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"Goodbye, Jean-Luc, I'm gonna miss you. You had such potential. But then again, all good things must come to an end."
- Q, Star Trek: TNG

Wired: Scientists Want Your MacBook for Earthquake Detection

by Ken Newquist / April 7, 2008

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.

Comments

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.

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?