An unwritten law of physics: Every town on this planet worth its salt has an Irish pub.

A fellow literate reprobate, Killer (no, really), is in the throes of Crystal Zevon’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life & Times Of Warren Zevon.  He reports back with the following anecdotes about where a couple of Zevon’s songs came from.

In May 1975, with $480 dollars, Warren and his wife moved to Spain for about three months and ended up in Sitges. Once there, they found themselves in a bar called the Dubliner where the owner was an American ex-soldier of fortune named David Lindell. They become regulars, befriend David Lindell and Warren starts playing guitar there for spare change, drinks and food. One day Warren and David are bored and next thing you know, Warren and David have co-written a song: “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” is born. Check out David Lindell’s card (attached).

Wait, there’s more. There’s always more.

In the early ’70s Warren was the bandleader for the Everly Brothers touring band. He gets friendly with Phil. Phil likes to stay up late and watch old movies. One day Phil dares Warren to write a new dance craze song using the title from a 1930 movie called “Werewolf Of London.”  Warren goes over to a friend’s house and tells him Phil’s challenge. The friend happens to have a guitar riff he’s been sitting on for a year with nowhere to put it. Another friend stops by. After some chemical and alcohol inducement, they decide to each write a verse. The whole song was written in 10 – 15 minutes. None of them think anything of it. It is done completely as a goof based on a challenge from Phil, so no one records it, writes anything down or plans to do anything with it. Just three guys killing time in the afternoon. When Warren’s wife tells them it’s a hit song, they look at her askance and say if she likes it so much she should write it down! Luckily she happened to have some paper handy. Otherwise, the song may have disappeared into the ether that day.

Who doesn’t like a nice Warren Zevon story in honor of St. Patrick’s Day?

In the last twenty years, I have worked as:

chemistry lab assistant, mathematics tutor,
electronics store salesperson, bank teller, lawnmower,
geology lab assistant, babysitter, inorganic chemistry tutor, computer lab assistant,
geology research assistant, geologist intern, geology teaching assistant,
geological engineering / virtual reality research assistant,
virtual reality center coordinator, web designer, Indian languages advisor,
geologist, geophysicist, krewe accountant,
geospatial & engineering services technologist, tech blogger

What jobs (and other unpaid responsibilities) have you had?

* If you don’t get the title reference, you Must Watch This (and, no, it’s not that stupid South Park “Jarbs” episode).

You read yesterday’s VatulBlog post on natural disasters and the benefits of educating yourself in this time of information plenty.  Where do you start, however, when search engine output has a rather low signal-to-noise ratio?

1) A list of Google’s or Ask’s search terms shows many internet users cannot pose a question to save their lives. Use these 20 Tips For More Effective Google Searches to avoid being overwhelmed by search results.  Become one with Boolean.

2) There are many free science search tools out there.  Here is a review of the prominent ones.  Search early, search often.

3) Ask a librarian.  There exist these humans, many Library & Information Science graduates and other smart people, who work at libraries who can help you hone your search skills as well as find answers to your questions.  They also do funny dances with library carts, I hear, which is always worth the time spent at your local library.  Jokes aside, considering the number of people who don’t possess home computers and computer & online literacy, well-funded libraries and intelligent, helpful librarians are crucial to the future of information facilitation.  Also consider publishing your search results and analyses as a blog post to help others who may have the same question.

4) For humanity’s sake, lower the noise or help verify data.

Blair pointed me to The Economist’s The Data Deluge which simultaneously celebrates and bemoans the exponential increase in data, be it photographic, tabular, scientific or vital-statistical in nature, and how corporations are only beginning to find value in separating the wheat from the chaff.  Violation of privacy aside, the greatest threat to signal quality is data hoarding (especially by individuals, taxpayer-funded organizations and publishing houses) and a large amount of noise in the system.  Those who do put information out there don’t (want to) curate it, which includes ensuring accuracy and constant updates.  In a comment on the aforementioned Economist article, a D. Sherman says it best:

… the vast majority of of “noise” in databases is simply bad data, duly entered and propagated … We put a great deal of effort into collecting more and more data, but comparatively little into weeding out bad data. This implies that the sign[al]-to-noise ratio is only going to deteriorate. Part of the reason for that is that the incentives all favor collecting more data, but do not adequately penalize bad data.

… Members of the database resistance movement who are willing to risk more radical means of spoofing more important databases can readily imagine even more creative (though less legal) methods. When RFID tags and image-recognition tracking of people and vehicles becomes more common, the opportunities and means for injecting noise into the system will multiply exponentially.

The solution is a selective and sophisticated willingness to part with data depending on what the data involves.  Not divulging personal information and data hoarding are two different things.  While I value my personal privacy and often purposefully give wrong phone numbers and zip codes to websites and salespeople, I will readily part with any scientific, technological or social information that is not classified explicitly as proprietary.  Google and Bing are not entitled to my street address but they are to my paper on transtensional folding because Americans paid for it and not Elsevier or Springer.

Another sure-fire way to lower noise is to cut back on content replication.  A mature search engine will a) enforce canonical URLs and b) take a scythe to unabashed content scrapers who enjoy high search engine rankings.  I’ve lost track of the number of MY blog posts that show up on others’ sites as higher-ranked search hits.  (Just because my content is published under a CC-BY-NC-SA license does not mean you are entitled to pilfer it and ignore the non-commercial and share-alike components of the license.)  Also, take-down notices only work if you can find a responsive human on the other end to respond, and who has time for that?  There has to be an easier way to punish websites and aggregators for outright plagiarism and internet abuse.

Speaking of content replication, here’s an interesting “what-if” article on information copying and machine sentience.  I guess there is one benefit to a low signal-to-noise ratio in the network: really dumb Artificial Intelligence, should it emerge.

@geologynews wanted to know where he could find “a list of all earthquakes from 2010 (say, >M5.0+), not just from the past week or month.” At the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Earthquake Browser, of course!

The following map shows all 3228 earthquakes between January 1st, 2010 and today.

In two months, a tiny fraction of a percentage of a blink of the geological eye, there were around three thousand recorded movements of the lithosphere. They nicely outline Earth’s plates and some intra-plate activity: Oceans subducting under continents, the mid-Atlantic rift quietly creating new crust, the furious Pacific Ring of Fire, the East African Rift, India ramming away at Asia and America unraveling at the Basin and Range. The Earth is alive and doing its thing. Earthquakes aren’t oddities, they are the natural norm. Never forget that.

Next up are all earthquakes of Magnitude 5.0 and above for the same time frame.  These make up around 20% of all earthquakes in the last two months.

The IRIS Earthquake Browser uses the Google base map and interface, so you can zoom in on particular earthquake-hit regions and look at satellite imagery and terrain data along with regular map view.

I urge everyone to donate as much as they can to the victims of the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and also ask you to take an objective stance towards why natural disasters happen. As I explained to my physician brother who was concerned about the frequency and severity of recent earthquakes and attendant natural disasters, think of the earth as the human body, i.e. it’s all inter-connected and there is a perfectly plausible reason for all “ailments,” even ones we don’t yet fully understand.

Let’s use Haiti and Chile themselves as examples. Haiti is an impoverished and deforested former French island colony sitting on the steep, clayey soil over an active strike-slip fault which just moved in a catastrophic manner in the lead-up to the rainy and hurricane seasons. I hope to still be alive when the nation is rebuilt and recovers from its ongoing and upcoming physical, emotional and social trauma. The geographic shape of Chile could not have been fashioned more disastrously by the gods themselves. The nation parallels an active subduction zone to the west and a highly-explosive mountain range to the east.  When were this earthquake and associated tsunami NOT going to happen? (As it happened half a century before. And how long until the Andes let one loose?) Thankfully, Chilean buildings are more sturdy in build and the earthquake occurred offshore and not directly underfoot as in the case of Haiti. This also highlights the difference between the magnitude and intensity of an earthquake and why a 7.0 in Haiti wreaked more havoc than an 8.8 in Chile. Again, this time around, the generated tsunami did not take as many lives as in 2004.

Each new natural and unnatural disaster definitely weakens our collective will, but it’s not an excuse for brain rot. This is why I’m glad to be alive in the internet age. We use this interconnectedness to give and get help, hope and knowledge. Vive Haiti. Vive Chile.