That was a surprisingly long earthquake. When it started, it was mild enough that I thought it was just someone walking heavily across the office. (I wonder how many small quakes I don’t notice because of that?) After about 20 seconds, the shaking got stronger…and it just kept going. 60 seconds? 90? USGS rates it at 5.4 near Anza-Borrego.
Category: General
Link Archive 2010
Some interesting links I encountered over the last few months, between the time I stopped importing Twitter digests and the time I started using them for linkblogging.
Rain
Rain (when we get it) is usually silent four stories above ground, but today gusts of wind have been spattering it against the windows.
Earthquake Frequency
According to the USGS, the frequency of large earthquakes has remained constant over the last century. In a typical year, the planet has roughly 17 “major” earthquakes (measuring 7.0 to 7.9 on the Richter scale) and one “great” earthquake (measuring 8.0 or higher).
So, no, earthquakes are not increasing as a sign/symptom of the impending end of the world.
(via @2012hoax)
Update March 1: 2012hoax has a nice page showing how recent quakes fit into these statistics, including Haiti, Chile, and the one in Illinois a few weeks ago (which was really quite small — there are 130,000 quakes that size in any given year!).
Late Night
Staying up until midnight for New Year’s Eve was a BIG DEAL when I was a kid. Now it’s a typical day. (I need to try to sleep earlier!)
Monday Morning
- I’m not sure light drizzle counts as “wind and rain,” but since I’d like to have water next year, I’ll take what I can get. (We did finally get some later in the day.)
- You know you need coffee when you bring your travel mug from home and leave it in the car.
Flu Away
I finally got my H1N1 flu shot today. My allergist called me this morning to say that they’d gotten five — yes, just 5 — doses of the vaccine, and wanted to know if I wanted one.
The CDC has been recommending for months that anyone with chronic respiratory conditions (*cough* asthma *cough*) get both the swine flu and seasonal flu vaccines, so I asked about it the last time I was in for a check-up. The office was expecting it sometime in October. That stretched out to late October, then November, then they began to wonder if they were going to get it at all.
Distribution on this thing has been just abysmal. I mean, I got the seasonal flu shot in September. And there have been other areas of the country that got so many doses they started offering them to the general public more than a month ago, because they didn’t have enough people in high-risk groups who wanted it.
Meanwhile, H1N1 proceeded to establish itself as the main flu of the season. I wasn’t terribly enthused about the possibility of being completely wiped out for several days and quarantining myself for another week afterward…
I did research other sources, though perhaps not as thoroughly as I could have. I checked in a couple of times at my regular doctor’s office, but they were in the same boat. I checked Google Flu Shot [Edit: This was a service that let you search Google Maps for flu shot providers that had the vaccine in stock, and is no longer available.] at least once a week after it launched, though it was always either empty or full of locations marked “Temporarily out of stock.”
Actually, I’d pretty much written it off at this point, figuring the vaccine would be available sometime in, I don’t know, February or March, by which time I’d either have gotten the flu or wouldn’t be getting it this year anyway. When my phone rang I figured it had something to do with an appointment I’d rescheduled.
For the record: no noticeable side effects (so far), and hardly any pain. My shoulder hurts less than it did after the seasonal flu shot I got a few months ago, and even that didn’t hurt much (and only after a few hours). Also, there was a patient survey and information sheet that went along with it instead of the standard “I solemnly swear that I am not allergic to eggs” (they grow the vaccine in eggs) waiver.