Wow, up to nearly 50,000 felt-it reports on the USGS for the 5.6 magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/events/us/b0006klz/us/index.html
I wonder if that’s some sort of record for responses.
For a comparison, a recent San Fran quake had 2,667.
yelyah - “inundated with options 20110318” piano improv
So I built this timelapse of earthquakes in Japan because I had seen the Christchurch Quake Map and I wanted to see the same thing done for Japan.
I was kinda surprised that the guy who did the original site hadn’t already announced plans to make a new one for Japan especially since I saw some requests for it on the facebook fan page.
I decided I could use the learning experience so I set about building a knockoff with data from the earthquakes in Japan.
Somewhat disappointingly, the original guy announced a Japan version of his site in the midst of my own development of the knockoff.
Sure, it was worth it for the learning experience but on some level I hoped my own site would end up unique instead of what it clearly is (to me anyway)… ya know, a knockoff.
So now it’s time to pivot.
And here’s where I end up buried in the landslide of questions.
- do I rebuild the Japan map so that it’s not such a knockoff?
- do I jump right into building a world earthquake map?
- do I stick with traditional map tools like google maps… or mapstraction… or openlayers?
- do I try doing something more future tech like SVG in raphaeljs?
- how do I update the map on a regular basis?
- do I stick to a static site (with the dynamic parts being updated by replacing static files)?
- do I go for a dyanmic backend?
- do I write the dynamic backend in Ruby or do I try to really learn node.js once and for all?
Now really, I see myself building both a Japan specific map and a world map but which do I start on first?
And I’ve managed to bury myself in data. Random web pages that I’ve found about learning javascript or openlayers or raphaeljs or node.js or backbone.js or underscore.js or what is any of this stuff anyway?.
Analysis paralysis.
No path is permanent and all of them would be good for the learning experience, but it’s just all feeling a lot like the same thing that happened the first time I tried to learn node.js: I had a booty load of articles bookmarked but I never wrote any useful code.
I need some momentum. NOW.
yelyah - “enn zed 20110222” piano improv
My thoughts are with the people of Christchurch who were hit by a massive earthquake on Tuesday, NZDT.
It’s been quite surreal watching all of the live coverage.
Though this earthquake was of a lesser magnitude than September’s, this one was much closer to Christchurch and was at a much shallower depth (5km vs 10km).
On the map below, the 2010 earthquake is marker A and Tuesday’s earthquake is marker B.
Things I’ve learned.
- first, I had never even thought about earthquake depth before, so that was a new concept
- I had incorrectly thought that casualty == fatality. I assumed that the NZ usage of “casualty” was regional/of British origin, but it turns out that casualty has a universal meaning, and it’s both injuries and fatalities.
- soil liquefaction is responsible for all of the water on the ground and roadways. In a sense, the ground is flooding. From below.
- Hilary Barry was the anchor that I saw a lot of on the first day. I think she did an amazing job considering all of the chaos of the day.
- Christchurch has had many aftershocks in the time after the September earthquake, including a 4.9 on Boxing Day. The Tuesday earthquake is even considered an aftershock of the initial September quake.
Though I’m sure it will be difficult for things to ever be the same, I wish the people of Christchurch a speedy recovery.
