The USGS now shows 5 earthquakes (that people can probably feel) and 14 smaller ones. This includes one that popped up while I was writing this post.
These are all clustered in a very small area on the northwest side of Enoch. Basically right under the house of vX friends KQ and RQ.*
The worry is that a swarm of quakes like this can be foreshocks before a much larger quake. Let’s hope it’s just reducing stress instead of building it up.
* FWIW: the latitude and longitude figures for these quakes are just bizarre. Most of them are around latitude 37.80 N 113.13 W, with a give or take that’s almost always less than a tenth of a degree. That’s about 7 miles. Some of them are showing up separated by a few thousandths of a degree from each other. That’s a few hundred feet. But, they are all coming at different depths. Kind of fun to watch …
If you’re like me you’’ve been fascinated by the discovery of the remains of King Richard III. But … you probably don’t have my advantages … 2 hours of exam proctoring this morning, giving me plenty of relaxed time to read the backstory and write this up.
In fact, here’s the video from last August, and it turns out they thought that looking for the body would make a good documentary whether they found him or not.
In this case … the (later to be shown not so) crazy archaeologists claimed to know where Richard III’s remains were. They’re going to make a ton of money on this documentary now!
Usually we know where famous people are buried. In this case, they did too … but no one followed up on it.
After the battle, Richard’s body was taken to a friary (like a monastery, but more open to the public). This was in the big town down the road, Leicester (pronounced “Lester”, it’s a city north of London, about the size of Spokane).
Reports indicate that he was buried under the choir of the friary’s church – a fairly common place to bury someone who’s grave might be robbed if it was buried outside. This was confirmed because the new King Henry VII paid to have it spiffed up a bit.
But then his son, Henry VIII, had the friars’ orders dissolved, and this particular order’s home torn down around 50 years later. And this is where the rumor started that kept the body from being found: they started to say the bones had been dug up and thrown in the river. Probably some other schleps bones were …
But, the lot was left vacant (some things never change). Eventually it was bought, and a large house was built on one side of the property. Walled gardens were grown over the site of the friary (you know … big, Downton Abbey style gardens covering several acres). And about 125 years after the burial it was reported that there was a 3 foot tall stone marking the grave.
About a hundred years after that, the city was mapped. And the map shows the paths in the gardens … intersecting.
Doh!
If you had the grave of a king, even a disgraced one, marked with a big stone in your backyard, just maybe you’d have the paths intersect there. You know … X marks the spot?
Here’s the map from 1741. The former Grey Friars property is the large trapezoid just below center. The words “Grey Friars” are written at a 90 degree angle. The garden paths intersect just to the right of the “y” in Grey.
It’s more like + marks the spot … but it’s there.
In the above image, a screen capture from the Google map linked below, the trapezoidal property that was Grey Friars is composed of the three blocks starting at the top right, and getting progressively larger going to the left. The “Google A” is misplaced … I’d put the + from the 1741 map just to the left of the 3 white trucks parked just to the right of center near the top (you can’t miss them — they’re bigger than the cars).
But over the last 300 years, the house has been torn down, and other buildings have been built on the site. But, the roads are still in the same spots, and there’s still a Grey Friars Road along one side of the site.
Here’s the thing: the new buildings were built on the sites of the old ones … and the gardens stayed undeveloped. No doubt, every round of builders decided to keep the nice looking lawns and trees instead of replanting. Here’s the same area in 1828:
In the above image, the original large trapezoid is now divided by a small road, right in the center of the map. The garden and its paths are now split between the two blocks, but the + is one of the intersections in the block to the right of the new road (which is still called New Street).
By 1904, another road had been put through the smaller block on the right, and more buildings were added. The + of garden paths is gone now, but it’s still in the white spaces in the interior of the middle block:
But, several decades ago, what was left of the gardens were paved to make what the British call a car park (almost, but not quite, paving paradise to put up a parking lot). If you compare the map directly above to the Google screen capture even further up, you can see that the empty white lots from 1904 roughly match the parking lot of 2013.
And a devotee of Richard III puts all this together and realizes that the spot where the choir of the friary stood might be under the (easy to excavate) parking lot. You can see the parking lot in the middle of this satellite image, in the block to the left of Grey Friars Road. In the image below, the body was found in front of the building way back on the left:
If you’re interested in more details, I suggest you go straight to The Search for Richard III site at the University of Leicester. It’s really cool, and very informative … just make sure that you figure out how to follow all the links (I had a little trouble at first). But, if you like my summary so far, I’ll finish.
What the archaeologists do is pretty interesting. They dig a trench and see what’s in it. Then they dig a parallel trench several yards to the side. But, they offset its starting point so that it just overlaps the the ending point of the first trench. That way they’re checking a lot of ground, but can also catch features that run across both trenches. In the video above they suggest that they had an 80/20 chance of finding the friary, but astronomical odds of finding Richard’s body.
In this case, they dug three trenches. But they started the first one where they thought the choir would be, and they found bones on the first day. But, they carried on, and from the three trenches were able to figure out the outlines of the friary, and confirm that the bones they’d found on the first day were probably in the choir.
They exhumed the bones, and confirmed that they are 500 years old, and from a relative of two people who are still living, and who are in turn distant descendants of Richard’s mother. The bones show fatal wounds consistent with descriptions of Richard’s death in battle. And they show a physical deformity — scoliosis — that is consistent with contemporary descriptions of Richard’s physique.
Here’s a facial reconstruction:
Here is a link to this part of the site showing the multiple, potentially fatal head injuries suffered by Richard in the battle. This is one part of the site where I didn’t realize right away that there were links I was supposed to follow.
Here’s Richard’s spine, showing the curvature that contributed to his undeserved reputation as a cripple, but which certainly did lead him to be shorter and slighter, perhaps a bit lopsided looking, and possibly chronically short of breath:
What a neat video. A filmmaker explains why it’s more likely that we went to the moon than it is that it was all faked … because the technology to fake it didn’t exist.
He’s wonderfully clear: he’s not sure the technology existed to go to the moon, but he is sure that the technology to fake it didn’t exist.
The title is the common explanation of flight: the air is split at the front of the wing, and most go faster over the curved top, and be less dense on the top, to meet the air going underneath the wing.
This is wrong. I knew that, but I still repeat this story because I’m just not fully cognizant of the real story of lift.
Here is a very good explanation of how lift works, and the light bulb moment for me was Figure 10, showing how a single wing acts like a downwardly angled air scoop.
Perhaps we should be teaching boys who want to wear homemade wings to strap a piece of sheet metal ductwork, open in front and back, to their arms before they start their take-off run!
Bacteria evolved, in response to the new agricultural diet we adopted about 10,000 years ago, to thrive in our newly starch-rich mouths … and give us cavities.
I’ve looked for it onlne, and have never been able to find it. But this is similar to other research done around 1990 at LSU (I think). In that research scientists placed rubber snakes on the road, and found that people went out of their way to hit them too.
Now for a second round of applying some basic economics to anthropogenic climate change.
Economists advocate figuring out how sensitive one thing is to another by calculating elasticity: a ratio of percentage changes.
Why do this? In short, because it prevents the sort of mistakes that alarmists make when pointing at data on climate change.
Data on real world GDP is easy to come by. From 1960 to 2000 there was about 500% growth.
Data on carbon dioxide concentration is also easy to come by. Over the past 50 years it has increased from about 315 to 370. That’s a change of about 17%.
Very roughly, the elasticity of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration with respect to real GDP growth is the ratio of those two percentages: 17%/500% = 0.03.
This is close to zero. Economists call that inelastic.*
Really inelastic. Elasticities for cigarettes with respect to price 10 to 20 times higher.
That’s right: smokers will change their consumption in response to price increases far more readily than the planet will change its atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in response to our economic growth.
So … if most of us know we can’t change smokers, why are some claiming that economic growth is the lever to be adjusted to change in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration?
This is why it’s so important to invoke possible non-linearity or hysteresis in climate processes … along with the all important claim that there will be bigger effects mañana.
* There’s a lot of quibbles in the details and method, but none of them change the fact that we’re looking at nearly perfect inelasticity.
Data on temperature is easy to come by. World average temperature is about 290º (big differences in that guesstimate will have little bearing on my final result). Over the past 50 years, temperatures have increased from about 289.8º to 290.5º. That’s a change of 0.25%.
Data on carbon dioxide concentration is also easy to come by. Over the past 50 years it has increased from 315 to 392 ppm. That’s a change of 24.44%.
Very roughly, the elasticity of temperature with respect to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is the ratio of those two percentages: 0.25%/24.44% = 0.01.
This is close to zero. Economists call that inelastic.*
Really inelastic. Elasticities for cigarettes with respect to price 20 to 50 times higher.
That’s right: smokers will change their consumption in response to price increases far more readily than the planet will change its temperature in response to carbon dioxide.
So … if most of us know we can’t change smokers, why are we trying to change carbon dioxide concentrations when it won’t do much good?
This is why it’s so important to invoke possible non-linearity or hysteresis in climate processes … along with the all important claim that there will be bigger effects mañana.
* There’s a lot of quibbles in the details and method, but none of them change the fact that we’re looking at nearly perfect inelasticity.
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