Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

8.9 earthquake hits Japan

earthquake.usgs.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 269 posts

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#171

Post by mrcharles »

3pt14159 wrote: post #152
wisty wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably also deep. Deep earthquakes do less damage. But still, 8.9, that's almost 100 times bigger than a 7.

Closer to 80 times stronger than a hundred, but yeah definitely deep.

From Wikipedia:

The energy release of an earthquake, which closely correlates to its destructive power, scales with the 3⁄2 power of the shaking amplitude. Thus, a difference in magnitude of 1.0 is equivalent to a factor of 31.6 ( = (101.0)(3 / 2)) in the energy released; a difference in magnitude of 2.0 is equivalent to a factor of 1000 ( = (102.0)(3 / 2) ) in the energy released.[2]

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#172

Post by yread »

bradly wrote: post #40

Interesting to view of all 5+ quakes the past 3 days http://cl.ly/3G0f0t0d1C2Z381s3O31 . Loads of activity in the area. Is that kind of activity common, or could that have been an indicator that there was a chance of a major quake?

You can see the swarm here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/1...

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#173

Post by nandemo »

veidr wrote: post #56

An interesting thing I noticed was that all cell phones were completely useless for a pretty long time following the quake. That's normal, but one difference this time, compared with several years ago, is that most people I know no longer have a landline phone at home. People were queuing up for like 20 minutes to use the one old green plastic coin-op pay phone accross the street. At first, I didn't think to use a ph…

I couldn't use voice but I did use both email and web (softbank).

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#174

Post by ascendant »

melvinram wrote: post #123

Red Cross and others will likely be jumping to the aide of those who have been affected by this disaster. If you have a website, please consider adding a message and link to the Red Cross donation website or the link to the donation page of any other website. To get it up ASAP, I've used the HelloBar ( http://www.hellobar.com ) on my site. You can see a working version of it at http://www.webdesigncompany.net but rea…

I want to upvote this a million times over. Hacker-type people, do what you can and add the link,

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#175

Post by nazgulnarsil »

koski wrote: post #170
koski wrote: post #133

Japan has declared a state of emergency because of the failure of the cooling system at one nuclear plant, according to the Associated Press. Officials say there has been no leak of radiation. Let's hope this does not get any worse than it is right now.

Fire out at Onagawa nuclear power plant. Oh dear ...

that fire was put out.

hope everything will be okay at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Another blow to the public's perception of nuclear energy. :(

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#176

Post by po »

apsurd wrote: post #43
po wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides what patio11 said, there is something similar to the US National Alert System which gets used quite often. It puts alerts on the top of every TV channel when an earthquake starts... unfortunately my TV then fell off the cabinet so I took that as an alert and climbed under my table.

Right about the tv. I was just thinking "what if it had been in the night?" People will be asleep so if there's any window of warning available, how can they get the message? On CNN the newscaster is repeatedly mentioning how people on the ground are waiting in line to use the pay phone to notify loved ones etc... I use my phone as an alarm so that's why I just thought it might be helpful if there was a public alert…

It's not a bad idea. A variation of your idea has actually been implemented in here as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTT_DoCoMo#Earthquake_warning_s...

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#178

Post by donw »

donw wrote: post #163
donw wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My office is on the 7th floor of a building in Yoyogi. Monitors are scattered everywhere, and our breakroom is effectively destroyed. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but I'm really glad this quake wasn't any stronger... I've been through a lot of quakes here, and this is the first time I thought I might be going home in a black bag.

Death toll is now being reported at over 400, mostly from the tsunami. Words don't exist to express the sorrow of their families...

I don't know if this is appropriate here, but the Red Cross donation site has been down for awhile (at least, for me). I took the liberty of setting up a WePay group for donations:

https://www.wepay.com/donate/78062

Not sure how to get the word out, but you've gotta start somewhere. :)

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#179

Post by megaduck »

veidr wrote: post #56

An interesting thing I noticed was that all cell phones were completely useless for a pretty long time following the quake. That's normal, but one difference this time, compared with several years ago, is that most people I know no longer have a landline phone at home. People were queuing up for like 20 minutes to use the one old green plastic coin-op pay phone accross the street. At first, I didn't think to use a ph…

Smartphones were better than regular phones during this emergency. My android phone was useless for voice and SMS, but still had a data connection. So, my wife and I were able to send gmail back and forth to stay in touch.

Also, the landline data networks seemed to be up and stable, so Skype worked great. Something to remember next time you're in an emergency and need to get a call out.

Re: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan

#180

Post by Vivtek »

angus77 wrote: post #166
apsurd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right about the tv. I was just thinking "what if it had been in the night?" People will be asleep so if there's any window of warning available, how can they get the message? On CNN the newscaster is repeatedly mentioning how people on the ground are waiting in line to use the pay phone to notify loved ones etc... I use my phone as an alarm so that's why I just thought it might be helpful if there was a public alert…

There are the air raid sirens. They use them all the time: for typhoons, for missing persons. Oh, and for earthquakes.

Every town in Indiana above maybe 1500 people has tornado sirens. And we're not best known for our public spending.
Post reply on HN