Monday, April 13, 2009
News The Morning News
Posted by Dominic Holden on Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 8:34 AM
Saved: Navy SEAL snipers pick off three pirates holding an American captain hostage on lifeboat in Indian Ocean. Next, military considers attack on Somali pirates’ land bases.
Burned: Propane-fueled blaze consumes 40 cottages at Christian center on Easter.
Spurned: Thai police fire on demonstrators loyal to former prime minister ousted in coup.
Accused: Family members say kidnapping and murdering a little girl was “completely out of character" of the suspect who knew the girl from church.
Samson Obama: President’s half brother denied British visa for providing police fake name—Henry Aloo—during sex-crime investigation.
Trashy: New garbage hauler has missed five percent of pickups around Seattle, leaving huge piles of trash. City threatens fines.
Hashy: Everyone’s talking about legalizing pot.
Goalie: Small-town boy let Kansas score a point. Seattle dies a little.
Earthquake! Scientists say a 9.0 earthquake could level Seattle high rises.
Stop: Police arrest 25 in gang sweep through south King County.
Drop: Skydiver dies when parachute fails to open.
Payroll: Paying staff to take the year off.
Egg salad with fennel recipe over here.
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In any case, it's good to know that the US military can take on a bunch of seafaring gangbangers.
Nah, they're more principled than that.
For SPD, The Seattle Times and The Stranger to imply that most of these arrests had anything to do with gang activity is a total misrepresentation.
Ho. Ly. Fuck. This is very bad news. Look for a metal skyscraper retrofit effort that will make the viaduct retrofit look like my son's latest LEGO project.
And @4, this is much worse than the usual "oh noes brick falls down go boom." This says that the CA standards are utterly inadequate against a Cascadia event.
I guess the fact that I laughed at that makes me a bad person.
I can live with that.
*Thus saith the Lord: one carbon mayst though have unto thee for heat and modest cookery - see Leviticus - two carbons mayst though have as well. Three carbon atoms doth the Lord thy god abhor, yea three carbons be an abomination before me, and shall I smite those who warm thyselves or heat thy foods over such a flame.*
Oh, wait. I think I just answered my own question...
cruise missiles should be the standard response to these pirate assholes.
Navy Seals FTW
It is entirely possible to design buildings to survive a M7.0 earthquake, but something a hundred times more powerful? You're going to run up against the limitations of materials, modeling, and basic understanding about how earthquakes work and when and where they can happen.
For example: what would be the peak ground acceleration (PGA) from a subduction earthquake? We don't really know, because there haven't been a lot of earthquakes like that since the development of computer modeling and ground monitoring.
And even with perfect information about seismic hazards, can your building deal with a PGA greater than 3 times gravity? No; your building is fucked.
At 9.0 you're basically looking at luck as to whether or not any particular building survives.
My understanding, and what King Co says, is that Subduction Faults don't produce particularly high peak g's (.25-.5g) as compared to shallow faults, but they go on and on and on and on- five plus minutes, as mentioned in the piece to which Dom linked.
In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.
From the abstract of Yang's thesis:
At rock sites, if slip is limited to offshore regions, the building model responses are mostly in the linear range. However, if rupture is extended beyond the Olympic Mountains, large deformations occur in the high-rise buildings models, especially those with brittle welds. At basin sites, our simulations indicate the collapse of all building models for a source model with rupture beyond the Olympic Mountains,
whereas buildings with perfect welds avoid collapse for simulations based on a source model with rupture limited to offshore.
So according to the model, even better welds won't save high rises if the earthquake is east of the Olympics.
And from the paper text:
Thus, while tall flexible buildings may perform well in high-frequency ground motions that are damaging to many types of buildings, their unique dynamic characteristics make them vulnerable to large amplitude long-period ground shaking.
So in a shallow earthquake, the short, brittle structures are destroyed, but in a low-frequency subduction earthquake, all the tall, flexible high-rises are doomed too. Awesome.
The stuff on earthquakes is from Cascadia Region Earthquake Group (http://www.crew.org/). The lahar stuff is from the Rainier and Glacier entries in the USGS CVO. The linking of the two is from a conversation with a pretty well known planetary geologist named Michael Malin- wiki him for more info...
Does anyone ever say, "Well, there you go. Ol' Fred, he was always a tickin' time bomb of evil. Hell, I'm just surprised he didn't rape an' murder nobody before today, is all..."
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