Shock and aftershocks

Most recent aftershock at the top:

1.4 2007/10/30 21:38:50 37.412N 121.763W 7.3 7 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.4 2007/10/30 21:30:51 37.426N 121.772W 7.5 8 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.2 2007/10/30 21:23:39 37.413N 121.756W 9.8 8 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
2.1 2007/10/30 20:41:31 37.397N 121.747W 8.7 8 km ( 5 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
1.7 2007/10/30 20:39:29 37.427N 121.770W 9.1 8 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.3 2007/10/30 20:35:02 37.345N 121.705W 8.9 11 km ( 7 mi) ESE of Alum Rock
1.8 2007/10/30 20:31:57 37.430N 121.772W 9.5 8 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.4 2007/10/30 20:26:53 37.404N 121.749W 8.4 8 km ( 5 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
1.3 2007/10/30 20:26:18 37.493N 121.758W 24.9 14 km ( 9 mi) ENE of Milpitas
1.3 2007/10/30 20:22:44 37.428N 121.777W 8.9 8 km ( 5 mi) NNE of Alum Rock
1.6 2007/10/30 20:16:12 37.404N 121.750W 8.2 8 km ( 5 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
1.3 2007/10/30 20:13:48 37.403N 121.749W 8.2 8 km ( 5 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
1.5 2007/10/30 20:12:55 37.419N 121.745W 11.1 9 km ( 6 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.4 2007/10/30 20:12:23 37.409N 121.675W 7.3 14 km ( 9 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
5.6 2007/10/30 20:04:54 37.432N 121.776W 9.2 8 km ( 5 mi) NNE of Alum Rock

5.6

The USGS just put up the number—5.6 on the Richter scale. Close to Alum Rock, in the south bay.

Earthquake

An earthquake just rumbled through Palo Alto.

It lasted for at least 5 seconds.

Must be a reasonable size to last that long!

I left my office, went into the house and everyone but Norbert (Gloria, Cole, Owen, and Pearl) was just coming out from under the kitchen table.

Doomed: Meyer Library

Stanford has announced that Meyer Library is going to be ripped down "by 2012."

I noticed that nowhere in that Stanford Daily article do they name the architect of the building, the "Internationalist" John Carl Warnecke, who is also responsible for the Stanford Bookstore, the Stanford Post Office, and (farther afield) the truly weird AT&T Long Lines Building, a apocalyptic and windowless skyscraper designed to "protect the valuable equipment within." It looks like something you'd see looming in the background of a Terminator movie. I don't know much more about that building, but I wonder what's in it today. Who has the corner office in that building, I wonder?

Back to Meyer Library. From the Stanford Daily article:

* * *

"Meyer Library is essentially doomed," said Andrew Herkovic, director of communications and development of libraries. "The building has not aged very gracefully, it needs millions of dollars worth of seismic upgrades and it's not cost-effective to keep it in the long term. It's also, in my opinion, an eyesore."

A second reason for the library's demolition is its violation of previous plans for campus layout.

"The original campus master plan wanted that area to be a corridor, not a building," Herkovic said. "Today it is very much in the way of traffic, and it also stands out oddly as a building larger than those around it. Architecturally, that's considered a defect."

* * *
In this way earlier painstaking debates about Stanford architecture are swept away.

I don't really like the building, either, and I'm glad to see it go, I guess, but it makes me wonder whether it's worth thinking about architecture at all in a serious way. Particularly on university campuses, all it takes is a few administrators to throw out the word "architecturally" and "violation," and that's it.

Yet there are some buildings is hard to imagine Stanford ever blowing away. The Quad, for example, and maybe Hoover Tower. Everything else could easily get ripped down I think. They're doing it already, in a big way, on the west campus.

Queen of the Night aria, III

Queen of the Night Aria, II

Queen of the Night Aria, I

From Raph Waldo's Religion

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and read fatal interrogations in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him. False position introduces cant, perjury, simony, and ever a lower class of mind and character into the clergy: and, when the hierarchy is afraid of science and education, afraid of piety, afraid of tradition, and afraid of theology, there is nothing left but to quit a church which is no longer one.

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