Wooden seismometer
Woke up after a nice LONG sleep. Noticed that the floorboards were creaking more than usual, in a way that usually happens after a windstorm has pushed the house around ... or after the small earthquakes in 2000. Checked the Weather Bureau. Nope, no wind overnight, no big changes of temperature.

Then I noticed this:

According to United States Geological Survey, a 4.1 magnitude earthquake hit just southeast of Sandpoint near Lake Pend Oreille at 7:32 p.m. Their website shows that more than 350 people from 51 area codes reported feeling shaking. A second earthquake occurred just hours later and north of Sandpoint's quake. According to USGS, at 10:43 p.m. a magnitude 4.2 hit near Ponderay. Their website shows almost 600 people from 75 zip codes said they felt it. People in areas as far south as Orofino and all the way up to the Canadian border, as well as in Washington with residents Colville and Spokane reporting feeling movement.

So there was an earthquake! Didn't wake me, didn't even show up in a dream. Thanks, old house, for serving as a recorder! No thanks to my internal predictor, which didn't give me any hint of an approaching quake in the last few days.

Bit later: Lots of people felt it, especially in the north part of town.

Later again: Maybe the quake did influence a dream. I woke around 11 to pee, which would have been just after the biggest of the three quakes. Wasn't thinking about anything except peeing, but one odd bit of dream lingered in memory. In the dream I had removed my glasses and set them down on the desk with a THUMP, hard enough to knock the nosepieces off. I was halfway surprised in the morning when I found my actual eyeglasses intact and normal. (The 2000 quake swarm generally showed as a THUMP after a rumble, sort of like reversed thunder.)

I'm always amazed by the instant creativity of the dream-generator. The time interval between physical arrival of a sound at the cochlea and interpretation in the cortex is about 2 seconds. The dream-scripter has to pick up the sound separately from a reflex channel and develop an appropriate bit of stage business to make the sound plausible by the time it hits awareness. Could you develop an animation and pass it into the visual channel in 2 seconds? I sure as fuck couldn't. But the dream-scripter can. Needless to say, this was "evolved" by "random mutations" and "natural selection". All the experts say that, and all the experts will SLAM YOU IN FUCKING JAIL for saying otherwise, so that's what I say too.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 3:06 AM