Nuketown

Wired: Scientists Want Your MacBook for Earthquake Detection

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Mon, 04/07/2008 - 12:29pm

Earthquakes cause vibrations. Certain Mac and PC notebook computers come with vibration detectors used to shutdown their hard drives should the computers fall. So why not, asks a seismologist, use the accelerometers on the computers as a distributed network for detecting earthquakes?.

You can help out by visiting the Quake Catcher Network's home page. Right now it only works on Macs, but a version for HP laptops is coming soon.

Constant Reader (not verified) said,

Mon, 04/07/2008 - 5:42pm

This reminds me of when SETI was trying to get folks to run a program of theirs as a screensaver to help them identify evidence of life in space. Only, you know, grounded a bit more in reality. No pun intended.

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Kenneth Newquist said,

Mon, 04/07/2008 - 9:16pm

heh. I remember those days. I lost track of the project over the last few years, though I see they're still going strong through BIONC (which I just downloaded to see what's what).

The big question regarding the earthquake detector is simply this: will it register graboids?

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