Old Blog Posts

In seismology, ground truth is jargon that originated when discrimination of earthquakes and other seismic events from small nuclear blasts was a hot research field. It refers to the collection of data to verify the source or location of a seismic event other than just the seismic data available on a network. It could include satellite imagery or infrasound data, for example. That’s a mouthful, but it really just means, verifying where something happened, seismically, from as many different kinds of data as are available. It’s important, especially if the event places suspicion on a (possible) rogue state for testing… Read More

Seismic Amphibians At the Earthquake Observatory of the University of Cologne (in Bensberg) we have frogs and toads. And no, that’s not a euphemism for our current crop of students. I see them whenever I go downstairs to my basement office as this window – a rain gutter window – is usually home to several at any one time, depending on the season and the weather. Since we are in the midst of a very rainy summer here in Bensberg, there is currently a healthy population. There are around ten of them in there today. We at first thought they… Read More

Just a heads up. My website will be undergoing a server change this week and so will be down for some of that time.

I’m on my third cup of jasmine-flavored organic green tea today after a half a pot of coffee this morning. My right shoulder aches and my thumb is twitching – my second bout of butt-in-chair induced pain – that no amount of the German version of Ben Gay ointment is going to cure and it’s raining giant slop buckets so I can’t go out and dig weeds or do anything…anything. I just threw a whammy into the whole goddarned outline of my fifth (and last, dammit) series book (now up to 20K) while I gather untold amounts of research material… Read More