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Building a large building does not look anything like building a nuclear silo.

This comment is 100% ridiculous speculation.

That's not to say they don't have a nuclear weapons program - they probably do - but needing a mega-project to cover it up is just silly.


Strong vibrations in Westchester county


Sky scrappers are the safest buildings to be in during an Earthquake. The most dangerous are the oldest much smaller masonry multilevel buildings.


This is like flying commercial. Your brain knows it is statistically safest. But your palms sweat during takeoff and landing no matter.

Does anyone know if there's a real-time feed of Earthquakes somewhere? The USGS website doesn't post the Earthquakes until 10-15 minutes after it's over - which nullifies any type of automated warning for our data centers.


There is in Japan. I don't know how the realtime data feed is set up, but here is one public webpage that shows the degree of shaking as it happens:

https://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/kyoshin/

I felt a moderate earthquake here in Yokohama a few days ago. I had my phone with me, so I clicked my bookmark for that page and, before the shaking stopped, could see that it was a magnitude 6 with epicenter offshore from Fukushima--nothing to worry about. A minute or so later the permanent record of the quake was online:

https://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/2024040412...


Curious: Why might data centers need earthquake warnings, and how might they prepare if given a few minutes or seconds of heads up?


I can think of some ideas: parking the heads on hard drives is one.

Magnetic hard drives are sensitive to vibration. You can shout at hard drives and measure the effects (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4).

One of the worst-case scenarios is a head crash. A head crash will damage the media and may result in data loss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash

My guess is that earthquakes powerful enough to cause a head crash are powerful enough for widespread destruction anyway, but I’m no expert. I did some quick searches for hard drives damaged by earthquake, and the only results I got were scenarios where the hard drives or the whole rack got knocked over by the earthquake and hit the floor.


Some other thoughts:

- Personnel-level warning to immediately rerack servers, close racks, and get off ladders and away from fall hazards

- Proactively spin up generators to reduce failover in the more-likely event of a power disruption

- Potentially temporarily shut off very large circulation fans so that blades don't collide with the housings

- Potentially stop and carefully restart cooling water loops, in case there's a rupture in the system somewhere


Good list.

Add to this: initiate failover or zone transfer of distributed servers / services to other DCs outside the likely impacted area.


Personally, I’d rather have the generators off when the earthquake hits!


Need realtime seismographs, my friend's dad has one he built as a hobby up in quebec city that picked it up: https://alainmichaud.ca/


Another great site with a ton of citizen stations (some are placed next to USGS seismographs too): https://shakenet.raspberryshake.org


There are also just too many entries in dense areas. It's impossible to go through all of them for something that might be interesting for the reader specifically.

It would be nice if they could be categorized/color-coded by some type (nature/monument/establishment/etc...) on the map so people can sift through them more easily.


> how often does a fridge door open on its own?

No, it's for when the kids leave the door open or just don't close it properly - which is VERY frequent. The door alarm goes off once per week here, at least.


Yeah but kids can do all kinds of stuff. If your kids start drawing on the wall, do you have an alarm for that? Or for when they break a glass?


Kids can know to close the door, intend to close the door, but still fail to realize they didn't close the door. They're kids, it happens. And its a simple feature that can help realize the door is still open. It's not that deep..


My dog is my alarm for when the kid starts drawing on the walls or breaks something. He barks to let me know. It’s very convenient and I’m glad to have him. If it was practical to make a computer to do this I’m sure people would find it useful.


bingo. It's like measuring the effectiveness of my gardening by seeing how many vegetables I produce in the summer vs winter, and then blaming Santa Claus for poor performance.


I think different companies use return-to-office mandates differently, sometimes even within the same company.

One facet of this is companies using return-to-office mandates to simply do layoffs without having to pay severance.


Not only blood transfusions, but ligament/tendon transplants from cadavers are extremely common for people who tear their ACL.

It would be a disaster if this type of surgery also transmitted some prior/protein misfolding disease decades later. Millions would be impacted. The practice stared in the 1980s, but really only became popular in the early 2000s with the boom in arthroscopic surgery standardization.

Hopefully the blood-brain barrier prevents this.


Oh man, I bet you’re right and enough time hasn’t gone by to see the fallout from it! I bet rich people will start bidding up tendons and ligaments from younger cadavers (probably mostly motorcycle accident victims). Although given that so many of those have toxoplasmosis, maybe that’s also not great…


One estimate says that 30-50% of all human beings have toxoplasmosis, so I would put that as pretty low on the list of risks.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3963851/


those tissues are unlikely to carry prions. prions are concentrated in the brain.


Unlikely != zero risk, and concentrated != isolated?


Could they test the donor first for these proteins or whatever is causing it?


We probably could, but only after we'd figure out what exactly is causing it.


"red flags" just means data entry errors, not intentional fraud.

Anyone who has worked in ETL knows data-in is usually garbage.


Yes, but there is a big difference between filling in some survey you don't care about and registering a company, where you might be criminially liable for any mistakes. I make damn sure any filings related to my company are correct.


It's not the founders of the companies that are making these errors, it is the bank's data entry employees typing in the data from hand written forms.

Most of these accounts were opened before online form submissions. Not to mention the ambiguity between date formats causing all sorts of issues. ...apostrophes in names, etc...

Data quality issues have a variety of causes.


In the UK company information is filed online with Companies House, by the company (or possibly a professional representative). Not by a bank data entry person.

And if the bank needs that data it should be able to download it.

So I don't understand where bank data entry comes in. However I only skimmed the article.


You forget that much of the data they looked as is decades old - before automated systems and computer data entry.


One would have to assume that it's a combination of both.


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