Wapsi Square Forum

FWIW, I was on Guam back in the late 70s, and enjoyed a 5.2 earthquake while I was just setting down my tray in the dining hall for lunch. The building was reinforced concrete embedded in the coral rock surface in that part of the island, as it was expected to survive earthquakes and typhoons. The quake went on for about 20 seconds, which is plenty of time to enjoy the action. Silverware danced off the tables, chairs and tables shifted, and since I was standing, it was like a quick drive on a rutted, grooved road. The deep roar of the walls (and everything else) shaking was loud enough you couldn't shout over it -- I barely heard the scream of the woman only two tables away.

The seismic scale is logarithmic, so the Christchurch earthquake mentioned (6.3) was more than 10 times (6.2) stronger than the one I encountered. That evening, there was a 4.0 aftershock, and for that, it was like having a heavy truck rumble by outside your house.

YMMV!

And then there's quakes where there's not supposed to be ones - or due to mankind playing around with the water table (see Oklahoma and Fracking).

AnotherFairportfan wrote:I don't know if it was responsible for the re-arrangement of the northern border of Kentucky out there, which leaves a small chunk of Kentucky physically separated from the rest of the state by a piece of Missouri, but that's where that is, and it's due to a loop in the river...

You're thinking of Kaskaskia, Kentucky? That apparently didn't get cut off from the Kentucky mainland (and turned into an enclave surrounded by Missouri) until the end of the 19th century. So, it wasn't an immediate result of the big New Madrid quake.

The long-term effects of the quake on the Mississippi River might have been involved, of course. But, considering the way the Mississippi has historically "wanted" to move around naturally, I doubt that anybody could ever disentangle the quake-related effect from the natural (silt-buildup-and-erosion) and man-made (cutting-down-trees-and-eroding-the-banks) effects over a period of close to a century.

That poor town... Kaskaskia seems to have been flooded, washed out, moved, demolished, rebuilt, flooded again, etc. on a very regular basis for a long time. "The inky-dinky spider went up the spout again..."

Dave wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:I don't know if it was responsible for the re-arrangement of the northern border of Kentucky out there, which leaves a small chunk of Kentucky physically separated from the rest of the state by a piece of Missouri, but that's where that is, and it's due to a loop in the river...

You're thinking of Kaskaskia, Kentucky? That apparently didn't get cut off from the Kentucky mainland (and turned into an enclave surrounded by Missouri) until the end of the 19th century. So, it wasn't an immediate result of the big New Madrid quake.

Nope - i meant at New Madrid.

Apparently the western borders of Kentucky are defined as something like "North of the such-and-such parallel and south of the river" ... and the river makes a hella north/south loop at New Madrid:

That isn't an island, though...

Also, what I meant was, people here in central Arkansas make a huge deal about minor tremors, when that particular fault is pretty far away from here. It's like the only person who felt it is the person talking about it, when it doesn't even really make headline news. Not even sure if it makes it into the paper at all, really.

Granted, it's "predicted" to have a 50% chance of having a major quake sometime in the next 40-something years or so, so who knows.

Alkarii wrote:That isn't an island, though...

I didn't say it was an island - i said it was a separate piece of Kentucky, physically cut off by a part of Missouri at New Madrid, where we know that the quakes caused the river to change its course radically.

True, but if you zoom in on that map, it says that's "Island Number 10", unless that's for something outside the frame.

It may have been an island at one point, or was a designated loop in a prior meander of the river. Consider Badgley Island, just south of Shreveport, LA, here.

Further north was a residential area referred to as Shreves Island, along an old meander as well. Note the long lake (formerly river) along East King's Highway.

Catawampus wrote:I have no idea what classification of bicycle mine is. It works fine on roads, I've used it on rough trails, I once took it straight down the side of one of the mountains here just to see what that was like (the answer: rather bumpy). It seems to handle snow well enough. Ice gets a bit trickier; maybe I can glue some thumbtacks to the tires.

Gluing thumbtacks won't work. They will come off in no time.

There are generally two ways to end up with studded tires: buy them already made, or make your own by taking the time to drill holes into some knobby tires, and inserting screws into those holes from the inside, so that only a short portion of the sharp end of the screws sticks out of the outside of the tire. Make sure that the screws you use have a flat head, and use some duct tape on the inside of the tire to cover said screw heads, so as to avoid damaging the inner tube. The process is rather time intensive, but I'm told it yields some interesting results.

From what I've read, such homemade studded tires will work really good on ice of any kind (you can even go on a lake or a skating rink, with those - though some people might object to that, as you will certainly be doing quite the damage to the ice surface), but if you try to go on clean asphalt, it will actually be quite slippery and unpleasant. YMMV.


The only way to do both (i.e. clean roads and ice) is to purchase an actual studded tire, like the ones I linked to earlier.

lake_wrangler wrote:From what I've read, such homemade studded tires will work really good on ice of any kind (you can even go on a lake or a skating rink, with those - though some people might object to that, as you will certainly be doing quite the damage to the ice surface), but if you try to go on clean asphalt, it will actually be quite slippery and unpleasant. YMMV

Scandinavians - Norwegians originally, i think - invented ice stock car racing.

Originally, at least - there may be purpose-built tires for it these days - they would get old bald tires and drive nails through the tread from the inside.

{There's an ice-racing sequence in the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service - about which you may have heard Bad Things, most of which are incorrect.}

AnotherFairportfan wrote:I don't know if it was responsible for the re-arrangement of the northern border of Kentucky out there, which leaves a small chunk of Kentucky physically separated from the rest of the state by a piece of Missouri, but that's where that is, and it's due to a loop in the river...

Nah, that's just the result of politicians deciding on arbitrary boundaries on maps without really worrying about the actual geography there. The border there wasn't really finalised until just before the Civil War, long after the big earthquake, and even then they decided to leave it at that particular parallel rather than mess around with it.

lake_wrangler wrote:

Catawampus wrote:I have no idea what classification of bicycle mine is. It works fine on roads, I've used it on rough trails, I once took it straight down the side of one of the mountains here just to see what that was like (the answer: rather bumpy). It seems to handle snow well enough. Ice gets a bit trickier; maybe I can glue some thumbtacks to the tires.

Gluing thumbtacks won't work. They will come off in no time.

Yeah, I wouldn't really just try gluing on tacks. Really, I have no particular desire to try riding on lots of ice, so I doubt I'll ever bother making or buying dedicated ice tires. Maybe I'd play around experimenting with tire chains or something such as that, but I don't really have the need.

My dad said that when he was a kid with a paper route, they tried to make bicycle tire chains with clothesline.

Said it didn't work very well.

Typeminer wrote:My dad said that when he was a kid with a paper route, they tried to make bicycle tire chains with clothesline.

Said it didn't work very well.

Just about anything you try to do in a snow chain kind of way will only work if you have disk brakes, rather than rim brakes... It's easy to guess why...

AnotherFairportfan wrote:{There's an ice-racing sequence in the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service - about which you may have heard Bad Things, most of which are incorrect.}

The moment you mentioned ice racing and James Bond, my mind went to something I had seen once, for which there is no pre-made link to it anymore, so I had to chase down an original YouTube video to plug into ... the Benny Hillifier...

If it is cold enough that I need to concern myself with tires specifically built for handling ice, then it is too cold for me to go bicycling.

Well... Huh. Just found out from my brother-in-law's Facebook post that my sister has cleared out their account to pay for a lawyer. Apparently, he had been signing up for dating sites. But then, I know my sister, and I'm surprised something like this didn't happen sooner.

Kind of makes me wonder if my family just has some kind of gene for not making things work. My brother had a divorce, my parents almost had one, and both of my dad's siblings had divorces. I'm starting to wonder if I'd even have a chance if I ever got married, or if I should just become a monk.

Heh, well, there's a Carmelite monastery not far from here. Nice looking place, too.

(If we were Cavemen, most of us would be Dead by now...)

lake_wrangler wrote:

Typeminer wrote:My dad said that when he was a kid with a paper route, they tried to make bicycle tire chains with clothesline.

Said it didn't work very well.

Just about anything you try to do in a snow chain kind of way will only work if you have disk brakes, rather than rim brakes... It's easy to guess why...

They had coaster brakes, back wheel only. I never thought of that.

This is from a Dark Horse Comics mini-series comic Lady Killer - a story of a female CIA assassin during 1960's-era Seattle.

But for some reason, I thought some of the people in this forum would like this...

lake_wrangler wrote: Just about anything you try to do in a snow chain kind of way will only work if you have disk brakes, rather than rim brakes... It's easy to guess why...

Rim brakes ARE disk brakes.

Or rather, modern disk brakes derive from them.