Well that, at least, is about to change!

Many states don't have those high speed limits. I live in Oklahoma, and travel all over the states for work. At home speed limits are mostly 65 mph on highways outside of the city. 70 on interstates. 75 on turnpikes in certain parts of the state. In TX, I commonly see 70/75 mph speed limits in the South and West parts of the state. In Louisiana, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Mississippi.. sometimes just 45, most often not more than 55 mph speed limits. It depends on what the terrain allows. So I would expect lots of people in the NE and select other parts of the country wouldn't know any better, since they haven't been to flyover country where we live. :)

Austin != the rest of Texas.. Their motto is "keep Austin weird" and it's a mix between hipsters, republicans and tech savvy professionals. A very dramatically different place than any other Texas city.

You must not be aware of this, but I was informed when I took first aid training & CPR that because I was a certified first responder, many states require me to ask if the person would like assistance, and comply if they respond affirmatively. If they respond negatively, or cannot respond, then almost every state absolves you of liability. "Good Samaritan" laws typically protect you from legal repercussions if you help and screw up. It's a civil suit, case law issue though - not usually enforced by statute.

It's hard to tell exactly what's on it, but I see a pad with what looks to be four tanks just north of there. It looks like it has a few horizontal and vertical separators too. Major hydrofracturing activity in Oklahoma is centered around other places though.. McAlester, El Reno and Elk City.

The kinds of wells that are known to be quake-causing, according to my geophysicist friend, are water disposal wells. These will have lots of tanks, often 10-20 tanks, for storage buffering. It will also conspicuously have electricity leading to the site to power the injection pumps.

The XY location of the quakes has an uncertainty of 8 miles. The depth was something a little less than a mile uncertainty. So you don't need to look *right* by the given epicenter. I don't think that particular facility could be responsible for releasing several high-magnitude quakes, when compared to what has been causing problems in Arkansas and Texas.

Those ridges may or may not be fault lines.. there is another phenomena that formed those here, the dust bowl. They're all over the place, so I can't say for sure, you'd have to consult the USGS maps. I think there is a fault line through Lincoln County.

Probably Google maps are too outdated to show a recent problem well, in hindsight. I'm curious what kind of operations are in the area, because I've never been there for work, but I have been nearly everywhere in the state where there are major operations going on. Based on the Prague homepage, it looks to be a depleted field, and I wouldn't expect any major hydrofracturing or disposal activity there.

I'm glad you posted this.. but did you read it?

With his arm twisted, Holland would still not definitively tie the microquakes to fracturing at the well. It is fiendishly difficult to attribute earthquakes, given existing scientific uncertainties about why and when quakes are triggered. What is clear is that the quakes are not common: As Holland noted, firms have drilled 100,000 fracturing wells in Oklahoma, with three minor seismic events reported.

The fracturing continued at the Picket well after the earthquakes, and the survey detected no additional seismic activity during that time, Holland said. The well was located in a geologically complex region riven by thrust rocks, he added, and a quake would likely have occurred at some point with or without the drilling -- the rocks were primed for it.

For all of those talking about hydrofracking / drilling / wastewater disposal wells in the same sentence, as if they are the same thing.. they are three completely different processes. First you drill a well. Then the drill rig leaves, and there is a well casing going to the formation. Hydrofracturing equipment moves in and swarms over the wellsite.. but this does not involve a tall drilling rig, as there is no drilling going on. High pressure water and sand are pumped downhole until the well is sufficiently fractured. Then the fracturing equipment leaves. The well makes oil, gas and water. Not always oil.. but usually. The water is useless, so it's trucked off. If there is a whole lot of water, then trucking is expensive, so they drill a wastewater disposal well which pumps the water into a different formation. Sometimes this is on a fault line, and sometimes it lubricates the fault so that earthquakes start happening.

But notice.. the wastewater disposal well is both not on the same site nor in the same formation as the hydrofractured well. If hydrofracturing has any effect at all, it must be due to fracturing on a fault line where there isn't already a lot of fluid accumulated.

FUD. According to a geophysicist buddy, salt-water injection wells have been known to cause earthquakes due to lubrication of fault lines. He doesn't seem to think there's a link to hydrofracturing. I work in the oilfield, I don't think there's a lot of that kind of activity in that area. If you check the satellite maps you can verify that, wells stand out as bright square pads. We would be much more likely to have that happen in the area West of Oklahoma City, where there is LOTS of horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing going on right now, rather than over by Prague, if hydrofracturing actually caused quakes.

Earth quakes, tornados, floods, etc. It's just God smiting the them for mean spirited politics and wacko religious views. Not that God hates those people mind you. He just doesn't approve of their "lifestyle".

It's interesting to me how easy it is to start with the "us and them" attitudes when you never leave one given region.

So what? They sell solar panels. I install them all the time.

Confirmation of the death isn't a problem, there are all sorts of efficient ways to do that. There are other reasons that people aren't being reported as deceased.

One of my very close friends died recently and the reason none of his Facebook friends have filed is because Facebook will delete all of his status updates. Maybe it is painful to see his name or face pop up every once in a while on my Facebook page, but it's much more painful to see all of our conversations on his wall get deleted because of Facebook policy.

Oh, for anyone who wonders - we have video from a sonogram that distinctly shows the kid scratching at his groin at around 7 months gestation. It's time we dragged that out and showed it to everyone again. LMAO

You need to put that on Youtube. For progress!

I have a long distance relationship, several states over, so I don't get to see my girlfriend often. This summer I'm moving out to be with her, so last Christmas I tried to make things go extra well. To prepare for Valentines day, when I knew I wouldn't be able to be there, I hid ten slips of paper all over her room with passwords on them. I gave her clues to find the next one each time she found one, in the form of little riddles. She's found all of them now, and I'm about to send her a box with a microcontroller/display that won't open without the passwords. Inside are some personal things, and candy, a letter, etc.

I was inspired by another project that was location-locked. It had a GPS and merely displayed the distance to the unlock location when a button was pressed.

FYI, fly-ball governor.

Of course the format ages, but what formats are there that can't be converted? Just the modern ones. If I wanted an mp3 of a Led Zeppelin song and you sent me a wav I wouldn't be the least bit upset, because there are a myriad of conversion apps out there. In ten years a digital copy doesn't have coffee stains or torn pages. Even if its format is proprietary someone will reverse engineer it, so sorry, that argument doesn't hold up.