most offices
Clean sweat doesn't smell - I'm a pretty heavy sweater, my t-shirt is damp when I get to work before I change into my work shirt. Take a shower before you go to work and you'll be fine. Reapply deodorant when you get there if you need to.
I know I don't smell bad at work, my significant other is very sensitive to smells, and she's not afraid to tell me if I have a BO problem.
. And for the Greeners out there: if I charge any more for my services, people will just throw away their TV and buy a new one instead of getting it repaired. Is that very environmentally friendly?
Depends on how old their TV is and how much they use it. If it's an old tube-style model, then it's very likely that the energy saved by buying a new, more energy efficient TV outweigh the wasted resources of throwing away a repairable TV.
People would rather drive their car to get a loaf of bread when a bike ride would be just as easy.
Oh, purlease. Pick up keys, get in car sitting right outside, drive.
Versus squeeze into lycra bondage gear, pick up keys, haul the bike out of secure storage, check tyre pressures, ZOMG where's my super-safe-helmet, find super-safe-helmet, realise you've dropped the keys, find keys again, undo seven kinds of lock, put on cool looking yellow glasses, finally climb on, wobble off, stop to adjust squealing brakes, get hit by your wife coming home in her car with the loaf of bread.
For context, I cycled to to work today, but all that healthsome fresh and exercise didn't somehow destroy my ability to look at a watch.
If you don't want to bike, you can just say "I don't want to bike", you don't need make up some complicated biking procedure to justify your desire not to bike. When I bike to the store, I wear street clothes, just go down to my garage, put on my helmet, hop on my bike, and 5 minutes later I'm at the store. It's faster than driving since I can cut through the middle of a large park instead of driving around it. I have a small u-lock and cable strapped to my rack, so when I park, it's easy to lock the bike securely... only one key required. My bike only cost $600 new, so I don't have some high performance bike, just a nice, sensible commuter bike (with fenders for the rain) with a rack to hook my commuter bag to.
Riding to work takes me 25 minutes door to door. Riding on transit takes 45 - 90 minutes. Driving takes only 15 minutes, but then I spend 10 minutes looking for parking and walking to the office. Depending on traffic, driving home can take an extra 10 - 15 minutes, while I never get stuck in traffic on my bike. Since I have to go over some pretty big hills, I do wear clip-in biking shoes to go to work - makes it much easier to go over the hills, but my pedals have platforms as well, so I can wear regular street shoes when I want to.
The only time I wear lycra biking gear is on the weekends when I go on longer rides (50 - 100 miles) where padded bike shorts make a lot more sense.
You're not being berated for paying less. You're being berated for whining about it while abdicating your responsibility to the international community by being fuel hogs.
The US imports 10,270,000 bbls per day. The EU imports 8,613,000 bbls per day.
It appears that US is not the only hog in the pen.
The US has 300M people, the EU has 500M. So that's.033 barrel/day/person in the USA, versus 0.016 barrel/day/person in the EU.
Mass transit is better suited to the higher population densities of European cities, much of the USA is too spread out.
Cycling doesn't work in some parts of USA due to weather extremes.
While true, there is no reason why this couldn't be changed. If we had learned a lesson from the oil crisis in the 1970's, we'd have had 40 years of building out transit and building houses/neighborhoods in a more transit friendly manner. That doesn't mean eliminating single family houses or putting people in dense urban areas. Just clustering homes and towns around transit hubs instead of building neighborhoods on whatever isolated farmland was up for sale would let transit be an option for many more people. Office parks would naturally cluster around these transit centers because it would be easier to attract employees.
You can't bike when its 40 below zero wind chill, or on snow and ice. (and parts of the south are too hot.)
Few people in the USA live where it gets down to 40 degrees below zero regularly. When I was in college, I bike commuted all year round, including in the snowy winter. When I lived in the south (Jackson, MS) I bike commuted every day, including 90+ degree summer days (leave early, bike slow)... I found biking to be better than walking, less effort required, more cooling breeze.
But no one is telling everyone they have to bike. If people lived closer to transit centers, they could drive a NEV to the station and catch a train to their job. Leaving the expensive SUV at home that trip to the lake when they need to haul the boat and extra gear.
The quakes in Japan, Haiti and California usually goes along with tremendous lateral displacements, so how will this help?
Isn't that exactly what this type of system is supposed to protect from? It doesn't matter if the ground below shifts laterally by a few feet, after the quake is over you just power on the compressor and get a few friends to help recenter it on the foundation.
Now a vertical displacement is a much bigger problem with this system...
I've heard some stupid ideas in my time, but this takes the cake.
Seriously, man. Don't you think there could be a problem with a house that is not actually attached to its foundations?
What's the deal with compressed air levitation. Is it good or is it whack?
Many many houses in earthquake zones (like Memphis TN and surrounding regions) are barely attached to their foundations - often by a few rusting anchor bolts set into aging crumbling concrete. When a moderately big earthquake hits, many of those houses are going to fall off of their foundations, but unlike this Japanese house, they weren't meant to.
A house doesn't sit on the entire square area of the floor space. It sits on maybe an 8-12 inch wide concrete or block wall around the perimeter of the house. So your 20x40 house is sitting on about 11,264 in^2 of foundation. This yields a figure of over 7psi.
My house wasn't designed to float on a cushion of air, but I'm certain that if you filled the crawlspace with 0.7 psi of air, it would float by the buoyancy against the underside of the floors. If I were designing the house to float, I'd give it a flat bottom.
It seems like it would make more sense to build all single-family type houses on "stilts" that can flex and should a tsunami come in, the house just floats on top (but is still anchored in place so it doesn't float away.) As far as I can tell it would be like building a "boat" on stilts, if an earthquake hits, the house stilts just flex (eg 8 stilts) and you can replace them if they are compromised. If a tsunami hits, well you may have to reconnect your utility lines (which should have auto-shutoff valves) but that's better than being crushed by the house coming apart or drowning after it's inundated.
But how high do you build the stilts? Peak tsunami waves after Tohuku hit 40 meters (the waves that innudated the Fukushima reactor complex hit 15 meters).
Save the area under the house for the car.
Some flood prone areas of the US already do this -- build a parking level on the bottom with slotted doors to let the water flow thorugh. My aunt had a house like this and after she evacuated, she thought her belongings were safe, until the flood water levels hit 12 feet -- 2 feet into the living area of the house.
It's funny really, there are actually many houses that are built in North America that won't last in an earthquake, because building codes are only heavily enforced for large buildings. Anything built before the 1989 Loma Prieta (San Francisco) earthquake, is likely not up to code. That's just 22 years ago. If you live in the Pacific area, you're sitting on a timebomb that can go any day now. I'm taking my chances in this 1960's apartment. I don't think the building would survive a Tohoku style earthquake, but I'm nowhere near any liquefaction area, so the worst that would happen is the damn building collapses on me. Luck would probably have it happen while I'm awake and could dive under my desk, but if it happens while I'm asleep, fucked.
I like to think that even my 1917 wood framed rented house will survive (albeit with some damage) a moderate quake, though I've deliberately avoided living in a soft-story building like the ones that failed in the Marina District in the Loma Prieta quote.
As I look for a house to buy, I'm looking for a single story building and plan to pay the $8K or so it will take to do some basic earthquake retrofitting (better foundation anchors and cripple wall bracing). Oddly, this type of retrofitting is opposite of the free sliding house that's described in this article. Maybe poor foundation anchors are the way to go to help ensure that the structure doesn't collapse even if it means the house is totaled after it falls off the foundation.
I'm sure they've thought of this, but in a house, that's a lot of mass that's been tossed around starting from the 0 mark. It seems at the one sec mark, the structure would already be unstable and that's when you're going to lift it up in the air?
Japan has an earthquake detection network that can give advance warning about a quake, giving a few seconds or longer of advanced warning. Long enough for the compressor to spin up, fill a pre-charge tank and wait for confirmation from a local sensor before dumping the tank and floating the house.
Housing ain't cheap, but most of the price goes into the land, and houses are viewed as somewhat disposable, most people expect a house to last about the lifetime of a generation. There are some companies that run commercials about a "100 year houses", implying this is a long-life structure, so that should tell you what the general expectations are.
Also, I don't believe the "being crushed" argument will be really critical, except in marketing. Most people seem to die from the fires that inevitably follow the earthquakes, not under the collapsed structures.
I'm living in a house that's nearly 100 years old now, and I'm pretty sure the landlord doesn't plan on tearing it down and rebuilding it any time soon. And this house has been through a number of San Francisco earthquakes since it was built in 1917.
I thought it sounded like too much - you only need to lift it high enough to let it float side to side above the foundation. A few mm would probably be sufficient and wouldn't require as much air to compensate for leakage around the perimeter of the house.
Though maybe building it on teflon skids with breakaway support structure would accomplish the same thing at much lower cost - the support structure keeps the house steady in normal times, and during an earthquake, it breaks away to let the house slide back and forth. After the earthquake you just need to push the house back into place and rebuild the support structure.
By the way, wouldn't underground houses be better for earthquakes than something sitting on top of the soil?
I think I'd rather be on top of the soil in a wood framed (i.e. flexible) house than under ground where there are enormous ground forces trying to cave in the walls.
Add up the weight, washer, dryer, fridge, stove, counter tops, toilet, sink, water heater, computer, bed, my fat ass, a couple of dogs, , wife, some fat kids - what's going to lift all that plus a few tons of house?
There's a huge surface area under the house. Figure a house and contents weighs 80,000 lbs, and is 20x40 feet (or 115,000 in^2). So you only need to sustain.7 psi of pressure to float the house. A person can generate that much pressure from their lung - if the house was sitting on a airbag, a person could lift the house just by blowing up the airbag (though it make takes weeks or longer to fill the airbag). But without an airbag, since the air is constantly leaking out from around the house, it takes a huge volume of air to keep the house suspended. A 3cm gap around the perimeter is a huge gap and will require large quantities of air to sustain the pressure.
Is this surprising? The vendors/contractors do more of the risky work. When it comes time for UPS maintenance, our vendor comes in to take the UPS offline and do the work. If they screw up when they bypass the UPS, they can take down the datacenter. Likewise, when it comes time to add a new disk tray to the storage system or replace a failed controller board, instead of having our staff do it (who may add one tray every year if that), we have the vendor do it, so there's more chance of him doing the wrong thing and bringing down our storage system -- but there's less chance of the vendor causing a problem than our own staff since the vendor's engineer does this twice a week.
There are similarities, yes, but the differences are far greater. I doubt you could send a few bytes across a network and suddenly have another mainframe at your disposal, priced at cents per hour to run. Not to mention have millions of people being able to use said mainframe at the cost of cents per person/hour. It reminds me as well, but then I laugh as I remember the vast differences in both ability and cost.
And for the record, I am familiar with mainframe operation, especially due to my parents being mainframe developers in the 60s and 70s and introducing me to computing in the first place.
So you've never bought a plane ticket online, nor used online banking?
Incompetence. You are running exchange. That is your first problem. 5 days to repair? Insane. I run a small company (10 people or so) and there is no way that could even happen. We don't use exchange and we certainly can be back up and running within hours normally. Worst case scenario is an unrecognized problem and/or no one is available for a few hours. We have daily off-site automated backups. Encrypted. About once a month we make a bit for bit image of the entire drive. About once every six months we make a bit for bit backup and send it to a third site.
We are reliant on our web site being up to bring in money. We do run into issues from time to time like any operation and yet have never been down for any significant length of time. We have had 'total failures' where we were back up and running within a few hours to data coruption type of issues and missconfiguration issues and something went wrong we can't figure it out type of issues. Thing is we have always recovered quickly. At some point in the past we have an image that was working. Reverting back makes it easier to figure out what that issue is.
The outage I was referring to was a small non-profit that was using Microsoft Small Business Server since they got it for "free", it was acting as their exchange server and file server. Their backups consisted of a copy of the D: drive that someone burnt to DVD from time to time, with no backup of the C: drive (hey, we can reinstall it from the original CD images, why back it up!?).
It sounds like you are more technical than they were and are in a better situation, but unless you have a DR site that is ready to go, I don't believe you have "hours" of recovery time if something catastrophic happens (fire in the datacenter, accidental fire suppression discharge, leaking toilet on the floor above you dripping onto your server rack, roof collapse during a heavy snow storm, 100 year flood, backhoe accident taking out your internet connection, earthquake, tornado, etc). Depending on what the disaster is, you and your other IT staff might be more concerned with keeping your home and family safe than getting the servers back online.
If you've had multiple instances where you had a "total outage" due to data corruption issues and misconfiguration issues, I don't think you're in as good of shape as you think you are, you're missing the policies and procedures that are supposed to catch those problems before they cause an outage. The same policy and procedures that make it take a week for a simple firewall change in a large corporate IT environment, but that change has gone through several layers of approval and has been tested on the test system before being promoted to production.
I wonder how old you are? The current "Web 2.0" paradigm reminds me very much of the old 3270 style mainframe environment.
The 3270 terminal (well, the controller) was not exactly "dumb" - it had some base level of intelligence, it knew how to display forms, it could do input validation, etc but it didn't really do much with the data beyond sending it up to the mainframe. The mainframe on the backend took the data and actually did something with it. This is pretty much exactly how "Web 2.0" works, except instead of a 3270 terminal communicating to the mainframe over SNA, you have web browsers calling back to the web server over HTTP using Javascript.
Yes, both the endpoints and servers have become more capable, but there are still many similarities to the old style model.
Well this makes a bunch of really funny things going on for Obama. And what 8 or 9 failed solar companies that got massive hand outs and F&F plus an extra gun running program that was started that let guns walk. Obama not better than the last guy, he's much, much worse.
I don't think it should be a surprise that some green-tech companies receiving government backed loans failed. Even if you discount the cheap panels coming from China's subsidized industry, if these companies were strong companies with a proven market and were on solid financial footing, the private market would have been lining up to invest in them.
Instead, these companies were in a speculative industry whose strength depends heavily on the price of oil (which has its own hidden and explicit government subsidies), so it's not surprising that some of them failed.
One of the selling points of using cloud services was that it would be more reliable than managing your own hardware/software. But to date, every single big player has suffered major downtime. If I would be hesitant to believe the sales pitch.
But still, for most companies that are good candidates for cloud offerings, even 8 hours of downtime once a year is probably better than they can guarantee using their own infrastructure. Companies in this range tend to not have redundant servers, offsite backups, disaster recovery sites, etc. Larger companies that can build redundant infrastructure (and staff it properly) are probably better off staying away from the cloud since they can guarantee any level of uptime and redunancy they want to pay for.
Of course, when a small company Admin spills a cup of coffee in the Exchange server and they are down for 5 days while building a replacement server, it doesn't make the news so you never hear about it...while when a large cloud provider has a 2 hour outage, it's all over the news.
When I was growing up, we had this happen to a family on the next street over. A two year old escaped the house unnoticed and thought it would be funny to hide behind daddy's car before daddy went to work. Daddy didn't see his son "hiding" behind the rear passenger side tire, because Daddy was not in the habit of making a complete circle around the vehicle in the driveway to check for debris and/or children prior to rolling out. Daddy was charged with accidental vehicular manslaughter. And his son was dead too. This technology didn't exist at the time, but that's one tragedy that could have been prevented right then and there.
I've never seen a backup camera that shows what's hidden behind a rear tire, so this is one tragic accident that wouldn't have been prevented by a backup camera.
I was hoping for a more detailed explanation than "Anyone who says they can hear beyond CD quality is stupid." That's the same argument that many people use to argue that 128kbit MP3 is equivalent to CD quality.
Are there any studies that says that CD quality is the highest quality that 99% of people can detect? I found lots of comparisons to various bitrates to CDs, but little justification for holding CD's up as the "gold standard".
There's no need to shill for a specific brand. I don't know what's in your selection Anything with chamomile in it will tend to make you sleepy unless it's counterbalanced by some other herb. YMMV. Chamomile works for me. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have a cup and it does nothing. Perhaps there are even people kept up by it. I know that some people can be kept up by sleeping pills because they're nervous about what the pill might do. I'm sure herbs are no different.
Isn't that the entire reason to "shill" for a specific brand? He has a specific brand that works for him so that's what he's recommending. He doesn't know what's in every "sleepy time" tea on the market, and probably doesn't even know what's in his specific brand of tea that makes him sleepy, all he knows is that it works. For him.
Is CD quality really the holy grail of audio quality? I thought DVD Audio with up to 24-bit bit depth and 192kps sampling rate was supposed to the the best in audio quality - far beyond the human ear's ability to hear.
Or is CD Quality "good enough", even for audio engineers?
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The Fukushima disaster was a lot more than an earthquake. It was a tsunami!! Levitate your house off its foundation? Just makes it easier to wash away! You've got a house-boat and surf-board now.
The Fukushima plant is on the coast. not every home in Japan is in a coastal Tsunami inundation zone. But even if it is, if this system keeps your house from being destroyed, it might give you enough time to evacuate before the Tsunami hits.
This assume the foundation will be in the "exact" same location as before the earthquake and there is no upwards shift in the ground.
Not to mention that if you don't mount the air compressor and backup generator high enough, the tsunami will take out your fail safe.
Have you not learned anything Japan?
Not every house in Japan in in a Tsunami inundation zone. And even for those that are, if this keeps you alive long enough to escape your house and evacuate before the Tsunami hits, it still seems like a win.
It doesn't matter if the foundation ends up in exactly the same place after the quake, even if it's shifted a meter or two to the side, the house will rest unevenly on the foundation until it's recentered. Which seems a lot better than having the rubble that used to be your house sitting perfectly centered on the foundation.
Not every solution will meet every need. This solution protects against a particular type of earthquake, for quakes that have significant vertical motion, this would not be very effective and might even be detrimental.
The only real reason to reject cycling is because it is unfair to your co workers to smell that bad all day long. If i could shower at or atleast close to work then i would be all for it. Smelling bad may be acceptable in some places but not most offices
Clean sweat doesn't smell - I'm a pretty heavy sweater, my t-shirt is damp when I get to work before I change into my work shirt. Take a shower before you go to work and you'll be fine. Reapply deodorant when you get there if you need to.
I know I don't smell bad at work, my significant other is very sensitive to smells, and she's not afraid to tell me if I have a BO problem.
. And for the Greeners out there: if I charge any more for my services, people will just throw away their TV and buy a new one instead of getting it repaired. Is that very environmentally friendly?
Depends on how old their TV is and how much they use it. If it's an old tube-style model, then it's very likely that the energy saved by buying a new, more energy efficient TV outweigh the wasted resources of throwing away a repairable TV.
Oh, purlease. Pick up keys, get in car sitting right outside, drive.
Versus squeeze into lycra bondage gear, pick up keys, haul the bike out of secure storage, check tyre pressures, ZOMG where's my super-safe-helmet, find super-safe-helmet, realise you've dropped the keys, find keys again, undo seven kinds of lock, put on cool looking yellow glasses, finally climb on, wobble off, stop to adjust squealing brakes, get hit by your wife coming home in her car with the loaf of bread.
For context, I cycled to to work today, but all that healthsome fresh and exercise didn't somehow destroy my ability to look at a watch.
If you don't want to bike, you can just say "I don't want to bike", you don't need make up some complicated biking procedure to justify your desire not to bike. When I bike to the store, I wear street clothes, just go down to my garage, put on my helmet, hop on my bike, and 5 minutes later I'm at the store. It's faster than driving since I can cut through the middle of a large park instead of driving around it. I have a small u-lock and cable strapped to my rack, so when I park, it's easy to lock the bike securely... only one key required. My bike only cost $600 new, so I don't have some high performance bike, just a nice, sensible commuter bike (with fenders for the rain) with a rack to hook my commuter bag to.
Riding to work takes me 25 minutes door to door. Riding on transit takes 45 - 90 minutes. Driving takes only 15 minutes, but then I spend 10 minutes looking for parking and walking to the office. Depending on traffic, driving home can take an extra 10 - 15 minutes, while I never get stuck in traffic on my bike. Since I have to go over some pretty big hills, I do wear clip-in biking shoes to go to work - makes it much easier to go over the hills, but my pedals have platforms as well, so I can wear regular street shoes when I want to.
The only time I wear lycra biking gear is on the weekends when I go on longer rides (50 - 100 miles) where padded bike shorts make a lot more sense.
Biking doesn't have to be complicated.
You're not being berated for paying less. You're being berated for whining about it while abdicating your responsibility to the international community by being fuel hogs.
The US imports 10,270,000 bbls per day. The EU imports 8,613,000 bbls per day.
It appears that US is not the only hog in the pen.
The US has 300M people, the EU has 500M. So that's .033 barrel/day/person in the USA, versus 0.016 barrel/day/person in the EU.
Who's the gas hog now?
Mass transit is better suited to the higher population densities of European cities, much of the USA is too spread out.
Cycling doesn't work in some parts of USA due to weather extremes.
While true, there is no reason why this couldn't be changed. If we had learned a lesson from the oil crisis in the 1970's, we'd have had 40 years of building out transit and building houses/neighborhoods in a more transit friendly manner. That doesn't mean eliminating single family houses or putting people in dense urban areas. Just clustering homes and towns around transit hubs instead of building neighborhoods on whatever isolated farmland was up for sale would let transit be an option for many more people. Office parks would naturally cluster around these transit centers because it would be easier to attract employees.
You can't bike when its 40 below zero wind chill, or on snow and ice.
(and parts of the south are too hot.)
Few people in the USA live where it gets down to 40 degrees below zero regularly. When I was in college, I bike commuted all year round, including in the snowy winter. When I lived in the south (Jackson, MS) I bike commuted every day, including 90+ degree summer days (leave early, bike slow)... I found biking to be better than walking, less effort required, more cooling breeze.
But no one is telling everyone they have to bike. If people lived closer to transit centers, they could drive a NEV to the station and catch a train to their job. Leaving the expensive SUV at home that trip to the lake when they need to haul the boat and extra gear.
The quakes in Japan, Haiti and California usually goes along with tremendous lateral displacements, so how will this help?
Isn't that exactly what this type of system is supposed to protect from? It doesn't matter if the ground below shifts laterally by a few feet, after the quake is over you just power on the compressor and get a few friends to help recenter it on the foundation.
Now a vertical displacement is a much bigger problem with this system...
I've heard some stupid ideas in my time, but this takes the cake.
Seriously, man. Don't you think there could be a problem with a house that is not actually attached to its foundations?
What's the deal with compressed air levitation. Is it good or is it whack?
Many many houses in earthquake zones (like Memphis TN and surrounding regions) are barely attached to their foundations - often by a few rusting anchor bolts set into aging crumbling concrete. When a moderately big earthquake hits, many of those houses are going to fall off of their foundations, but unlike this Japanese house, they weren't meant to.
A house doesn't sit on the entire square area of the floor space. It sits on maybe an 8-12 inch wide concrete or block wall around the perimeter of the house. So your 20x40 house is sitting on about 11,264 in^2 of foundation. This yields a figure of over 7psi.
My house wasn't designed to float on a cushion of air, but I'm certain that if you filled the crawlspace with 0.7 psi of air, it would float by the buoyancy against the underside of the floors. If I were designing the house to float, I'd give it a flat bottom.
It seems like it would make more sense to build all single-family type houses on "stilts" that can flex and should a tsunami come in, the house just floats on top (but is still anchored in place so it doesn't float away.) As far as I can tell it would be like building a "boat" on stilts, if an earthquake hits, the house stilts just flex (eg 8 stilts) and you can replace them if they are compromised. If a tsunami hits, well you may have to reconnect your utility lines (which should have auto-shutoff valves) but that's better than being crushed by the house coming apart or drowning after it's inundated.
But how high do you build the stilts? Peak tsunami waves after Tohuku hit 40 meters (the waves that innudated the Fukushima reactor complex hit 15 meters).
Save the area under the house for the car.
Some flood prone areas of the US already do this -- build a parking level on the bottom with slotted doors to let the water flow thorugh. My aunt had a house like this and after she evacuated, she thought her belongings were safe, until the flood water levels hit 12 feet -- 2 feet into the living area of the house.
It's funny really, there are actually many houses that are built in North America that won't last in an earthquake, because building codes are only heavily enforced for large buildings. Anything built before the 1989 Loma Prieta (San Francisco) earthquake, is likely not up to code. That's just 22 years ago. If you live in the Pacific area, you're sitting on a timebomb that can go any day now. I'm taking my chances in this 1960's apartment. I don't think the building would survive a Tohoku style earthquake, but I'm nowhere near any liquefaction area, so the worst that would happen is the damn building collapses on me. Luck would probably have it happen while I'm awake and could dive under my desk, but if it happens while I'm asleep, fucked.
I like to think that even my 1917 wood framed rented house will survive (albeit with some damage) a moderate quake, though I've deliberately avoided living in a soft-story building like the ones that failed in the Marina District in the Loma Prieta quote.
As I look for a house to buy, I'm looking for a single story building and plan to pay the $8K or so it will take to do some basic earthquake retrofitting (better foundation anchors and cripple wall bracing). Oddly, this type of retrofitting is opposite of the free sliding house that's described in this article. Maybe poor foundation anchors are the way to go to help ensure that the structure doesn't collapse even if it means the house is totaled after it falls off the foundation.
Isn't that a long time to wait?
I'm sure they've thought of this, but in a house, that's a lot of mass that's been tossed around starting from the 0 mark. It seems at the one sec mark, the structure would already be unstable and that's when you're going to lift it up in the air?
Japan has an earthquake detection network that can give advance warning about a quake, giving a few seconds or longer of advanced warning. Long enough for the compressor to spin up, fill a pre-charge tank and wait for confirmation from a local sensor before dumping the tank and floating the house.
Housing ain't cheap, but most of the price goes into the land, and houses are viewed as somewhat disposable, most people expect a house to last about the lifetime of a generation. There are some companies that run commercials about a "100 year houses", implying this is a long-life structure, so that should tell you what the general expectations are.
Also, I don't believe the "being crushed" argument will be really critical, except in marketing. Most people seem to die from the fires that inevitably follow the earthquakes, not under the collapsed structures.
I'm living in a house that's nearly 100 years old now, and I'm pretty sure the landlord doesn't plan on tearing it down and rebuilding it any time soon. And this house has been through a number of San Francisco earthquakes since it was built in 1917.
That doesn't seem like much. Am I wrong?
I thought it sounded like too much - you only need to lift it high enough to let it float side to side above the foundation. A few mm would probably be sufficient and wouldn't require as much air to compensate for leakage around the perimeter of the house.
Though maybe building it on teflon skids with breakaway support structure would accomplish the same thing at much lower cost - the support structure keeps the house steady in normal times, and during an earthquake, it breaks away to let the house slide back and forth. After the earthquake you just need to push the house back into place and rebuild the support structure.
By the way, wouldn't underground houses be better for earthquakes than something sitting on top of the soil?
I think I'd rather be on top of the soil in a wood framed (i.e. flexible) house than under ground where there are enormous ground forces trying to cave in the walls.
Add up the weight, washer, dryer, fridge, stove, counter tops, toilet, sink, water heater, computer, bed, my fat ass, a couple of dogs, , wife, some fat kids - what's going to lift all that plus a few tons of house?
There's a huge surface area under the house. Figure a house and contents weighs 80,000 lbs, and is 20x40 feet (or 115,000 in^2). So you only need to sustain .7 psi of pressure to float the house. A person can generate that much pressure from their lung - if the house was sitting on a airbag, a person could lift the house just by blowing up the airbag (though it make takes weeks or longer to fill the airbag). But without an airbag, since the air is constantly leaking out from around the house, it takes a huge volume of air to keep the house suspended. A 3cm gap around the perimeter is a huge gap and will require large quantities of air to sustain the pressure.
Is this surprising? The vendors/contractors do more of the risky work. When it comes time for UPS maintenance, our vendor comes in to take the UPS offline and do the work. If they screw up when they bypass the UPS, they can take down the datacenter. Likewise, when it comes time to add a new disk tray to the storage system or replace a failed controller board, instead of having our staff do it (who may add one tray every year if that), we have the vendor do it, so there's more chance of him doing the wrong thing and bringing down our storage system -- but there's less chance of the vendor causing a problem than our own staff since the vendor's engineer does this twice a week.
There are similarities, yes, but the differences are far greater. I doubt you could send a few bytes across a network and suddenly have another mainframe at your disposal, priced at cents per hour to run. Not to mention have millions of people being able to use said mainframe at the cost of cents per person/hour. It reminds me as well, but then I laugh as I remember the vast differences in both ability and cost.
And for the record, I am familiar with mainframe operation, especially due to my parents being mainframe developers in the 60s and 70s and introducing me to computing in the first place.
So you've never bought a plane ticket online, nor used online banking?
Incompetence. You are running exchange. That is your first problem. 5 days to repair? Insane. I run a small company (10 people or so) and there is no way that could even happen. We don't use exchange and we certainly can be back up and running within hours normally. Worst case scenario is an unrecognized problem and/or no one is available for a few hours. We have daily off-site automated backups. Encrypted. About once a month we make a bit for bit image of the entire drive. About once every six months we make a bit for bit backup and send it to a third site.
We are reliant on our web site being up to bring in money. We do run into issues from time to time like any operation and yet have never been down for any significant length of time. We have had 'total failures' where we were back up and running within a few hours to data coruption type of issues and missconfiguration issues and something went wrong we can't figure it out type of issues. Thing is we have always recovered quickly. At some point in the past we have an image that was working. Reverting back makes it easier to figure out what that issue is.
The outage I was referring to was a small non-profit that was using Microsoft Small Business Server since they got it for "free", it was acting as their exchange server and file server. Their backups consisted of a copy of the D: drive that someone burnt to DVD from time to time, with no backup of the C: drive (hey, we can reinstall it from the original CD images, why back it up!?).
It sounds like you are more technical than they were and are in a better situation, but unless you have a DR site that is ready to go, I don't believe you have "hours" of recovery time if something catastrophic happens (fire in the datacenter, accidental fire suppression discharge, leaking toilet on the floor above you dripping onto your server rack, roof collapse during a heavy snow storm, 100 year flood, backhoe accident taking out your internet connection, earthquake, tornado, etc). Depending on what the disaster is, you and your other IT staff might be more concerned with keeping your home and family safe than getting the servers back online.
If you've had multiple instances where you had a "total outage" due to data corruption issues and misconfiguration issues, I don't think you're in as good of shape as you think you are, you're missing the policies and procedures that are supposed to catch those problems before they cause an outage. The same policy and procedures that make it take a week for a simple firewall change in a large corporate IT environment, but that change has gone through several layers of approval and has been tested on the test system before being promoted to production.
Except this time you can add as many mainframes you wanted, dynamically. And access them over the internet. And serve content to millions of people over said internet. That wasn't possible with this clichéd "mainframes!!!!!1" nonsense. Yes, you are using a remote computer. That's the only similarity. The current terminals are far from dumb, and the server being connected to is vastly different to the mainframes of old.
I wonder how old you are? The current "Web 2.0" paradigm reminds me very much of the old 3270 style mainframe environment.
The 3270 terminal (well, the controller) was not exactly "dumb" - it had some base level of intelligence, it knew how to display forms, it could do input validation, etc but it didn't really do much with the data beyond sending it up to the mainframe. The mainframe on the backend took the data and actually did something with it. This is pretty much exactly how "Web 2.0" works, except instead of a 3270 terminal communicating to the mainframe over SNA, you have web browsers calling back to the web server over HTTP using Javascript.
Yes, both the endpoints and servers have become more capable, but there are still many similarities to the old style model.
Well this makes a bunch of really funny things going on for Obama. And what 8 or 9 failed solar companies that got massive hand outs and F&F plus an extra gun running program that was started that let guns walk. Obama not better than the last guy, he's much, much worse.
I don't think it should be a surprise that some green-tech companies receiving government backed loans failed. Even if you discount the cheap panels coming from China's subsidized industry, if these companies were strong companies with a proven market and were on solid financial footing, the private market would have been lining up to invest in them.
Instead, these companies were in a speculative industry whose strength depends heavily on the price of oil (which has its own hidden and explicit government subsidies), so it's not surprising that some of them failed.
One of the selling points of using cloud services was that it would be more reliable than managing your own hardware/software. But to date, every single big player has suffered major downtime. If I would be hesitant to believe the sales pitch.
But still, for most companies that are good candidates for cloud offerings, even 8 hours of downtime once a year is probably better than they can guarantee using their own infrastructure. Companies in this range tend to not have redundant servers, offsite backups, disaster recovery sites, etc. Larger companies that can build redundant infrastructure (and staff it properly) are probably better off staying away from the cloud since they can guarantee any level of uptime and redunancy they want to pay for.
Of course, when a small company Admin spills a cup of coffee in the Exchange server and they are down for 5 days while building a replacement server, it doesn't make the news so you never hear about it...while when a large cloud provider has a 2 hour outage, it's all over the news.
When I was growing up, we had this happen to a family on the next street over. A two year old escaped the house unnoticed and thought it would be funny to hide behind daddy's car before daddy went to work. Daddy didn't see his son "hiding" behind the rear passenger side tire, because Daddy was not in the habit of making a complete circle around the vehicle in the driveway to check for debris and/or children prior to rolling out. Daddy was charged with accidental vehicular manslaughter. And his son was dead too. This technology didn't exist at the time, but that's one tragedy that could have been prevented right then and there.
I've never seen a backup camera that shows what's hidden behind a rear tire, so this is one tragic accident that wouldn't have been prevented by a backup camera.
I was hoping for a more detailed explanation than "Anyone who says they can hear beyond CD quality is stupid." That's the same argument that many people use to argue that 128kbit MP3 is equivalent to CD quality.
Are there any studies that says that CD quality is the highest quality that 99% of people can detect? I found lots of comparisons to various bitrates to CDs, but little justification for holding CD's up as the "gold standard".
There's no need to shill for a specific brand. I don't know what's in your selection Anything with chamomile in it will tend to make you sleepy unless it's counterbalanced by some other herb. YMMV. Chamomile works for me. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have a cup and it does nothing. Perhaps there are even people kept up by it. I know that some people can be kept up by sleeping pills because they're nervous about what the pill might do. I'm sure herbs are no different.
Isn't that the entire reason to "shill" for a specific brand? He has a specific brand that works for him so that's what he's recommending. He doesn't know what's in every "sleepy time" tea on the market, and probably doesn't even know what's in his specific brand of tea that makes him sleepy, all he knows is that it works. For him.
Is CD quality really the holy grail of audio quality? I thought DVD Audio with up to 24-bit bit depth and 192kps sampling rate was supposed to the the best in audio quality - far beyond the human ear's ability to hear.
Or is CD Quality "good enough", even for audio engineers?