#Inappropriate language
2 messages in this thread
No, what I meant was: that convention center is very near the area of
greatest damage in the last quake.
BTW, I've been meaning to report to the folks over on CLM: The quake was
detected by our inertial lab tiltmeters here in Clearwater, Fla. Remember,
these are not seismometers, but part of our lab equipment. The instruments
show a tilt of about +/- 3 arc seconds, lasting over a period of about 1.5
hours (the waves disperse as they travel). Took about 30 minutes for the
first waves to arrive. If I do come to the conference, I'll bring a copy
of the graph.
These guys give a measure of an arc-second. Take a perfectly level board
17 feet long. Pick up one end, and lay a human hair under it. It's now
tilted by one arc-sec. The graphs would seem to imply that these meters
can easily detect angles on the order of 0.1 arc-sec or so.
Interesting, all right. Tell me, what kind of pinball machine is that that it
yells "tilt" with such a small push?
Really, what kind of equiptment needs a tiltmeter that fine?
A friend of mine (just finished up at Texas A&M) built a laser. He set up a
sand-table and soon had a working inferometer in the bedroom. He could detect
a train passing through Bryon, and footsteps on the walkway outside, and trucks
driving by, etc. He also set up a target so that a small object (like a hair)
placed in the beam would difract the light and you could read the thinkness of
the object off the chart. He could measure the thinkness of a hair so well as
to distinguish between individuals. The chart was marked in nanometers! He
also folded up his brother in the sofabed to see if such a thing was possible.
Such is the mind of a scientist.