Latest Earthquakes • Hacker News Board

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#41

Post by robocat » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

redisman wrote: post #26

Asparagirl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that article is a classic, in the Venn diagram intersection of "hard science explained well" and "creative ways to get historical data" and "both local and federal government failure to plan or address known issues" and "we were warned" and "absolute nightmare fuel". If/when the Cascadia superquake kicks off, everyone will be passing that link around, so you may as well read it now.

What would you have them do? Have everyone move out of the PNW?

Look at what first world countries do just after major earthquakes.

Do some of that.

I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and there were some obvious deficiencies in planning before the 2010 quake, and some obvious fixes were done after the 2010 quake. The main problem is convincing the cynical private and public that some prevention is worth paying for. Also the statistical victims are often not those that are making the financial choices.

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#42

Post by bhk » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #39

bhk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you've published your seeds...

... we just need to manipulate earthquakes and solar flares to control his PRNG.

Typically I think of compromising the secrecy of inputs as the main RNG attack vector, but controlling the inputs is even better!

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#43

Post by swader999 » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

belter wrote: post #15

g0ran wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you seed when there's no activity on all three fronts?

I fall back on real time neutrino event detection :-) https://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/amon_hese_events.html

Is it truly random though?

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#44

Post by cc101 » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 3:00 AM UTC

As I recall it, transform "faults" are not really faults. They are the traces left between moving spreading centers. They can be weak zones and be the center of volcanic activity. Magma moving toward a potential eruption is my thought.

It's been a long time since I was current in geology. I could be wrong. Our understanding of the world just keeps growing more complicated.

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#45

Post by brenainn » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 3:20 AM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #10

jedberg wrote: post #6

If you do feel a quake, don't forget to report it to the USGS! They need your data.

Don’t the USGS have seismographs for detecting earthquakes? Does human reporting add resolution or other information to their data?

With a standardized report format the data can complement modelling of ground motion intensity caused by an earthquake, such as https://earthquake.usgs.gov/data/shakemap/

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#46

Post by pugworthy » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 3:22 AM UTC

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #39

bhk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you've published your seeds...

... we just need to manipulate earthquakes and solar flares to control his PRNG.

Just the thing for us that live inside dormant volcanoes with several rockets ready to launch at any time.

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#47

Post by brenainn » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 3:30 AM UTC

DantesKite wrote: post #22

jedberg wrote: post #6

If you do feel a quake, don't forget to report it to the USGS! They need your data.

It would be interesting if you could accumulate seismic data with iPhones. Like if they're stationary for more than 10 minutes, share data with USGS.

I'm not an expert in seismometry, but I think there'd be quite a lot of challenges to overcome. Off the top of my head:

I don't know how precise iPhone accelerometers are, but modern seismometers measure on the nanometre scale.

There's also the issue of orientation. Seismometers measure X, Y and Z and are fixed in place, aligned with latitude and longitude or at an offset. It looks like you can get X, Y, Z from an iPhone accelerometer, but the phone could be in any number of different orientations. It would be necessary and difficult to rectify all those different orientations, as calculating magnitude on a horizontal or vertical component makes a difference.

Seismometers also have well known transfer functions, which are required because a step in calculating most magnitude types is simulating them as a particular type of seismometer, e.g. ml or local magnitude is taken after simulation as a Wood-Anderson seismometer.

Not saying it couldn't be done, just lots of problems to solve. There's always https://raspberryshake.org/!

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#48

Post by jjk166 » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

pugworthy wrote: post #46

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... we just need to manipulate earthquakes and solar flares to control his PRNG.

Just the thing for us that live inside dormant volcanoes with several rockets ready to launch at any time.

It's funny, just as you're beginning to think that the Quakeflarinator may not have been a viable investment, the universe provides.

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#49

Post by jjk166 » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 4:56 AM UTC

brenainn wrote: post #47

DantesKite wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if you could accumulate seismic data with iPhones. Like if they're stationary for more than 10 minutes, share data with USGS.

I'm not an expert in seismometry, but I think there'd be quite a lot of challenges to overcome. Off the top of my head: I don't know how precise iPhone accelerometers are, but modern seismometers measure on the nanometre scale. There's also the issue of orientation. Seismometers measure X, Y and Z and are fixed in place, aligned with latitude and longitude or at an offset. It looks like you can get X, Y, Z from an iP…

Orientation wouldn't be that hard an issue to overcome, phones have magnetometers to act as a compass, and accelerometers which indicate the direction of gravity, so assuming you have a decent idea of where on earth the phone is located, you can work out its orientation in 3 space.

Precision can to some degree be made up for by quantity. If data from all the phones in an area skew the same way, it can stand out even if the signal would be impossibly lost in the noise from a single detector.

More problematic would be calibration. A phone at the top of a tall building vibrating like a tuning fork is going to have a radically different signature from one at the same altitude but in the pocket of a mountain climber, which in turn is going to be very different from one at sea level but close to a highway. If you had a sensor sitting in the same place for a long time, you could probably characterize it, but assuming these are phones people are going to pick up and move after a couple minutes I doubt you could do more than a very crude guess.

Re: Latest Earthquakes

#50

Post by milleramp » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 5:18 AM UTC

DantesKite wrote: post #22

jedberg wrote: post #6

If you do feel a quake, don't forget to report it to the USGS! They need your data.

It would be interesting if you could accumulate seismic data with iPhones. Like if they're stationary for more than 10 minutes, share data with USGS.

If you are in California or Oregon there is the my shake app: https://myshake.berkeley.edu/ Collects data when charging.

I have only had the early warning go off once, and before I could act the quake hit. It happed to be really close, so not much warning.