The Really Big One

portland's earthquakeby karlieeee

The New Yorker has a story BY KATHRYN SCHULZ about the coming earthquake that is going to destroy the Pacific Northwest. Who'd a thunk that New York would care about my neighborhood?
      So we've got an earthquake coming, disaster is looming, but as I am fond of saying, the future is cloudy, I cannot see. It might happen in the next few minutes or it might not happen for a thousand years, and if it is later rather than sooner, any number of other disasters could occur that would potentially make the arrival of a really big earthquake a non-event.
      I do have one quibble with the story and that is this line:

"You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver." 

When I was a kid in Seattle we used to have little earthquakes all the time. My mom pointed out that Japan also frequently had earthquakes and Seattle and Japan were somehow related, possibly because we were both on the Pacific Ocean, or because there were a fair number of Japs living in Seattle, or maybe my mother invented plate tectonics, I really don't have any idea. They were small earthquakes. I don't remember feeling any shaking. Of course, that was over fifty years ago and maybe earthquake memories don't last that long. We had one when we lived in Beaverton 20 years ago. It went on for a few seconds, long enough to wake me up out of a sound sleep.

Update: Jack tells me that this was the Scotts Mills Earthquake. The USGS Earthquake site has the specifics:

M 5.6 - Oregon

Time

1993-03-25 13:34:35 UTC

Location

45.035°N 122.607°W

Depth

20.6 km

It was 31 miles away from where I was.

Earlier I found three earthquakes that were right in Portland in the right time frame:

M 3.5 - Oregon

Time

1991-07-22 09:04:38 UTC

Location

45.638°N 122.869°W

Depth

19.8 km

M 3.1 - Oregon

Time

1991-10-18 02:49:51 UTC

Location

45.633°N 122.896°W

Depth

20.2 km

M 3.0 - Oregon

Time

1991-10-21 00:51:01 UTC

Location

45.631°N 122.887°W

Depth

20.4 km

But they were puny, only 1% as strong as the one in '93.

Map of recent local earthquakes

Our house has earthquake ties, bolts I think, that connect the wooden frame of the house to the concrete footers. I suppose that's a reasonable precaution, they probably didn't add more than 0.1% to the price of the house. It won't matter if we get inundated by a Tsunami, or tidal wave, as we used to call them before we got seduced by this nifty foreign word. I suspect that is unlikely, as we are 50 miles from the coast and we have the a range of hills between us and the ocean. Supposedly this area was inundated by the Missoula flood some 15,000 years ago, but I don't expect a repeat occurrence of that event any time soon.

Map of Tsunami Evacuation Zones

P.S. Is anyone offended by the word 'Japs'? It's so much shorter than having to write out 'people of Japanese ancestry'. Of course now I've gone and written it out. It's all my kids fault. They are the local thought crime enforcers, and they are relentless.

Via Captain of the Thought Crime Police.

Update July 14, 2015: Corrected the USGS search results on account of I forgot how to subtract.
Update July 19, 2015: Added Scotts Mills Earthquake information.

Inner-Space-Suit

Adam Savage Incognito at Comic-Con 2015 (with Astronaut Chris Hadfield!)
The video starts off sort of gooberish, which I guess is typical Adam Savage style, but it quickly gets technical. These two make some astute observations. Who'd a thunk a spacesuit for walking around on Earth would need to be so sophisticated? Via Iaman. Entertainment Weekly has a story with some photos.

Other Space Suit posts.

Pluto

Pluto

[Tomorrow], and after a long journey of nine years, the New Horizons spacecraft will make its highly anticipated flight past Pluto and its five moons.  - Carolyn Porco, NASA.

You'd think they could have come up with a better name for the probe, something like 'Space Hound of the Baskervilles', or 'The Tail Wagging Fiend'. 'New Horizons' sounds like something that came out of a committee, and I suppose it did. I dunno, maybe that's what it takes to make things happen.

Font

I changed the default font on this blog today. Times-Roman is okay for paper, but serif fonts don't do read so easily on the screen. Only question I have is why I waited so long to make this change. The title doesn't look as nice, but that may be just because I am used to the way it has looked for so long. We shall see how this all pans out.

Socio/Psychopathy

An image of a redacted court file describing Kravetz's mental problems.

California Bob sends me a link:

How Dunkin Donuts And Others Ended Up Hiring A 'Psychotic' Credit Card Thief As Director Of Communications

Business Insider only got the story because a group of law students got a bunch of secret papers released. The criminal had a degree from Harvard, while the students who got the papers released are from Yale. Wonder how it would have gone if they were from the same school.

California Bob responds:

    For every scheme that gets exposed, there are probably dozens remaining undiscovered or unreported. Point being, whether there was bias or not, this kind of thing goes on all the time. Heck, my own experience tells me that.
    I did a quick inventory of my job history. 1/3 of my bosses have been psychos; 1/4 have been decent; and the remainder have been some combo of immature, incompetent, or flailing.
    The more experience I gain, the more I realize that "career advice" is too general to be of any use. It all comes down to "being a good employee" for your particular boss. And depending on the boss, that could require attributes ranging from competency and reliability, to obsequiousness, to being a jerk, to the willingness to enthusiastically support any idea no matter how stupid or dangerous, to expertise, to the willingness to avert your eyes to felonious activity.
    It is very dependent on the situation. That's why job-hunting is such a low-return activity -- there are 1,000's of jobs that require your SKILLS, but in those jobs you have to find the bosses who like you.

P.S. I looked for a picture of Carolyn Kravetz, but could not find one, which I found just a little peculiar.

Report from Berlin

Site of Hitler's bunker, now a parking lot in front of an apartment complex.

A fitting memorial, me thinks.

Windmills

Click to embiggenate to get the full effect

Lots of windmills in Iowa. Saw this convoy carrying sections of a pylon at the truck stop on the new Highway 20 just north of Rockwell City, Iowa.

Previous posts on the subject, group 1.
Previous posts on the subject, group 2.