DanRochman.com

Who’s fault is it?  It’s San Andreas fault!!  Ha ha ha ha.  Okay, that’s not even remotely funny.  But Tuesday (April 18th) was the 100th anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the local media’s been fairly saturated with quake-related items.  There were also a host of quake-related events going on in the Bay Area, none of which we ended up going out for.  Well, the closest we came was going kayaking on Tomales Bay (thanks to Janna for organizing the trip!) last Saturday with a group of friends.  Tomales Bay sits right on top of the infamous San Andreas fault.  In fact, it was *created* by the fault spreading at that point, and creating a depression in the landscape that happens to be open to the Pacific at one end.  The Exploratorium has a great web page (with a really cool webcast!) on the geology of Tomales Bay.  It’s part of their excellent “Faultline: Seismic Science at the Epicenter” project, which I wholeheartedly recommend as a starting point for the curious.  And by “the curious” I mostly mean Em’s brother Nelson.  He’s coming down from Toronto (and by “Toronto” I mean Brampton) to visit us at the end of June, and I guess he must have caught a whiff of the hype surrounding the big quake’s centennial.  He told Em he’s all excited about the potential for the next “big one” to happen while he’s out here.  Of course, if it *does* happen while he’s out here, and assuming he were to survive it and all, well then I guess it *would* probably make for a pretty cool story. 

True Story.  Within a day or so of moving to San Francisco, back in February of 1999, I went to the offices of a company called “Rent Tech”.  [Back then, with the dot-com boom in full swing, and before all such services were obliterated by the inexorable rise of craigslist, two or three private firms (including Rent Tech) shared total control of the *frenzied* rental housing market in San Francisco.]  While meeting with one of their reps, I was distracted by a huge (6′ x 4′, maybe?) framed poster on the wall behind him.  It was obviously a map of San Francisco, but covered in splotches of different colors.  I couldn’t make out the legend from where I was sitting, and had to ask the rep what the colors represented.  He walked me over to it, and explained that it was a “Seismic Hazard” map.  The different colors represented the underlying geology - one color for bedrock, another for fill, and so on.  I can’t remember it exactly, but it looked a lot like this map I just generated [warning: link is to a 1.2 MB PDF that I'm self-hosting] using the extremely cool ABAG Interactive (GIS) Liquefaction Susceptibility Map.  It turns out that fill (aka landfill) is stable enough under ordinary circumstances, but when shaken it tends to “liquify” (a process known as liquefaction), which makes living on fill particularly risky in earthquake zones.  Coming from Toronto (and Montreal before that), I was completely fascinated - it had NEVER occurred to me that people who weren’t geologists would ever be interested in a map like that.  But of course, in places like San Francisco, the makeup of the ground beneath you is a HUGE deal.  In the last big quake out here, back in 1989 (known as the “Loma Prieta” earthquake - 7.1 on the Richter scale), parts of the Marina district of San Francisco (which is mostly fill) suffered disproportiate amounts of damage, most of it due to liquefaction.  So maps like these can really be a major factor when people out here decide where to buy a home - or even where to rent.  Speaking of which, I’m writing this post from our apartment, which *is* located on bedrock (in your FACE, Marina district!).  And yes, I’m having a yabba-dabba-doo time.

On a completely unrelated note, Michelle Parise (thanks, meep!) sent me this very sweet (sorry) link today: Top 10 Creatively Decorated Nerdy Cakes.  Those cakes are cool, but I’d certainly never try to make any of ‘em myself.  Not like I’m the one who makes the cakes in this family, anyhow.  But I don’t even think Em would try to make any of these.  Now photo cupcakes, on the other hand… Well, I just cannot WAIT to make me some photo cupcakes. First of all, I like to think that even I can make cupcakes.  Second of all, the mind literally REELS at the possibilities. And yes, I know that photo cakes have been around for some time, but these are photo CUPcakes. I mean, this is a whole new ballgame. Okay, I can’t explain why it’s a new ballgame - it just is.  Humor me!  Or not.  But if you don’t humor me, then no cupcakes for you…  And if you aren’t craving a cupcake by now, it can only mean that you still (how??) have not yet seen this awesome video (watch it quick, before the jerks at NBC shut it down - they had it pulled from YouTube ages ago, so this mirror’s days are surely numbered).

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.