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Exponential Innovations Everywhere
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Joost Bonsen's Opinions on How Money, Ideas, and Talent can
Enable Health, Wealth, and Happyness for Each plus Achieve Liberty, Prosperity, and Vitality for All and Ultimately Help Us Spread Beyond Our Cradle Planet Earth
"An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when. [...] At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. [...] We now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, 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 three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle."Here's a simulation of what happened back in 1700... And here's a geologist's discussion... Finally, documentary shock & awe imagery... NYTimes' DotEarthling Andrew Revkin weighs in too, with nice infographic showing past 8.0 and 9.0 events over 10K years...
"At the runway's edge, Halvorsen spotted a few dozen boys and girls. [...] Halvorsen promised to drop candy to them on a future flight. [...] Not surprisingly, dropping candy from a military airplane was against regulation, but Halvorsen was resolute. [...] Instead of a court martial, Halvorsen received congratulations. The operation's commander, Gen William Turner, realized the psychological value of Halvorsen's efforts and lent his full support: Operation "Little Vittles" was official! As Halvorsen and a few dozen other pilots made daily candy drops, letters poured in. Elated children thanked Der Schokoladenflieger (The Chocolate Pilot) and Onkel Wackelflügel (Uncle Wiggly Wings) for the gifts. [...] All told, Operation Little Vittles rained down 23 tons of candy from 250,000 parachutes. And though it took nearly a year, the Soviets eventually called off the blockade for one simple reason: It wasn't working."