2017 increased refrigerator and in-wall oven efficiency

Replacement fridge

Old fridge

Fridge set to 3 (5 oC); freezer set to A (-14 oC)

Power demand after reaching target temperatures:

33W closed

98W right and left open

73 left (freezer) closed; right (fridge) open

57 left open; right closed

R+L = 65; R=~40; L=~24 (probably mostly the wattage of the light bulbs)

Power demand with compressor at work:

Watts

330 Compressor starts

300 >30s

298 >60s

292 >180s

290-95 >10min (steady state while working to reach target temperatures)

Watt-up measurements of old fridge:

10.54 kWhr for 60:27 hr

= 174 W

Watt-up measurements of new fridge:

Fridge set to 3 oC; deli drawer set to 3 oC; freezer set to -19 oC (changed to -15 oC on 11/16/17)

5.62 kWhr for 80:15 hr

= 70 W

~ 40% of old load

New oven

DIY permanent bathroom floor made with cheap cork underlayment

There’s no home-improvement motivation like sewer water dripping through the ceiling onto your couch!  I had noticed the cracked tiles around the base of the toilet a couple years ago, but chose to ignore them.  Our “master bath” (shower+toilet) had clearly been a cheap finish to a big addition and I wanted to believe the cracked tile dated to the 1998 toilet installation, rather than suggesting an underlying problem.

Of course, I was wrong.  A quick examination of the toilet bolts showed that they were rusted through on one side and nearly corroded-through on the other.  The subsequent rocking of the toilet had allowed flushed water to leak past the wax seal and slowly saturate the particle board underlying the tiles, as well as the 19mm plywood sub-floor.  The moisture and rot further destabilized the toilet and the surrounding tile began to crack with the rocking.  Luckily, the ceiling rafters were unscathed (dry, no rot), so I only had to demo about 1 m^2 of the subfloor and 2 m^2 of the drywall ceiling in the playroom below (after cleaning the poop water out of the couch).

Looking at all the carefully labeled bathroom tiles and starting to imagine chipping all the old grout off of them, I realized that I’ve always wanted to try a cork floor!  So, out came all the rest of the tiles and particle board, and into the trash went all those labeled tiles, along with the moldy drywall and sewage-soaked wood.

With the rafters drying out and new drywall on the ceiling, the main problem became how to install a cork floor.  The Internets made it clear that not only is there some controversy about using cork below grade, and in basements, bathrooms, and kitchens, but also manufactured cork comes in many forms: cork tiles with adhesive backing; cork tiles that click together; cork tiles that you glue down, often with a water-borne contact cement (like the oft-recommended Waktol D3540, Roberts 7250, and Dritac 6200); and tongue & groove cork planks.  Most of these products cost 3-4$/ft^2 (with tiles usually being 1 square foot each), plus $10-50/gallon for glue.  One basement job estimate was about 2x that cost installed, ~8$/ft^2 for snap-in cork floor delivered and installed by Home Depot.  Another estimate in a floor-contractor forum was 10-15$/ft^2 installed.  I only needed to cover about 20 ft^2, so the DIY materials cost of a few bucks/square-foot didn’t seem too expensive, but many of the manufactured cork products (e.g. GreenClaimedTorly or Forna) come pre-coated with a sealant on the upper surface or require sealing of that surface and/or seams after installation (most commonly polyurethane, sometimes with an embedded more durable material like ceramic beads).  I’ve grown to hate polyurethane from having it fail on our oak floors (e.g. with water damage from a houseplant or wear in a high-traffic area) and then be near-impossible to spot-repair.

Instead, I wanted a bare or uncoated cork so I could seal it with an eco-friendly, low-VOC product made by Osmona.  I had loved re-finishing oak floors in our previous house with Osmo Polyx-Oil (hardwax-oil”) and was delighted to notice that it was also recommended for cork floors.

As a boat-builder familiar with water infiltration and damage, I was also worried about the seams between cork tiles or planks in the floor of a bathroom (or kitchen).  Would water from a dripping shower or cleaned human or overflowing toilet work its way through the seams?  Most folks seemed to recommend only the pre-sealed tiles in bathrooms, and then sealing the seams with 3-4 coats of a sealant.  That sounded like a lot of work and waiting, as well as the normal nightmare of having to re-finish the polyurethane every 3-7 years or replace the whole thing when only a spot repair was really necessary.

Thus, to pioneer a super-cheap yet functional solution I went looking for DIY bathroom or kitchen floors made with bare cork (ideally cork underlayment which costs only ~$0.80/ft^2 — 3-6x cheaper than tiles!), but found little guidance about how to install a permanent, waterproof cork floor.  This temporary cork floor from a renter in New York was heading in the right direction, but they just laid underlayment down without any gluing or sealing.  This general guide to installing bare cork from familyhandyman was helpful and taught me that the traditional finish for a cork floor was a paste wax.

Without much guidance available, I decided to experiment.  I bought some 6mm (1/4″) thick underlayment for $0.78/ft^2 from Amazon as well as range of adhesives and the Osmo-made sealant I hoped to use.  Using 20cm squares, I tried gluing down single layers on a piece of clean 1/2″ plywood, as well as laminating triple layers of cork underlayment. I also coated experimental squares of cork with the Osmo Polyx-Oil.

The sealant test surprised me a bit.  The epoxy was just too hard, making the cork feel stiff and reducing the likelihood that I’d ever get it off (or even get through it to the screws holding down the underlying plywood) in a worst case scenario.  The 3M spray glue and the DAP contact cement wasn’t holding down the edges well, plus I couldn’t imagine coating 2 surfaces, keeping them from sticking to themselves while getting tacky, and then successfully lining them up on the first (and only) try.   I was going to go with the official cork underlayment adhesive (easy to spread with the right tool and forgiving if the cork needed to be repositioned once in contact with the adhesive), but it was stinky and didn’t cure completely, even after a few days (especially in the 3-layer lamination test).

In the end, I went with interior/exterior Titebond II wood glue.  Though I could have used an extra bottle of it, I ended up using some plain old interior Titebond glue and it seems to have mostly held the cork down.  In places where I detected it was lifting a bit as I cleaned it and then sealed it, I was able to inject some 2P-10 superglue (cyanoacrylite) using a syringe attached to a ball inflator needle, getting the loose portions to stick down by applying pressure for a minute or two.  After replacing the molding, I caulked the top of it (as well as the base of the shower) and let it dry for ~24 hours.

I put the Osmo Polyx-Oil put down in two coats.  First coat went on thick (used about 1/2 of the 750ml can) and dried and soaked in for 36 hours.  Then I installed the toilet flange, wax seal, and toilet.  The second coat of Polyx-Oil took less (about 150ml).

I may add a third or fourth coat if the water doesn’t bead up enough, or I decide to try to fill up the voids in the cork over time…

img_3670img_3671

So far (a few days into use of the bathroom), all family members seem satisfied.  There’s general agreement that the cork has a warm feeling — both to the touch with bare feet and in terms of the colors in the bathroom.  My only gripe so far is that the cork and sealant are giving off a noticable waxy/woody smell.  With luck it will go away, but I’m worried the solvents in the Polyx-Oil are interacting with the cork organics and/or the Titebond adhesive under the cork.  Luckily, the cork seems to be staying adhered to the underlying plywood fine…  I’ll provide updates as we make further observations and use the bathroom more.

Budget

  • Final DIY materials/tools cost: $65 total, including experiments; $47 for cork flooring (underlayment, adhesive, and sealant) which for 20 sq.ft. area comes to ~$2.40/ft^2
  • Spreadsheet with source and links

Test results: adhesives

  • Titebond wood glue
  • 3M spray glue
  • Dap water-borne contact cement
  • Roberts 1407 (wanted Roberts 7250 as recommended on cork underlayment label, but could only find locally in 4-gallon containers)
  • System Three epoxy

Test results: sealants

  • Osmo Polyx-Oil (interior)
  • Osmo Deck oil (exterior)
  • Fill voids in cork with Osmo UK wood filler or another wood filler?

 

 

The spirits of Jock and Holly Cobb

Driving north out of Albuquerque with my parents last month to celebrate my aunt’s and uncle’s 50th anniversary, we learned from the Internet that our dear friends Jock and Holly Cobb have passed away.  Jock was my god-father and immortalized himself in my mind early on, mostly by convincing me (as a ~6-year-old) that it would be a good idea to rent a very large rock from him at a compounding interest rate, which I’ve done for more than 40 years!  He was always an inspiration — whether reclining naked in the outflow stream of a Colorado glacier when I first met him, or demonstrating the latest prototype of his solar-powered water purifier in the New Mexican sunshine when Annie and I last saw them in the early 2000s.

Both Jock and Holly were wonderful people, full of ideas, compassion, principle, and creativity.  I’m going to take the time to get to know them a bit better this winter.  Perhaps you should do so, too.  Here’s my reading list:

Jock’s book

Jock took some amazing photographs during WWII when he was a conscientious objector working as an ambulance driver in north Africa for the American Field Service.  Thankfully, they made it back to the States and through the decades to be published recently (in 2013) as Fragments of Peace in a World at War.  You can buy the book directly from the Cobb family via the publisher, Renny Russell or Amazon.

Here’s a video of Jock discussing parts of his book and offering related relections:

He ends his Vimeo recollections (in ~2011) with this quote from John F. Kennedy

“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

Letter to a Navy friend, quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), p. 88.

NYT article (2013) regarding the photographs

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/lens/2013/09/11/during-dark-times-a-darkroom-on-the-front-lines

An example photograph

San Vito, Italy: This fatherless boy, like so many in the war, was searching for something he did not understand and could not find.

Obituaries

Tribute to Jock in the Denver Post

John Cander (Jock) Cobb II, MD, MPH

1919-2016 (age 96)

John Candler Cobb II, known to all as "Jock", was born July 8, 1919 in Boston, MA. He died June 20, 2016 in Albuquerque, NM. After earning his B.A. in Astronomy from Harvard, he volunteered as an ambulance driver with the American Field Service in World War II. This experience and his association with the Quakers around this time, led him to his lifelong devotion to the cause of peace and to his career in medicine. He returned from the war to earn his MD from Harvard, and an MPH from Johns Hopkins. While in medical school he met Radcliffe student Holly Imlay-Franchot on a skiing trip. They were married for 67 years until Holly died in 2014.

After teaching at Johns Hopkins in maternal and child health, Jock began a career in public health when he moved to Albuquerque, NM in 1956 to work for the Indian Health Service. In 1960, he moved with Holly and their four children to Lahore, Pakistan, where he directed a Family Planning Research project. In 1965, the family settled in Denver, CO, where he became professor and chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Realizing the importance of environmental health early on, he was a member of the task force studying the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant and Uranium Enrichment Plant, which were shut down as a result of this work. He also served on the Governor's Scientific Advisory Council, and tackled Denver's notorious "brown cloud" as a member of the Air Pollution Control Commission. His work with international public health continued with shorter assignments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Togo, and China. He is honored to have his work and papers archived in the University of Colorado Archives in Boulder, CO.

In 1985, Jock retired from the University of Colorado Medical School, and he and Holly returned to live in the house they had built in Corrales, NM. They continued to travel abroad and enjoyed summers at their mountain cabin in Alice, CO. Jock's inventive spirit and dedication to health and the earth led him to develop a solar sanitation system for water and waste. While active in the world, he also treasured quiet time in nature, played cello, wrote poetry, and took many photographs. In the last decade of his life, Jock revisited the photographs he took while serving as ambulance driver in Italy, North Africa, and Syria. He distilled his dedication to peace in the book Fragments of Peace in a World at War, which includes his photographs, poetry, and narrative.

He is survived by his children Loren, Nat, Bethany, and Julianne; grandchildren and great grandchildren; and many people whose lives he touched.

In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the American Friends Service Committee  or  Planned Parenthood.

Tribute to Holly in the Albuquerque Journal

Helen Imlay (Holly) Cobb

1925 – 2014 (age 89)

Helen Imlay Franchot Cobb was an artist, a musician and a teacher. Holly grew up in New York State, and graduated from Radcliffe College with an AB in International Affairs. She and her husband Dr. John C (Jock) Cobb lived Baltimore MD, Corrales NM, and in Pakistan before settling in Denver, where he was a professor at CU Medical School. She taught art and kindergarten at Graland School. She leaves a beautiful portfolio of paintings and note cards of the peaks by their cabin in Alice, Colorado. She is survived by Jock, her husband of 67 years, her brother Dick Franchot, children Loren, Nat, Bethany and Julianne, and grands and greats. In lieu of flowers, donate to Planned Parenthood or AFSC.
  • Published from June 26 to June 29, 2016
  • Source link

Archives of Jock’s work

Cobb, Dr. John C. 83 linear feet, 1960-1993</div><div>Dr. John Cobb (b. 1919), M.D., Harvard University (1948), and Master of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University (1954), became a professor of community health in the Department of Preventative Medicine and Biometrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in 1965, where he is currently an emeritus professor. Dr. Cobb was appointed by Governor Lamm and Congressman Wirth to the Lamm-Wirth Task Force on Rocky Flats in 1974. From 1975 to 1982, he worked as principal investigator on an EPA contract to study human plutonium burdens in people who lived near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Facility. He has also served on several other councils and commissions concerning Rocky Flats and Three Mile Island. The collection contains files relating to Dr. Cobb's medical career including: plutonium study papers; material on air and water pollution, recycling, bioethics, holistic medicine, and urban health ecology; Rocky Flats and Pakistan radiation studies; and teaching materials, reports, and conference papers. Guide available in Archives.

Source: University of Colorado library archives

Inspiring quotes from “earth, air, water” class of Peter Rhines

“The world looks so different after learning science. For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. And in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid Earth, instead. These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are inspiring and they can be used to inspire others.” — Richard Feynmann, physicist, California Inst. of Technology.

“We are living our lives as energy hunter-gatherers rather than energy farmers. The midwest is farmland for windpower and biomass; the southern states and California are farmlands for solar energy.” — Dan Kammen, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Univ. of California, Berkeley, on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, 13 September 2002.

“We need a Manhatten Project for energy independence in the US.” — Dennis O’Brien, University of Oklahoma.

The golden chain of spirituality

“As long as we follow a spiritual approach promising salvation, miracles, liberation, then we are bound by the “golden chain of spirituality.” Such a chain might be beautiful to wear, with its inlaid jewels and intricate carvings, but nevertheless, it imprisons us. People think they can wear the golden chain for decoration without being imprisoned by it, but they are deceiving themselves. As long as one’s approach to spirituality is based upon enriching ego, then it is spiritual materialism, a suicidal process rather than a creative one. All the promises we have heard are pure seduction. We expect the teachings to solve all our problems; we expect to be provided with magical means to deal with our depressions, our aggressions, our sexual hangups. But to our surprise we begin to realize that this is not going to happen. It is very disappointing to realize that we must work on ourselves and our suffering rather than depend upon a savior or the magical power of yogic techniques. It is disappointing to realize that we have to give up our expectations rather than build on the basis of our preconceptions. We must allow ourselves to be disappointed, which means the surrendering of me-ness, my achievement. We would like to watch ourselves attain enlightenment, watch our disciples celebrating, worshiping, throwing flowers at us, with miracles and earthquakes occurring and gods and angels singing and so forth. This never happens. The attainment of enlightenment from ego’s point of view is extreme death, the death of self, the death of me and mine, the death of the watcher. It is the ultimate and final disappointment. Treading the spiritual path is painful. It is a constant unmasking, peeling off of layer after layer of masks. It involves insult after insult.”

Chögyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

What insights from science could blur the boundary between self and the rest of Nature, or even the boundary between life and death?

Feynman’s quote about trees being and becoming air as they grow and recycle is in the right vein.  Contemplate the past and fate of the molecules in each lungful of air or mouthful of water.  How many of the molecules that make up “me” are part of “you” or your dog, or your mortal enemy, tomorrow?  Of the molecules that made “me” uniquely me (the DNA in an egg from my mother and sperm from my father), how many are the same in you, or a monkey, or any animal, the plants I eat as a vegetarian, or the bacteria in my gut?  When I die, what will “my” molecules become (if buried on land, or cremated, or “buried” at sea)?

Similarly, what are the origins and fates of the ideas and culture that make “me” me?  Who taught me what I know and believe?  What will become of the memes I have created?

And maybe most profoundly, what makes “me” alive and what happens to “me” or at least my consciousness when I die?

I am a left egalitarian, social Democrat (like Bernie)

I’ve had an evening of political realization, thanks to Benjamin Studebaker, an American PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at Cambridge.  This post helped me understand that Bernie is my candidate and this next one convinced me that it is strategic to fight now for his vision: “a future to believe in.”  That sounds vacuous, but it’s not because for too long I’ve believed in egalitarianism — without having a name for it — but not seen so clearly how to realize it in a future, more equitable society in the U.S.

Will we defend the now-decrepit monster [neoliberalism] they [the 1%] gave us until they inflict a new and more terrible monster upon us, or will we stick up for our own ideology and put up a real fight against Trump and Cruz [the right nationalists]?

In taking on this fight, it seems advantageous to use the term “egalitarian” to emphasize that we value a more equitable society.  This value underlies some recent phenomena like the WTO protests and Occupy movement.  And it might also be accurate and savvy to call ourselves Social Democrats, rather than Democratic Socialists.

Science clarifies risks of “the really big one” for Seattle residents

All the recent hoopla regarding “The Really Big One” (2015 New Yorker article describing the terrifying possibility and risks associated with a magnitude 9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest) motivated me to do two things: take some reasonable actions to be more prepared; calm my relatives down a bit by elucidating the risks of living with the Cascadia Subduction Zone based on my reading the relevant primary scientific literature.  The key to the latter task is clarifying two key parts of Schultz’s story:

“…the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten.”

and (adding bold emphasis and changing written out numbers to actual numbers)

“Thanks to that [Goldfinger’s] work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced 41 subduction-zone earthquakes in the past 10,000 years. If you divide 10,000 by 41, you get 243, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now 315 years into a 243 year cycle.

 

It is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky…”

Ok, so let’s quibble by looking at Goldfinger’s work, specifically his analysis of layers of submarine mud that avalanche deeper into the sea during big earthquakes (a.k.a. turbidites).  In “Turbidite Event History—Methods and Implications for Holocene Paleoseismicity of the Cascadia Subduction Zone” (Goldfinger et al., 2012), you can find in the abstract the results that underlie Schultz’s prose:

The combined stratigraphic correlations, hemipelagic analysis, and 14C framework suggest that the Cascadia margin has three rupture modes: (1) 19–20 full-length or nearly full length ruptures; (2) 3 or 4 ruptures comprising the southern 50–70 percent of the margin; and (3) 18–20 smaller southern-margin ruptures during the past 10 k.y., with the possibility of additional southern-margin events that are presently uncorrelated. The shorter rupture extents and thinner turbidites of the southern margin correspond well with spatial extents interpreted from the limited onshore paleoseismic record, supporting margin segmentation of southern Cascadia. The sequence of 41 events defines an average recurrence period for the southern Cascadia margin of ~240 years during the past 10 k.y.

 

19+3+18=40 events, and 20+4+20=44 events

so it seems Schultz tries to be sort-of conservative and chooses to divide by 41:

10,000 years / 41 events = 243.9 years between events

= 244 year average recurrence time

We could get a range of recurrence times instead by using the range of number of events — 40-44:

10,000/40 = 250 years

10,000/44 = 227 years

And if we average those estimates, we’d get (250+227)/2 = 238 years

So, rounded down (for whatever reason) the bold math above yields (approximately) Schultz’s 243 year average recurrence time for a “big Cascadia earthquake” by which she means either a full-rupture earthquake (involving the whole boundary between the North American and Juan de Fuca tectonic plates, from British Columbia down to northern California) or a shorter/smaller ruptures at the southern half or 2/3 of the margin (CA and OR).  But we could break these averages down for big full plate ruptures (let’s assume 20 rather than 19), 50-70% southern ruptures, and smaller partial southern ruptures.  In the grey literature (not peer-reviewed) document “CHARACTERIZING THE CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE FOR SEISMIC HAZARD ASSESSMENTS” Wong et al. (2014) make a similarly motivated division of earthquakes, assuming they would fall into groups of magnitude 9, 8-8.8, and <8.  Adopting a similar terminology (and implicit assumptions), we can go back to the Goldfinger abstract and calculate

10,000 years / 20 full-length events = 500 years between magnitude 9 events

10,000 years / 50-70% length events = 2,500 years between 8-8.8 events

10,000 years / 20 full-length events = 500 years between magnitude <8 events

In the spirit of quibbling, what magnitude earthquakes are we talking about in the New Yorker article?  Schultz implies we are talking about the really big (~9.0) and big ones (>8), but not the <8 events:

If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. Thats the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

So maybe it would have been most appropriate for her to sum the number of these larger events from the turbidite record, but leave out what Goldfinger termed the “smaller southern-margin ruptures” —

10,000/(20+4) = 10,000/24

= 417 years between earthquakes greater than magnitude 8.0

If so, then we can transform one of her scariest sentences into something substantially less terrifying: “Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now 315 years into a 243 417 year cycle.”  So, on average we shouldn’t expect a big or really big earthquake for another 100 years or so.

If you want to get more geographically explicit, consider this nice figure from “Tsunami impact to Washington and northern Oregon from segment ruptures on the southern Cascadia subduction zone” (Priest et al., 2014), modified from Goldfinger et al. (2012) —

Yellow text show recurrence times for different inferred segments of the full-rupture patch of the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Yellow text show (simple average) recurrence times for different inferred segments of the full-rupture patch of the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Of course, all this averaging assumes that earthquakes are random (time-independent) rather than cyclical or periodic (time-dependent), but Goldfinger et al. (2012) point out that — conveniently — it doesn’t matter if you use simple averages or complicated earthquake modes, you get about the same computed likelihoods:

Time-independent probabilities for segmented ruptures range from 7–12 percent in 50 years for full or nearly full margin ruptures to ~21 percent in 50 years for a southern-margin rupture. Time-dependent probabilities are similar for northern margin events at ~7–12 percent and 37–42 percent in 50 years for the southern margin. Failure analysis suggests that by the year 2060, Cascadia will have exceeded ~27 percent of Holocene recurrence intervals for the northern margin and 85 percent of recurrence intervals for the southern margin.

These statistics are what underlie Schultz’s memorable 50-year odds: 1 in 3 (~30%) for a big one; 1 in 10 (~10%) for a really big one.  To the extent that either probability is worrisome, it’s got to be the 30% chance of a big one down south in the next 50 years.  Interestingly, in her follow-up article “How to Stay Safe When the Big One Comes” Schultz clarifies that the 30% probablity is indeed for a magnitude 8-8.6 event:

The odds I cite in the [original] story are correct: there is a thirty-per-cent chance of the M8.08.6 Cascadia earthquake and a ten-per-cent chance of the M8.79.2 earthquake in the next fifty years.

But from Seattle’s perspective, what will be our experience of a magnitude 8-8.6 earthquake, particularly one with an epicenter in Oregon?  It’s not clear to me if the shake maps Schultz provides in her follow-up are for a full- or partial- rupture.  The symmetry of the contours suggests they are for a full-margin rupture.  We need clarification, or another model run (for the full Northwest region) of this most likely (30%) type of earthquake!

The most helpful things I’ve found as I continue to “feel” the risk and decide whether and how to proceed are this timeline from this PDF

Seem likely the next one will be big, not really, big, and maybe pretty soon?

Seem likely the next one will be big, not really, big, and maybe pretty soon?

— and this figure depicting the height of a worst case tsunami as it moves up the OR/WA coast (from a magnitude 8.7 earthquake, aka simulation C588 centered in southern Oregon) —

As the tsunami propagates northward, the maximum wave height deceases from ~10 meters near the epicenter to ~2 meters in northern coastal Washington.  There is no tsunami risk in Seattle from a big or even a really big subduction earthquake.

As the tsunami propagates northward, the maximum wave height deceases from ~10 meters near the epicenter to ~2 meters in northern coastal Washington. There is no tsunami risk in Seattle from a big or even a really big subduction earthquake.

Despite all this scientific quibbling, I applaud Schultz on getting us all to be more prepared.  Here in northeast Seattle, I plan to refresh our emergency plans and kits, and look into a seismic retrofit for our 1926 house.

 

Re-thinking life, death, and purpose

After the death of my friend, Rafe Sagarin, I’m re-thinking the nature of life, death, and one’s purposes and values while on this planet.  Below are a few articles that I want to read and then discuss.

  • Matthieu Ricard in the New York Times (2011) regarding “The Future Doesn’t Hurt. Yet”
    • References a book written with his father “The Monk and the Philosopher
      • From an Amazon comment, the Monk sums up with:
      • `…such a dialogue is useful, but can never be a substitute for the silence of personal experience, as Goethe had aptly stated, “silence allows nature to whisper to us”.’
    • Review by Maria Popova
      • “When Revel takes issue with the Buddhist concept of reincarnation, pointing out its mystical and scientifically ungrounded suppositions, Ricard emphasizes its metaphorical and philosophical importance over its literal interpretation. Embedded in that notion, he suggests, is the key to unmooring ourselves from the tyranny of the self in the here and now:”
      • From the book: “It’s important to understand that what’s called reincarnation in Buddhism has nothing to do with the transmigration of some “entity” or other… As long as one thinks in terms of entities rather than function and continuity, it’s impossible to understand the Buddhist concept of rebirth.

        […]

        Since Buddhism denies the existence of any individual self that could be seen as a separate entity capable of transmigrating from one existence to another by passing from one body to another, one might well wonder what it could be that links those successive states of existence together… It’s seen as a continuum, a stream of consciousness that continues to flow without there being any fixed or autonomous entity running through it.

      • “The fact that there’s no such discontinuous entity being transferred from one life to the next doesn’t mean that there can’t be a continuity of functioning. That the self has no true existence doesn’t prevent one particular stream of consciousness from having qualities that distinguish it from another stream. The fact that there’s no boat floating down the river doesn’t prevent the water from being full of mud, polluted by a paper factory, or clean and clear. The state of the river at any given moment is the result of its history. In the same way, an individual stream of consciousness is loaded with all the traces left on it by positive and negative thoughts, as well as by actions and words arising from those thoughts. What we’re trying to do by spiritual practice is to gradually purify the river.”
      • “There’s a natural feeling of self, of “I,” which makes you think “I’m cold, I’m hungry, I’m walking,” and so forth. By itself, that feeling is neutral. It doesn’t specifically lead to either happiness or suffering. But then comes the idea that the self is a kind of constant that lasts all your life, regardless of all the physical and mental changes you go through. You get attached to the idea of being a self, “myself,” a “person,” and of “my” body, “my” name, “my” mind, and so on. Buddhism accepts that there is a continuum of consciousness, but denies any existence of a solid, permanent, and autonomous self anywhere in that continuum. The essence of Buddhist practice is therefore to get rid of that illusion of a self which so falsifies our view of the world.”
    • Founded Karuna-Shechen Foundation doing humanitarian work in Tibet, Nepal, etc.
    • “The unbridled consumerism of our planet’s richest 5 percent is the greatest contributor to the climate change that will bring the greatest suffering to the most destitute 25 percent, who will face the worst consequences.”
    • “Unchecked consumerism operates on the premise that others are only instruments to be used and that the environment is a commodity. This attitude fosters unhappiness, selfishness and contempt upon other living beings and upon our environment. People are rarely motivated to change on behalf of something for their future and that of the next generation. They imagine, “Well, we’ll deal with that when it comes.” They resist the idea of giving up what they enjoy just for the sake of avoiding disastrous long-term effects. The future doesn’t hurt — yet.

    • Interdependence, sentient living beings, suffering
    • “all beings are interrelated and all, without exception, want to avoid suffering and achieve happiness”
  • Harkening back to one of my childhood’s most trusted sources — Scientific American on “What Happens to Consciousness When We Die” (2012).  I’m not intrigued by the rather dull article, but inspired by the title and many of the comments!
    • “…the goal of enlightenment is to transcend to a more universal nonlocal, nonmaterial identity.” — Deepak Chopra?
    • “The hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness, however, has vastly more evidence for it than the hypothesis that consciousness creates the brain.”
    • “Thousands of experiments confirm the hypothesis that neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences.”
    • “2008 paper published in Mind and Matter by University of California, Irvine, cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman: Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem. Conscious realism asserts that the objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents.”
    • “In Hoffman’s view, our senses operate to construct reality, not to reconstruct it.”
  • Seven strange questions that help you find your life purpose” by Mark Manson