I don't have the faintest idea what I am doing on here but I joined this blog up so I can erupt over the state of play with volcanoes. I have picked up a following on Discus' web-site without having the faintest idea how to respond to any of them.
I am just no good at social media. But I am a socialist. Just an antisocial one.
OK, if by some strang chance anyone has followed me here. Welcome. If you are wondering what I am about, I am a thaumaturge.
I forecast geophysical phenomena as and when I can spot them. This ability varies with the season. Sometimes it is due to ignorance and sometimes it is due to climate problems. I am not a climatologist and nor am I interested in the art. It is just that with conditions in Brazil at the moment things are a bit ropey in my favourite scrying tool.
My crystal ball:
http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/charts/viewer/index.shtml?type=mslp-precip&tz=UTC&area=SH&model=G&chartSubmit=Refresh+View
Another favourite is the NA-EFS but that has been a load of crap lately. (And I can't see why.)
What I am trying to do at the moment is forecast volcanoes from seismic backgrounds. I was having some success with forecasting tropical storms. That blasted f word in Boston seems to have effed me over. Feeking Americans!
And what I want to rant about today is the Smithsonian archives, a website called Volcano Discovery and the volcano lists in Wikipedia.
Let's deal with the latter first. The entries in Wikipedia are for morons. Some twink from Fox News seems to be in charge of all their data. I can't say any more as the swearing will annoy you and when I come back to look at this blog, it will annoy me.
Volcano Discovery is alright in its own way. The site is unreadble of course as the fourth rate adverts put you off. I didn't even know there was a fourth rate for adverts. The least said about them the better.
The Smithsonian volcano archives were sold to Adobe, which as you all know is the commercial arm of the CIA/NSA. (I keep mixing them up. Which is the one that owns a Bible?) (The other one owns the USA. (If you don't believe, me have a think about why Comcast is deliberately bad at supplying broadband to the USA.))
OK; to business:
You can forecast -or could forecast recently, where there was going to be a tropical storm from the lists of earthquakes (supplied by the SED) (If you want the NSA to go straight to your searches, use the list put out by the USGS called the NEIC.)
You can easily tell when the US secret police have got at a website: The agency has moved from HTML to Adobe or Javascript.
Here are a couple of examples.
Sort them out yourself. I am not interested. What I wanted to do was compile a short list of eruptions so I could go back over the SED lists and match them up. It is a simple process provided you can get the data.
I suppose I could get the data from Volcano Discovery but it means looking at their abortion of a website. My life is already shitty enough, thanks. Someone called Lucas Wilson was publishing a PDF of volcano data, complete with photos of the happy events. But he seems to have moved on to better things.
(Anyone know where he is these days?)
Anyway the point is that until recently you could tell where the tropical storms would peak by the break in the lulls or what in Maths is called the "saddle point". The highest low spot. I don't see a need to supply you with links. All you need to do to find out about saddle points is highlight the term and right click on your local Secret Police patrol engine.
My problem is that I don't have decent charts. I have a small collection; a selection of which are some use. All I really need is dates of appropriate eruptions and lists of earthquakes. You can try for yourself how accurate a method that is, once you become good at it. In a few hours practice, you can see what I am talking about.
It is a little harder to forecast volcanic eruptions. Which is all there is of use in any of this. I personally find that art more pleasurable than compiling and researching old data. With the real thing, you always get something as a reward. It may not be what you wanted but...
With data, if you comb through it carefully enough you may not find what you want and then you are stuffed. Well that is about all I have to say on the matter. I wish that someone would compile a decent Wikipedia list get rid of the tripe. The problem is it is open to anyone to edit it. Arseholes seem to get attracted to such places.
Maybe that is a good thing. I seem to have reached my pinnacle at geo-physics with volcanoes. The arseholes of the world. At least there is only me here at the moment and so I can say what I effing well like.
