[ExI] earthquake prediction

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 
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>...Cool.  BillK, ...what this is really is rapid reporting of a detected quake.  ...  The on/off switch pulls rank on everything on the phone, but emergency alerts defeat everything else...So now, the students have their phones on privacy mode, silent mode, vibrate mode etc.  But every classroom would have 30 cell phones honking and urging the cell phoner to duck and cover...News at 5.  spike


Clarification: News at 5 means 5 PM Pacific time, US.

As expected, a number of phones went off and attempted to give their messages, but were out of synch, interfering with each other, creating the kind of chaos that students always love as a way to break up the grinding monotony of learning the lessons they are certain are actually brutal revenge for the way they have behaved since approximately four weeks after they were conceived.

Upon receiving the earthquake message, a full three minutes passed before the principal addressed his students, calmly assuring them that the danger had passed nearly unnoticed, but if they wished to take extra precautions, they were free to do so.  The students, being Californian, were aware that compression waves pass thru rock very quickly, so any shaking would have happened within a few seconds of the disturbance at the epicenter.

This all has me thinking: this is a marvelous engineering challenge. A year ago last summer I was hiking in the Sierras and saw in the distance an object way off the trail.  Being a curious sort, I climbed over to it and realized it was a seismometer with communications gear.  It occurred to me that such a system could be created, given a number of these observation stations placed in various locations.  

This is the first time I have seen that in use, but compression waves travel quickly in rock.  So the threat would need to be detected, the appropriate message selected and sent, all within perhaps a quarter of a minute to be any value (in entertaining high school students (to whom everything this a big joke (because they are still young and indestructible (but I'm not.))))

spike