It’s pretty great that people are just now realizing that Planet Earth isn’t some sort of static strip mall. There are volcanoes, and earthquakes, and hurricanes, and tornadoes, and tsunamis—objects from outer space regularly invade the atmosphere. This planet is alive, brother! So, idea: you know how certain laptop models, like ThinkPads and MacBooks, come with built-in accelerometers? → Read More
Did you know? Japan experiences 20% of the world’s most powerful earthquakes. I didn’t know that until I read this article, though I knew they got quite a few. And as you can see, what with the country being mostly composed of volcanoes and nuclear power plants, it makes sense that they’d have the world’s most advanced seismic activity warning system. With the five… → Read More
This is a great idea. That accelerometer in your laptop is meant to interrupt hard drive activity in case of a fall or sudden jolt, but it can also be used to detect seismic activity. Similar to other distributed computing efforts like SETI@home and Folding@home (join one if you haven’t already), each client would be running software and reporting to a central server. However, unlike those… → Read More
I live in an earthquake zone. It is called Seattle. We don’t have many rumblers here, but when we do, they’re pretty serious. Just a few years ago the mighty Nisqually quake dropped the block my apartment was on six inches. The whole block. Were the quake any harder, the building might have come down around me. If I didn’t die, I’d likely be trapped, as that building was… → Read More
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