crossposted from
unbossed
In Southern California, they refer to them as events. Or temblors. For those who can't be there in person, now 45 minutes after an earthquake, ShakeMovie will post a video of ground shake patterns for all "events" magnitude 3.5 or greater back to 1999.
You can search for quakes by
location or magnitude or date. And for those who want to know more, you can look
here for the science behind the video.
If you want more on earthquakes, try the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC). This link will show you just whose fault it is next time there's an "event".
And if you are thinking about buying a little pied a terre in Southern California, with that spare $2 million, here is some useful information for newbies.
And here is the link to the SCEC I always loved - great logo with the letters slipping along a fault.
Archimedes
And farther north in California, at the Exploratorium, they are using a linear accelerator to deciperan ancient text by Archimedes. Considering the history of the document, you can see why.
This document, now called a palimpsest (writing material used several times after earlier writing has been erased), has a long and fascinating history. Archimedes, who lived between 287-212 B.C., wrote the original text and diagrams on papyrus. That document was lost, but other papyrus versions survived. A scribe copied Archimedes's writings onto sturdier goatskin parchment, probably in the second half of the tenth century A.D. In the thirteenth century, the manuscript was taken apart by Greek monks and the Archimedes text was scraped off. The parchment was recycled into a prayer book in a process called palimpsesting. The Archimedes manuscript then effectively disappeared for centuries, obscured by its new life as liturgical writings. For many years, it was in a monastery library in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
And that was just the beginning of its travails.