Sunhusky's Alaska: March 2014

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Palmer for lunch and the earthquake center's open house

It was a beautiful day to be out and about.

ADN headline on day of Alaskan Statehood on display in the lobby of the Palmer Hotel.

Poor wolfie and bear forever stand guard in a little nook beside the hotel reservation desk.

The ol' water tower and the mountains beyond.

Earthquake simulator outside the earthquake center, which is now the national center for earthquake coverage.

I'm sure there is probably a very proper techie term for this but if there is, I didn't pick it up. It is way past cool, however. It connects to a computer and there's a video display inside that rotates and changes.

This simple computer screen impressed me most cos, well, see the darker line near the bottom. This is a seismograph printout. The guy that was explaining it all to us showed how sensitive it is by jumping up and down roughly beside it. The line moved! It's the line that monitors the building itself and the force of him just jumping -- and he was just a normal sized guy -- went to a sensor outside the walls, was picked up, and sent back to this monitor all within the blink of an eye. How cool is that?

Right beside to the seismograph display was this monitor. It's simply collecting and saving info from all around the world as it happens.

The camera flash sorta dulled it, but the four green balls on the top display, the man said, were simply showing the waves of the satellites that read, monitor, and share info with them. The bottom screen puts it all together in techie terms, in a sense.

Another set of computer screens showing incoming info and changing info. I was most taken with the video screen at bottom right, tho', which was showing video clips of the damage from the Good Friday Quake here in Alaska.

On the way out, the view across the quake simulator -- no, no way I was getting in that thing -- and across the parking lot to the mountains beyond. Such a freaking beautiful day...one of many of late. Lots more info was shared inside, btw, but mostly didn't lend itself to photos.