Earth shaking news

[altivo]

Or not. Today was all a-dither here in northern Illinois about the horrible, scary earthquake that hit just before 4 am this morning. I listened silently to several accounts of how frightening it was, and read several more online. All I can think is that this reaction must have been occasioned by bad dreams about the Haiti quake of last month, which was thousands of times more powerful.

The expert assessments I found put the thing at 3.8 on the Richter scale, which is barely enough to rattle the dishes. One stated that it wasn't enough to make ripples in the lake. I'm inclined to agree. I sleep on a water bed, am a light sleeper, and was in fact awake at that time and didn't feel it. Our two dogs did not wake up or act in any way bothered, and one of them normally barks instantly if you so much as step near him when he's asleep. Late this afternoon I realized another piece of evidence exists. I have several weight driven pendulum clocks in the house. These are hung on walls facing every direction. Most of them stop if you leave a window open and the breeze blows on them, or if you slam a door. Brushing against the chains or weights, even very slightly, is enough to stop them. None of them stopped. Either that earthquake was a lot weaker than what people are making it out to be, or our house is standing on some sort of shock absorber. This doesn't even take into account the precarious piles of books and papers in my study, none of which was disturbed in the least by the tremor, even though just sitting down too heavily in the desk chair can cause them to tip and collapse. ;p

I think I probably mistook it for a passing snowplow, something we have been getting regularly the last couple of nights.

More chatter about Google's newest gadget, called "Buzz," which appears to be sort of a cross between Twitter and Facebook. It was dropped on Gmail users gradually throughout the day, and finally appeared in my inbox around 4 pm. Not so much as a "Do you want this?" or a message telling me how to get rid of it, much less how to make use of it. As far as I can see, it looks like a Facebook "wall" and is rather slow and cumbersome to act on commands. Of course, "ponderous" is a good description of many of Google's products. None of them are zippy, most of them eat lots of memory and bandwidth.

In spite of being W-day, got some things done. That includes stretching some more paper, so a painting should be forthcoming in the next day or two...

Comments

[feathertail]

You paint things on handmade paper?

I didn't notice Buzz because I use an offline email client, but I'm not too excited about it. It's just another walled garden like Facebook is, that's non-interoperable / non-open source and is supported by ads. At least, as near as I can tell.

[altivo]

I'm a little resistant to the handmade paper. It's awfully expensive. But yes, I have done watercolor painting from time to time. In recent years it has been lying dormant and I recently decided to wake it up again.

Last week's sample here.

My boss says now I have to illustrate my own stories, and the thought has crossed my mind before, but I don't know where the time would come from.

I'm not really sure what Google is up to with this Buzz thing, aside from their apparent plans to take over the entire world, crush enemies under their feet, and hear the lamentations of the women.

[feathertail]

I keep looking at WordPress themes and thinking "This one would require me to have a big icon for every story. But hey, I could do that!" Not that I'd have the time to find CC-licensed photos and edit them all. >.>

(Nice work, BTW.)

Google found a huge lode of pure money. Some of what they do with it is pretty nice. Other things, not so much. If Denise / Synecdochic is right, though, the money's going to run out sooner or later. And I'm not sure Google has a business model other than selling ads. Although I have to give them credit for being smart.

[altivo]

Finding and editing CC-licensed photos or art is actually pretty easy. There are several stock photo sites on the web. The one I use is called Stock.xchng (Google for it to get the URL, it's a Hungarian address but the site is in English.) They have photos you need to pay a license fee for, but many more that are free for uses like web pages.

[feathertail]

I know, I use Flickr. Lots of neat CC-licensed pics there. I'm just not sure I could make them look anywhere near attractive enough to justify the time spent modding them in the GIMP, plus the site's theme is pretty nice the way it is with the minimalism. I think.

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

Buzz works great for me, and I got a "do you want this?" message when I first logged in today. So I find it odd that you didn't. Anyways, you can go to your google settings and opt out.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

But if you had said "no thanks" to the "do you want this" it would have kept showing you that panel every time you logged in. That's what happened to me and others. Persistent spamming until you said "ok".

[hrrunka]

Word on the Net seems to be that Buzz is riddled with "you havn't said we can't so we've pushed your info/profile/real name/whatever into all your friends' following lists" type stupidities, especially when you start connecting other places to it.

Now, where's that alleged opt-out option, I wonder...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

In essence, they are behaving like Facebook. I guess many people think this is OK, but I'm not so sure about it. Facebook constantly gnaws at users to add "suggested" individuals based on who knows what algorithms. Often they are people you have never heard of and have no idea who they are. They do provide an option to ask why the person is being recommended, but the answer is often obtuse. I often see them explained as "friend of" someone else I do not know, or as having "three friends in common" or something like that.

I did not permit them to push to all of my Gmail contact list, but they "automatically" set me up to follow my "most frequently contacted" (however that is determined, it's a secret apparently) which added up to about 16 people. They did the same to other people who "frequently contact" me, so I already had followers as soon as I entered the application. The damage is done so I'm letting it run for a few days, but I expect it will quickly develop into something as spammy and useless as Facebook is.

I also expect Twitter-style spammers and spambots to appear before long. They just have to find some different algorithm of attack, but I'm sure the means are there.

The "opt out" after you're in the system is apparently hidden in very tiny print at the bottom of the "Edit Profile" page.

[hrrunka]

Google Buzz takes it one step further by automatically adding a selection of your contacts to "people you follow" and then making this list public if you have a public Google profile...

...at least, according to this story and reports I had from another friend who found he'd inadvertently revealed a friend's full real name...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I followed up on the sources mentioned and found a list of privacy issues much longer than I expected and all of them are real.

I don't have to completely disable the thing just yet, because I severely pruned my contact list immediately and have since hidden it. But there are other issues. Twitter doesn't allow people to follow you without your knowledge, and does allow you to block them if they seem at all suspicious or aren't revealing enough about their identity to satisfy you. I block new followers constantly there because I have no idea who they are or why they should be following me. Buzz allows them to follow you anonymously if they hide or erase their Google profile. Worse, if you can't get to their profile you can't block them. Now that is severely unacceptable. Stalking anyone? Bosses snooping on employees?

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I remember the earthquake of two years ago here in Yorkshire. I think that was a 5 or high 4. I noticed buzz on gmail this morning. I have not looked at it yet. I do dislike "gadget creep" as a rule though. Do one thing and do it well is my motto for software.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, and when one datacenter has its tentacles into everything, I can't help but wonder what they are mixing and matching. Or what they might be selling. Or worst of all, if they were hacked, what would the hackers get out?

[hrrunka]

We get the same sort of hysteria over here from tremors of similar magnitude...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

People are madly warning each other of "what to do" in an earthquake. As if any of them will remember ten years from now when the next one comes along in this area. As it happens, in this case it was over before anyone could have done much of anything.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

I can only recall one incident here of feeling 'tremors,' back in '66. It was strange, like the ground was fluid for just a couple of seconds... I didn't realize until then that we were in an area that was 'due for a Big One.'

Of course, all geologists in every area of globe tell the locals that "You're overdue for the Big One," every time someone else has a major quake.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

And people always ignore them.

Quakes may concentrate around the edges of tectonic plates, but every place on Earth is vulnerable, and the "it will never happen here" or "will never happen to me" mentality is a very dangerous faith to live by.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've experience perhaps two or three where I felt anything. To me it was never more than the same shake I notice when an overloaded truck passes on the nearby road. In one case, a can was shaken off a pantry shelf and fell to the floor. Admittedly, in the midwest, we don't usually get real shakers the way they do out west. But I'm amazed that these people who were so panicky don't run for cover every time a gravel truck passes their house.

[alaskawolf.livejournal.com]

quakes are always something interesting to experience :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, in Alaska anyway. Sometimes really dangerous. Here they happen about once a decade and amount to a quick bump in the night. When they hit in the daytime, people usually don't even notice them.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I thought they didn't use the Richter scale anymore and that's just a thing the media use after it was superceeded by the Moment Magnitude Scale.

Sounds like it just triggered people's inate fears rather than anything important. My first earthquake which I felt while visiting my Grandparents in a suburb of Tokyo just felt like a low flying jet. I was in bed at the time which had something to do with how I felt it.

Yahoo has something similar to Buzz but I don't bother with it either :)

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

It should be a reminder, else we get a Haiti. No one believes a quake is coming for a couple centuries, then of course no buildings are made to withstand one.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'd say there's a lot more likelihood of a major hurricane flattening Miami Beach than of an earthquake knocking down buildings in Chicago or Manhattan. ;p

No one has done anything about the unsafe construction in Florida hurricane zones or the houses rebuilt again and again on Mississippi River flood plains, so getting them to spend money on earthquake protection is extremely unlikely.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

I won't argue about the likeliness of anything being done, but No, it is not true that Chicago or New York will never have a flattened building. In fact, both New York Chicago will experience serious earthquakes and unless they have strong earthquake standards in every single building (which I doubt), buildings will get knocked down by those earthquakes.

I'm a bit surprised you of all people would make such an ignorant statement, Altivo. The Midwest has experienced very large earthquakes that have literally changed the landscape. The piece of the state of Missouri where New Madrid is, for instance, has its unique geopolitical boundaries due to a significant earthquake that radically altered the course of a boundary river. The New Madrid earthquakes were felt from New Orleans into Canada and themselves are a threat to the Chicago area despite how far they seem.

It may not be particularly likely that it will happen tomorrow, but those areas have been hit by very serious earthquakes and, sooner or later, they will again.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Read my words again. I didn't say Chicago couldn't have an earthquake, I said it is far more LIKELY that Florida's east coast will suffer devastation first. Most of those high rises in Miami and Lauderdale were built without adequate consideration for hurricane force winds.

Everything in life is a crap shoot, when you come down to it, and there's only so much we can do about the odds. You'll notice that I don't live in a high rise building, never have, and never will. A tornado could still get me, though, and that's much more likely here in the midwest than death by earthquake.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I still find it amazing that they continually rebuild a city below sea level (New Orleans) despite the fact that areas below sea level near the coast tend to flood continually.. *scratches his head*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

They've been doing that in the Netherlands and Belgium for centuries.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

True but they don't tend to have hurricanes battering the coastal area every year ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

She didn't say "Richter" but the scale, whatever they call it, is still an exponential one so a 3.8 is hardly more than a bump unless you're sitting right on top of it.

[deffox]

I didn't feel a thing from your last quake. Maybe being 1300 miles away had something to do with it.

I did feel a similar quake from Illinois several years back. Though where I was in Wisconsin it was only in the 1.8-2.0 range. It felt like a truck driving down the road when there wasn't.

As for the internet tapeworm Google, I virtually boycott them. I've had enough of their lack of respect for privacy. Some things like their 'Docs' have user agreements that are jaw-dropping bad.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Illinois quakes are usually of the sort where people don't even realize it's a quake if it hits in the daytime when there's traffic on the roads and construction and all that other activity going on. It's when they come in the wee hours of the morning as this one did that they cause a panic. Apparently the 911 lines were swamped in South Elgin. As if they had anything to actually call in about, people who were shaken awake called 911 to ask what was going on instead of turning on their radio or television.

[quetico.livejournal.com]

This is Illinois, for crying out loud. If I wanted to shake involuntarily I'd move to the West coast. Suddenly flat ole Illinois got all these little faults.
Nobody said anything about Earthquakes when I signed up for this cruise.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We have earthquakes here regularly. Most are so small that people never notice, or they think it's a passing truck or sonic boom. This is the third significant one I recall in the 30 years I've lived here. I didn't recognize any of them as quakes at the time, though.