Stalking the Big One

 If there are 3600 seconds in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, then there are 86400 seconds in one mean solar day, obviously - not counting the occasional leap second.  Multiply that on your favorite calculator by 36524 which is the number of days in 100 years, assuming that the century year is not a leap year - and you get 3,155,673,600 seconds.  Now press the reciprocal button on your favorite calculator and you will immediately see that by implication, if you have an earthquake fault that has a slip rate of one meter per century, then that will correspond to 3.169*10^-10 meters/second for the average slip rate of that particular fault, or approximately 3.17 Angstroms per second for each meter per century.  Which would mean that a typical active earthquake fault should radiate an acoustic signal associated with oscillations the associated Casimir field with a frequency which is proportional to the rate of slip and inversely proportional to any inter-ionic spacing for the various atoms and ions that have their respective fields go in and out of phase along any existing planes of fault slip.  Provided of course that the fault planes along a forming fracture plane have already formed, and yet they remain spatially proximal to the extent that the field gap is able to produce a signal.  Of course, once the main event is "just about to happen" if the fault gap increases to the point that the Casimir field dies off, then that would explain why the earth seems to fall silent, that is to say, just before the main shock.  This might also help to explain why at least for some earthquakes, the rate of change in frequency is linear in K,   or at least why it does not follow the normal equations of simple harmonic motion or classical wave mechanics.

This will only get curiouser and curiouser if I attempt to more fully develop the theory, because on the one hand, on such a serious subject as whether Casimer's analysis is mathematically sound, because of what it would imply,  insofar is attempting to analyze earthquake initiation based on quantum mechanical principles; but then again, as soon as one mentions Casimar, it can also lead to dark energy, and whether wormholes are potentially traversable (according to none other than Hawking and  Thorne, see Wikipedia!), as well as who knows what other kind of rabbit holes.

Yet that data is there for all to see …. and yes I will have a very interesting update on the hardware development side of this project in the next few days, along with additional source code.

But of course - if the Casimer effect were to be coupled with a clock reaction, analogous to the so called "iodine clock" …. well, this is something I will explain later …  

In the source code that I have provided for the sigma-delta part of the DSP core that I am working with on the Parallax P1, I have discovered that if I do some extreme underclocking when I simulate the Analog to Digital conversion and subsequent filtering using the Song "White Wedding" by Billy Idol as a test, well it seems to add an interesting what should I call it - but maybe it is a sort of "don't forget to bring the rice" like sound effect to the music, let's say around 4 minutes or so into the song;  or else it sounds almost like adding a maraca to the existing track - playing in perfect lock step to the beat!   This could of course lead to an extremely simple beat detection hack, which combined with a polyphase filter tree and some event detection hysteresis! 

Reminder to myself.  Fire up the spectrum analyzer software and post a screen shot showing how the CD rip of the Queens Greatest Hits album has a very obvious second harmonic component of the 50Hz British power line frequency near the beginning of the song Bohemian Rhapsody, down of course at about -70db (FS), but very obvious if you know how to look for it.

This may actually be important of course, because the experiments that I have been doing with FFT+DSP+sigma-delta seem to show that although low bit rate sigma-delta transcoding can suffer from noise bursts, as well as out of ban oscillations, which are characteristic of the convolutional nature of the algorithm, it does not seem to suffer from the so called "Cher effect" which MP3 suffers from at low bit rates, i.e., unwanted frequency shifting.  This would of course be important to know about, when analyzing signals that might contain evidence of visco-elastic failure mode.

Note - that's visco-elastic failure, not DISCO-elastic!  Sorry, I couldn't resist!

This would be a good place to mention that the USGS spectrograms for various seismographs are available at USGS.gov, and they are of course in the public domain, for licensing purposes!  If you go to the USGS website you can normally find about 47 of them gong back about two weeks, however - if you know how to hack the URL you can usually find the older ones that are still up; like this July 5th spectrogram from Geyser Peak.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/spectrograms/24hr/23/20190705

Looking at the August 21st spectrum from the same seismograph, it is immediately obvious that there was some activity at around 5.5Hz, with some faint but very chaotic phase noise between 5 and 10 Hertz, and a magnitude 5 aftershock soon followed in the Ridgecrest area.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/spectrograms/24hr/23/20190821

Of course, going back to March 9th it is very interesting to examine the instabilities associated with the 5.5Hz and 7Jz signals that were present at that time.  is this the original premonitory signals?

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/spectrograms/24hr/23/20190309

Also take a look at the signals from June, … etc., where that was a massive buildup of phase noise in the 5 to 10Hz range, easily detected from a distance of about 470 miles!

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/spectrograms/24hr/23/20190608

Here it is August 25, 2019 and I still don't have live P2 hardware to port my code base over to.  Still I venture on, and will continue to work with Windows 10/Visual Studio and the P1 hardware, as well as conducting experiments with the P1 stuff that I have so that when I do get the final hardware - it will be possible to simply configure the filtering and processing algorithms by, for example, simply describing the filter tree in XML or maybe in SCRATCH!  (even if that is a bit far out there!)