" The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake near San Francisco sent out strong signals of magnetic disturbances fully two weeks before the 7.1-magnitude quake occurred. The idea that such signals existed was still a new one then, certainly not well enough accepted to justify a decision to issue a public warning.
We happen to have excellent data from that quake. Stanford professor Anthony C. Fraser-Smith had buried a device called a single-axis search-coil magnetometer to monitor the natural background ULF magnetic-field strength at about 7 km from what turned out to be the center of that quake. He selected this spot simply because it was in a quiet area, away from the rumblings of the Bay Area Rapid Transit trains and other man-made ULF noise. He monitored a range of frequencies from 0.01 to 10 Hz, essentially, the ULF band and the lower part of the ELF band.
On 3 October, two weeks before the quake, Fraser-Smith's sensors registered a huge jump in the ULF magnetic field at the 0.01-Hz frequency—about 20 times that - Sanjeev Singh
...of normal background noise at that frequency. Three hours before the quake, the 0.01-Hz signal jumped to 60 times normal. Elevated ULF signals continued for several months after the quake, a period rife with aftershocks, and then they disappeared. " - Sanjeev Singh
The next time I move (and have to change my address anyway) I'm totally signing up for one of those we-scan-your-paper-mail services. - ⓞnor
Consider the filing cabinet to be the audit trail table in your database. Every time the database changes, the audit trail table has to be updated, so indexing that table adds extra cost to every change in the DB. However, it makes the audit trail easy to query. If you don't index that table, every audit lookup requires an expensive table scan that bogs down your whole server for minutes at a time. That expense might be so high that you don't do audit queries even when you want to. - Gabe Schaffer
What's an audit query, and why would anyone ever do one to their old phone bills? - ⓞnor
The audit table in your database keeps track of when something in your database changed. You would do an audit query when you want to find out when some field changed or what the value was on a particular date, for example. You would want to do this with your old phone bills when you want to figure out the last time your rates changed or to see how this month's usage compared to this month a year ago. - Gabe Schaffer
My point is that keeping the data unindexed makes it almost impossible to use, so why bother keeping it at all? - Gabe Schaffer
Because "almost impossible" is different from actually impossible, and because the large cost of finding those few items you need is less than the combined small cost of indexing the many items you file. - ⓞnor
Sure, Onor, but odds are that the task of going through the unsorted mess would be substantial enough that you just wouldn't do it, or would find other ways around it like just asking the phone company. - Gabe Schaffer
Sounds good to me. But if the IRS comes knocking, you might really want those records... - ⓞnor
i like sinophore's comment on your blog (but i like commenting here better). i had a gigantic pile of bills/statements/etc in my closet which i had to sort through before i moved :( it was painful. - Neha Narula
The write penalty might be worth it if you ever need an incredibly fast seek performance... - Steve Lacey
Oh God, I can't stop laughing at the "Sure, Onor" comment. (Gabe, that "O" is an egg.) - niniane
The story is #7 on the Reddit front page. - Gary Burd
I am amused at how much discussion this post is generating. I hope RB doesn't mind. - niniane
I'm pretty sure you can't just uncircle an o like that, it messes up the phoenetics. - j1m
Anyway, I agree with ⓞnor's weights (as always) -- the point of saving papers is that there's a tiny, tiny, tiny chance that you'll need them. Not a chance that you'll want them really bad -- I don't know what that chance is -- but the chance that you'll *need* them. In that case you just search through the damn things, even if you have a file cabinetfull it won't take more than an evening to look at each one. In my experience this happens about once every 10 years. - j1m
Neha: Why did you have to sort them? Why not just move 'em all in unopened boxes? My name: we Circlevanians are used to people mangling our names. Call me Onor, Nor, @Nor, whatev'z. - ⓞnor
And if it turns out that you do need to search, just file then: manual incremental filing is probably less efficient than manual batch filing. - Larry Greenfield
Some people on the blog assert that there's some kind of hard latency requirement for lookup. Those people are wrong. John K Lin asserts that carefully filing your bank statements into neat little alphabetized folders is warm and human, but putting it all in storage for later and getting on with your life is cold and robot-like. John K Lin is weird. - ⓞnor
eggy: two things. First, there was a bunch of extra stuff like envelopes that I didn't need to move. Second, it gives me happiness to put things in file folders. - Neha Narula
"Taxes aimed at commercial trucks mean diesel costs anywhere from 40 cents to $1 more per gallon than gasoline". I always wondered why diesel was so expensive here. - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
Diesel used to be cheaper than petrol (gasoline) here in the UK until the govmint decided "Diesel is bad". And what do we do when something "is bad" - that's right, we tax it so you can't afford to use it. - Slippy Lane
Benjamin Fulford was a journalist for Forbes Asia for several years, covering finance and corruption, afaict. He now lives under the protection of the Red and Blue Asian secret society, and has a ton of interesting stories to tell. This interview is UFO-free. - Sanjeev Singh
Tales. Not stories. His having been bureau chief for Forbes does not mean he could not have lost it and gone off the deep end. - Sudhakar Chandra
Is there a difference between a tale and a story? - Sanjeev Singh
From Wikipedia's page on Benjamin Bulford: "A Chinese secret society with a membership of 6 million, including 1.8 million gangsters and 100,000 professional assassins has issued an ultimatum to the Illuminati, warning them that if they persist with their plan to depopulate the earth, they will be stopped. The society has created an alliance joining Russia, China, India, South America, ASEAN, the free Muslim nations and Africa that is united in stopping the illuminati." - Tudor Bosman
(apparently, the above quote is from this interview). This man makes the plot of Deus Ex seem believable. But, I love a good story; is there a transcript (or a summary) available anywhere? I don't want to sit through 3 hours of watching this. - Tudor Bosman
No transcript that I know of. It was pretty interesting to watch, if you like good stories. - Sanjeev Singh
The best of the three parts. Of course, it's really hard to tell whether or not Bob is making the stuff up. His wife is a "consultant" who helps business owners position themselves for 2012, so there's a vested interest here. For those who don't know, there is a movement that believes 2012 marks the beginning of a new era, with the potential for great calamity on Earth (4B people die, etc.). - Sanjeev Singh
Firefox and Prism (same guts) both give between 900 and 1600 on my low-specced Linux box. It's not an accurate representation, I think. From subjective experience, Prism is lightning fast for me, and firefox just a little slower. - Slippy Lane
Looks like you need Chrome to win this contest. My 8 core Mac Pro was eeking out 6000 on Saf 3.1 and FF3, but nothing near the 15K+ that others were getting :P - Patrick Lightbody
~3400 Mozilla 1.9.1b1pre and ~12000 Google Chrome 0.2.149.27. Both on Windows XP Pro, Dual core, 2G RAM - Stephen Pierzchala
I'd love to know what kind of results well-specced Linux boxes are getting on Firefox, Prism and others.....anyone? - Slippy Lane
8834 - Macbook Pro 2.33 Core 2 Duo, OS X 10.5.4, Webkit Nightly.. - Derek Collison
@Slippy: I get 3700 in Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.04. (Intel Core 2 @2.4GHz) - Bret Taylor
5589 on FF 3.0.1, MacOS 10.5.4 Mac Pro 2x2.66Ghx Dual Core Duo. - Kevin Fox
About 11k on Chrome - Dell Precision 390 - Haggis (Sean)
Funny thing is that it only seems to use one processor, so the quad-coreness doesn't seem to matter. - Kevin Fox
I posted scores over 30K several times. Not sure this is a meaningful measure of anything. - abacab
yeah the benchmark is single-threaded. - Sanjeev Singh
419 - (Firefox 2.0.0.14, Linux x86_64) 199 - (Konqueror 3.5, Linux) (dual 2.6 Gig, dual-core Xeons, 6 gigs of RAM) - Robert Felty
Bret - cool...looks like the linux boxes are holding their own, although I don't know what Robert's done to his to drag it down to 419! - Slippy Lane
1618 - (Firefox 3.0.1, Linux x86_64) - this is on my home computer with a 1.2 GHz AMD Athlon64 (single core). Maybe the difference is between Firefox 2 and 3? - Robert Felty
yeah ff3 is a lot faster than ff2. It might seem strange but a bunch of us are excited about JS on the server, and this VM war is going to get us there sooner :) - Sanjeev Singh
20296 - Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 - Vista SP1 - 4GB RAM - E8500 @ 3,16 GHZ - Lars Rune Jensen
ok Lars, you win :). abacab, what setup do you have that's getting 30K? - Sanjeev Singh
441 on FF Powerbook G4 and >7000 on Chrome on XP P4 3.2GHz - Eugene
@paul: Your sole provider of operating systems :-) - Sanjay Ghemawat
Microsoft executive sez: "The first in this series of television ads airs initially in the U.S., and it aims to re-ignite consumer excitement about the broader value of Windows." (via TechCrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... ) I understand the goal, but I don't see how this ad helps. - Gary Burd
$10M for Seinfeld for this and $300M ad campaign in total - as an icebreaker to reintroduce Microsoft to viewers in a consumer context. I can think of million ways to spend this more usefully. - Krishna Gade
That was a really bad ad, seriously! - Sumit Chachra
Bob Dean talks about a classified report on UFOs conducted by NATO in the 1960s -- NATO HQ never got good answers from Washington about UFOs, because an extensive French spy ring at the time meant anything sent to NATO HQ also went to the Russians, so they were forced to commission European scientists to do a study. - Sanjeev Singh
"... the organisms were assembled in fractal patterns from frond-like building blocks. They were unable to move and had no reproductive organs, perhaps reproducing by dropping off new fronds. The creatures, which were neither animals or plants, are called rangeomorphs." - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
"They accounted for over 80% of fossils early in the Ediacara period, when there were no mobile animals or traces of burrows. But they declined as more mobile animals evolved, apparently unable to compete, or perhaps being eaten themselves." - Sanjeev Singh
"Imaging the Earth from this distant perspective allows astronomers to connect overall variations in brightness at different wavelengths with planetary features. The observations will aid in the search for earth-like planets in other solar systems." - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet
I like the notion that being on the outside looking in can help us understand what we're seeing when we look even further outward. - DeWitt Clinton
It doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me. - ⓞnor
If I were looking for an earth-like planet, I'd want to know what earth itself looks like. - DeWitt Clinton
So scale down an image taken close up. Optics are well understood, I don't know why you need distant observations to be able to calculate what the average brightness would be. - ⓞnor
Fine smarty pants. I just think moons are neat, okay? : ) - DeWitt Clinton
"They also follow a remarkable transit of Earth by its large, natural satellite, the Moon." I like that they explained what the Moon is. - Kevin Fox
Actually, I take that back. I don't think moons are neat at all. They are rather dull in fact. I'm not sure why I said that. Must have been the excuse to call ⓞnor a smarty pants. - DeWitt Clinton
Moons are neat when they have alien obelisks on them :). - Sanjeev Singh
Moons are neat when they're space stations. - Kevin Fox
I don't understand why somebody who would be trying to prevent pregnancies and transmission of STDs would not also want to promote condoms. - Gabe Schaffer
Because they believe that their approach is the right one and other approaches are wrong. It's the same as most social policy, like anti-drug or anti-drinking programs. - Paul Buchheit
religious conviction and denial of what's happening in the real world. - ~C4Chaos
Well, because *if* it took, it would be extremely effective. They have a very high regard for the will power and decision making skills of teenagers against a chemical/biological surge. I, however, do not have the same regard and would like to solve for what I believe is the majority and not the minority. - AJ Kohn
It boils down to a morality point of view, where pre-marital sex is not condoned or, in this case, even discussed as a possibility. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
My thoughts exactly! They act like teenagers will listen to 100% of what they are told. For those that choose to still do as they please, sex education should also educate on ways to stay safe so that teenager are aware of their options as well as consequences - Michael Garrett
Because it helps with the "multiply" part of "go forth and multiply"? - Sanjeev Singh
Gabe: I didn't think the goal of abstinence education was to prevent pregnancies and STDs - the goal is abstinence itself, for religious reasons. Pregnancies and STDs are used as a bogeyman to support the main goal. - Robin Barooah
So are people who are morally against underage drinking also against teaching teens not to drive drunk? - Gabe Schaffer
@gabe, Yes, many are. If you tell your kids, "I know you may drink, so if you do, don't drive. If you've been drinking, I will pick you up, no questions asked, no consequences." MADD would oppose this teaching. They used to support this, but they've become zero tolerance prohibitionists. MADD supports total alcohol abstinence for under 21. @Paul Buchheit, Zero tolerance and abstinence dogma exacerbates the problem. - Steve Olson
The fact is teenagers have been screwing for thousands of years. There horny. I know I was. We're trying to artificially extend childhood and it won't work. Condom education probably won't work either because screwing without one is more fun than with one. You might get it to move a pct point or two, but I doubt it would have significant effect. It's like handing out light beer and light cigarettes to solve the teen drinking and smoking. There is no clean answer. Every solution has problems. - Steve Olson
Steve, the fact that teenage pregnancy rates vary by county shows that these things do have an impact. "Adolescent pregnancy, birth, abortion and sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates are much higher in the United States than in most other developed countries." - http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs... - Paul Buchheit
Because they are embarrassed about sex. - Sam Levine
Abstinence only proponents want bad things to happen to people who have sex. - Clare Dibble
Steve: I would just tell my kids "Don't drink, and especially don't drink and drive". Whereas I understand that the abstinence-only people are actually against teaching about contraception, I find it hard to believe that Mothers Against Drunk Driving would not want people to be taught not to drive drunk. - Gabe Schaffer
Gabe, I think the closer analogy would be teaching them how to drink safely (which I think is reasonable but I'm sure many don't). - Paul Buchheit
"Brian Rakowski walks to the whiteboard in a small conference room in Building 41 on Google's Mountain View campus. A lanky, gregarious man in his twenties, Rakowski is the product manager of a top-secret project that's been under way for more than two years." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
Congrats on the great article, Brian. - Bret Taylor
@john: alleyinsider is the last source i will trust as to whether it is going or not going to happen. But, really, as @slippy says, choice FTW! The rest will just pan out. - Ashwin Bharambe
That picture is great. It looks like a band photo. - Andrew Burd
Internets are the new rock'n'roll, Andrew, didn't you hear? - Slippy Lane
The photographer, Joe Pugliese, has a great website: http://www.joepug.com/ In fact it's so great I haven't got round to reading the Wired article yet - Adewale Oshineye
Enjoyable read except for this completely bizarre paragraph -- "Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. "I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it," says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. "Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake." - Osi
"The snake, called Mr. Bigglesworth, seemed to purr softly in Sergey's lap, providing a calming influence during the demo. However, when one of the tabs crashed, taking the browser with it, Sergey's voice took a more strident turn. "I have gathered here before me the world's best developers," Sergey began, "and yet each of you has failed to kill Internet Explorer. That makes me angry. And when Sergey gets angry, Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset. And when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, people die!" - Karim
Sergey then pressed a nearby console button that retracted Darin's chair into the floor below. A flash of flame could be seen as the screaming developer vanished from the conference room. - Karim
Somebody help me!" Darin pleads. "I'm alive, only very badly burned!" This proves to be very distracting, and after being interrupted several times, Sergey picks up his phone, and reports the situation to a henchman. "I'll go deal with it," he assures Sergey. "If someone opens the retrieval hatch, I can get out," Darin explains. At this point, the hatch opens. Darin is at first grateful, but then a gunshot is heard. - Geoff Longman
After a pause, Sergey is satisfied Darin is dead and attempts to continue explaining his plan, only be interrupted by Darin again, who says indignantly "you shot me! You shot me right in the arm! Why did you-". Darin sentence is cut short by a second gunshot, which proves to be the end for him, as the hatch is heard to close. (http://www.moviedeaths.com/aus...) - Geoff Longman
Google’s Chrome is aimed at Windows, not IE
This is no longer about browser but about the an entire marketplace spread between desktop, mobile and web. With Chrome, Google’s taking a shot at Windows, not paltry Internet Explorer
I’ve covered this in more detail on my blog
http://sachendra.wordpress.com... - Sachendra
The point of Chrome is the same point one would make about the iPhone. Will iPhone outsell Nokia worlwide in total number of phones sold? Not a chance in hell! Has it changed the face of mobile phones forever...absolutely. This is where I think Chrome is a fantastic concept. By open sourcing D8 Google has literally empowered every other browser including Safari and Firefox to be Windows beaters. In actual fact IE may even implemented their own canibalised V8 to canibalise their Microsofts existing fat client business. If you ask me, Google is the master of judo in this case. google 2 MSFT 0 - John Kotsaftis via feedalizr
I haven't been able to find many details about the V8 design, but it's apparently a straight JIT (no interpreter) with inline caching of property accessors. I didn't see anything about HotSpot/TraceMonkey-style optimizing compilation, and it doesn't seem to use any intermediate language. (http://code.google.com/apis/v8...) Is this the future of dynamic language runtimes? Am I a nerd? - Jim Norris
Nice to see Wired putting out a great article in a timely manner for a change - rather than spend page upon page talking about minor internet celebs and how they gatecrashed gawker media parties to build their fame. - Jonathan Beckett
Jim, tracemonkey should still be faster. Paul friendfeeded an article comparing them. I should say that tracemonkey will still be faster eventually, unless V8 adds hotspot-like tracing as well, in which case, my money would ride on V8, since Google probably has half of the hotspot team :) - Sanjeev Singh
Is this for real? "Perhaps the most famous consumer of rodent cheese is US President, George W Bush. And although he cannot spell, pronounce, or even remember it, Fromage des Merdes is said to be his favourite." - Sanjeev Singh
No. Last time they got in because there was a vulnerability in Dreamhost's user panel and passwords were kept in cleartext. After that I changed all my passwords and only use encrypted methods for access. My best guesses are that they either installed a backdoor last time that I didn't see/disable, or Dreamhost hasn't updated their openssh keys after all openssh keys were found to be vulnerable. - Kevin Fox
Kevin, have you considered a VPS? They're a little bit pricier, but you get a whole lot more control. - Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
i wonder if it's at all linked to the wordpress hackings with links getting appended to the bottom of pages. - Dustin
This one was different than last time. They edited my .htaccess file so certain urls would redirect to other urls (sapping pagerank). VERY strangely, at the same time they cleaned up some spam files they put in before, probably thinking they were less likely to get caught if they moved to the cleaner system. - Kevin Fox
Mike Sego had reasonably good experiences with 1and1 - Sanjeev Singh
damn. that's scary. is there a way to prevent this on our own? I wonder if I set the wrong change mode (CHMOD) settings. - Dustin
Dustin, the modified files were all 644, with me being the owner. Talk about 'the call is coming from *inside* the house'... - Kevin Fox
'the call is coming from *inside* the house' - yes, these were my thoughts exactly. Someone is backdooring the whole thing which is making me finally think about closing my 4 year relationship with Dreamhost. - Dustin
JS, HTML rendering, or just all round? - Sanjeev Singh
JS seems to be significantly faster than status quo. ff: 144, ie: 40, safari: 158, chrome: 1902. From this benchmark suite: http://code.google.com/apis/v8... - nadim
"the prevailing mentality [...] has been to focus on isolated discoveries by single teams and interpret research experiments in isolation. An increasing number of questions have at least one study claiming a research finding, and this receives unilateral attention. The probability that at least one study, among several done on the same question, claims a statistically significant research finding is easy to estimate." - Simon via Bookmarklet
Essentially, on average 1 out of 20 times you'll be able to claim something is statistically significant at the 95% level even if it is not. So if 20 teams do the same experiment with a non-existent effect, it's quite likely one of the teams will obtain statistically significant results, and that team will receive all the attention. - Simon
How did you find this? I was about to friendfeed it after reading about the study in Edward Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" :) - Sanjeev Singh
A friend of mine (MarkP) placed a copy of the paper on my desk :) - Simon
it was also on Norman Swan's Health Report program on Radio National in Australia - a program I quite like. - A Puri
Probably my greatest regret in Beijing was opting to go home early one night instead of staying out w/ my friends at a bar where they later met up and spent the rest of the night hanging out w/ Usain Bolt. I just assumed he'd be sort of pompous, but my friends swear that he was a really nice and cool guy. - Ana
Ana, remind me if we're ever hanging out and a decision has to be made about interacting with a celebrity (like talking to the real Dwyane Wade or hanging with Usain Bolt), to not listen to you. - Dan Hsiao
Gary McKinnon, "most wanted hacker" on how he hacked the pentagon, NASA, etc, and what he found out. (1) He never had to "hack" these machines, they had blank Administrator passwords. (2) There were a ton of other (presumably unauthorized) hackers on these machines (3) NASA regularly airbrushes UFOs out of pictures. (4) He saw an excel spreadsheet of 20-30 "non-terrestrial officers" but it's not clear what that term means. - Sanjeev Singh
Or, if they are real, they are the advance exploratory team for the main armada. Or perhaps we don't perceive or understand what they are doing. The main question you have to ask is: why have governments around the world worked so hard to bury the story? One explanation: the general public couldn't handle the truth. - Sean McBride
One possible truth: they are real, they are far beyond our understanding in every possible way, we have no control over them, and they are possibly manipulative and hostile in ways that are much too scary for most people to contemplate or handle. Good reasons for a cover-up. - Sean McBride
Slippy -- have you reviewed all the testimony of Disclosure Project members or read Richard Dolan's UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973 http://tinyurl.com/27bpej ? Once you get around to doing so, perhaps you can provide some useful comments. Many high-level government, military and intelligence officials have been convinced by the hard evidence that something is going on here. - Sean McBride
Sean, please stop, you're killing me. I mean, let's face it, you were prepared to believe in the owl-man's secret lair, despite the fact that it was a publicity blurb for the Watchmen film. Some people will believe anything, often flying in the face of reason and common sense. Please stop trying to draw me in to your fantasies. - Slippy Lane
ops, i didnt know Mexica had Air Force.. I thought they only had big hats and wooden guitars..! - Hayk Hakobyan
Mexican air force craft ARE the UFO's. They fly around in giant sombreros. - Geoff Longman
Slippy -- so you know nothing about the Disclosure Project or Richard Dolan's book. I'll wager you didn't even bother to read the reviews of the book on Amazon. Tell me: are there are any subjects on which are you are knowledgeable and about which you have made useful contributions on Friendfeed? I just reviewed a batch of your posts and couldn't discover a single post which contained any content. Am I misrepres
