101–108 of 108 posts
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Spinning disk drive heads? Okay, GRANDPA!
Hey there Whipersnapper (31 is a bit young to be "GRANDPA"). Your SSD in your Mac Book Air may be the "new hotness", but every datacenter in the world that needs a lot of hot storage is using spinning disk (disclaimer: does not apply to low latency applications like AWS EBS, providers like Cloudflare, etc).
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No. This would almost assuredly be sent as a level 2 extreme alert. The only alert that can bypass the settings is an alert directly from the president.
Well don't freaking turn off earthquake alerts!
Yo. From EARTHQUAKE. [edit] tough crowd...
Relatedly: http://www.earthquakeyo.com/
Japan, Mexico City, and other seismically active places, have such systems in place and have had them for years. Amazing that California, the epicenter of tech, is just getting on board with this.
As someone who used to work for a university's geosciences department as a Unix sysadmin/programmer and who worked on two different seismic monitoring networks (one spread across the state for earthquake monitoring and one parked on top of a coal mine), allow me to explain why earthquake monitoring in the United States is largely stuck in the stone age: There's no f---ing money. Back in the '80s, there were a lot of…
Japan, Mexico City, and other seismically active places, have such systems in place and have had them for years. Amazing that California, the epicenter of tech, is just getting on board with this.
yeah, recently the most popular seismic alert app in Mexico City had a false alarm, many buildings were evacuated, but no quake arrived. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=h...
A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans, especially at 3am, but it would be cool to have this feed into automatic systems to automatically put them in a "safer" state before an earthquake hits. It might even be that 10 false positives a day are worth it to catch one real event, if the "safing" operation is relatively non-disruptive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who used to work for a university's geosciences department as a Unix sysadmin/programmer and who worked on two different seismic monitoring networks (one spread across the state for earthquake monitoring and one parked on top of a coal mine), allow me to explain why earthquake monitoring in the United States is largely stuck in the stone age: There's no f---ing money. Back in the '80s, there were a lot of…
Is there any place I can find more detailed requirements for earthquake seismology stations? I feel like modern off-the-shelf parts could be used to build the signal conditioning and digitization stages for well under $20/channel, and cheap wifi-capable ARM dev board have become available in the past few years. 10 millisecond time stamps are possible with NTP and easy with a GPS or WWVB receiver. How hard are the pow…
Basically, nothing is really a hard limit. Seismologists push the data to its limits, so depending on the purpose you _really_ do need a broadband station. For other purposes, though, you could definitely get away with off-the-shelf accelerometers. We'll take whatever we can get. The more precision the better, but the more sensors you have, the less the precision matters.
As far as whether or not you really need 20 bits of resolution over the full frequency spectrum, you certainly don't for every application. For some applications, though, you need it over most of the frequency spectrum. For others (e.g. strong ground motion) you don't at all. (For a quick overview, see here: http://www.passcal.nmt.edu/content/instrumentation/sensors In most cases, the high frequency component isn't the problem on the sensor side, it's maintaining accuracy on the low-frequency component. High frequency sampling generates more data and results in more power consumption, though, so there's a different set of challenges there.)
The power limits depend on where the station is installed. Typically, they're solar powered with lead-acid batteries (or maybe something else these days) to store energy. Solar panels are expensive and fragile. The less power it needs, the easier it is to reliably deploy.
Overall, if the data is available, someone will push it to its limits. You have to make compromises, and which ones to make depends on exactly what you're trying to do. A ton of cheap, easily deployable instruments changes things. There's a lot of talk about things like this, but it has been hard to do in practice so far.
Take anything I say with a grain of salt, though. I'm an exploration seismologist who crosses paths with earthquake seismologists. I don't really know what I'm talking about.
At any rate, this is all largely a non-answer. I think a lot of this is more within-reach than I realize.
I know little of the science behind earthquakes and the movement of tectonic plates, however it would seem that if 10 seconds warning is possible today then further longer periods of time in the future could help people and or the technology surrounding building's and the infrastructure within the building to ready themselves/itself for the onset of an earthquake.