linkstream2 microblog

The Really Big One
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one How the evidence has come together for huge quakes hitting #Seattle in 1700 & in the near future

The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle

QT:{{”

“In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.
…
In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that 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. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.”
…
Finally, in a 1996 article in Nature, a seismologist named Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the work of Atwater and Yamaguchi, matched that orphan to its parent—and thereby filled in the blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny specificity. 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. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku.

…
Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins…..
..
This problem is bidirectional. The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do.
“}}

$BMY rips up its R&D group…800-plus [affected]
http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/bristol-myers-rips-its-rd-group-adding-eliminating-and-moving-hundreds/2015-06-25 Trend of pruning spoke cities & growing #hub ones HT @JorgensenWL

QT:{{”
“Bristol-Myers Squibb’s big reorganization fits into the industry’s new model for R&D. Large, scattered groups are out as big
organizations gravitate toward the big hubs. GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK) and Amgen ($AMGN) have offered two recent examples of that trend, which has benefited hubs like Boston/Cambridge and the Bay Area while inflicting painful cuts in outlying areas. Biopharma companies are also concentrating on core areas, sometime shedding early-stage work–reflected in Merck’s ($MRK) recent downsizing at the newly acquired Cubist and the big asset swap that occurred between GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis ($NVS).”
“}}

Days of Our Digital Lives by @seththoughts http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/opinion/sunday/seth-stephens-davidowitz-days-of-our-digital-lives.html #Search data shows misspellings & forgotten passwords more common at night

QT:{{"
“There is some evidence that we get less sharp as the day progresses. Between 2 and 3 a.m., search rates for “forgot password” are 60 percent higher than average. They are lowest around 9 a.m. Between 2 and 3 a.m., we are more than twice as likely to misspell “facebook” as “facbook” and nearly twice as likely to misspell “weather” as “wether.””

"}}

QT:{{”
Henry Gustav Molaison (February 26, 1926 – December 2, 2008), known widely asH.M., was an American memory disorder patient who had a bilateral medial temporallobectomy to surgically remove the anterior two thirds of his hippocampi,parahippocampal cortices, entorhinal cortices, piriform cortices, and amygdalae in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. He was widely studied from late 1957 until his death in 2008.[1][2] His case played a very important role in the development of theories that explain the link between brain function and memory, and in the development ofcognitive neuropsychology, a branch of psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. He resided in a care institute located in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where he was the subject of ongoing investigation.[3]
“}}

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medial_temporal_lobe

QT:{{”
EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He’s personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP’s memory.
“}}

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2007/11/memory/foer-text

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2006/04/kaavya_syndrome.html

QT:{{”
In 1970, a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a landmark paper in Nature about a Harvard student named Elizabeth, who could perform an astonishing feat. Stromeyer showed Elizabeth’s right eye a pattern of 10,000 random dots, and a day later, he showed her left eye another dot pattern. She mentally fused the two images to form a random-dot stereogram and then saw a three-dimensional image floating above the surface. Elizabeth seemed to offer the first conclusive proof that photographic memory is possible. But then in a soap-opera twist, Stromeyer married her, and she was never tested again.
“}}

QT:{{”
“Exploration has a second meaning: Running pilot tests to explore ideas, refine procedures and tasks, and guide where precious research effort is best directed is often one of the most rewarding stages of research. No matter how intriguing, however, the results of such pilot work rarely deserve even a brief mention in a report. The aim of such work is to discover how to prespecify in detail a study that is likely to find answers to our research questions, and that must be reported. Any researcher needs to choose the moment to switch from
not-for-reporting pilot testing to prespecified, must-be-reported research.”
“}}

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/07/0956797613504966.long

Why do we…expect…robots to kill us?
http://mashable.com/2015/07/02/robot-killers/ Freak accident & coincidental reporting leads to skynet/#Terminator posts

QT:{{”
“The news flashed around the world, every headline a variation on the classic “man bites dog” — Robot Kills Man. To make matters more ominous, one of the reporters tweeting about the story was the Financial Times’ Sarah O’Connor — who was apparently unaware of the Terminator franchise featuring her namesake, Sarah Connor, and didn’t understand why so many of her replies talked about something called Skynet becoming self-aware.

Never mind that the robot in question was a relatively prosaic piece of machinery, a giant arm designed to operate within a cage, far away from humans. Never mind that, according to the preliminary assessment, the worker was at fault. Never mind that since the first robot-related death was reported in 1979, we’ve seen fewer than one such incident per year. Toilets, zippers and pants all cause more deaths than robots.

But we see what we want to see, and apparently what we want to see is the robopocalypse.”
“}}

QT:{{”
The character is an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, mathematician and Manhattan Project principal John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (a central figure in Nazi Germany’s rocket development program recruited to the US after the war), and Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb.”[15] There is a common misconception that the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this;[16] Sellers said, “Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger—that’s a popular misconception. It was always Wernher Von Braun.”[17]
“}}

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove