If they didn’t, the control device would heat up as much as the hob.

Using the “water analogy” for electricity, voltage is like water pressure inside a pipe, current is like water flow. The power consumed by an electrical device is the voltage change across it times the current through it.

If a switch is turned off, it holds back the full voltage from the mains, but no current flows through it, so the switch consumes no power, because anything times zero is zero. If it’s turned on, the current is high but it doesn’t hold back the voltage at all, so again no power consumed by the switch.

But if you turn the switch on “halfway”, so it blocks half the mains voltage and lets the other half pass through to the hob, then hob and switch carry the same current across the same voltage change, so the switch consumes as much power as the hob. This is wasteful, but more importantly it’s dangerous, because the switch will produce as much heat as the hob.

This technique is called “pulse modulation”, and it’s incredibly common, not just in stoves. Any time a digital device is controlling a smooth variation of something, the device is usually just switching it on and off. Often the switching happens too fast for humans to notice (like dimmable lighting) or the signal goes through a filter that smooths out the pulses.

Yeah, so, this is completely antithetical to everything I just laid out. I.e., you're effectively asking for a prediction after I just spent a significant amount of time trying to explain why these are not possible. PSHA maps for a given region are going to be the best bet for effectively background risk. As new events occur, these of course are updated as we consider whether a large event has increased or decreased risk in a certain place (e.g., through loading or unloading of related faults through Coulomb stress transfer, etc.) and as we learn more about an area (i.e., expanded paleoseismology records, faults are discovered through mapping, etc). Similarly, there will be specific short duration forecasts related to individual large earthquakes, i.e., aftershock forecasts. Beyond that, even within the area of the world I specifically focus on (and for which I understand the local geology and earthquake hazards reasonably well), there is no meaningful way for me, or anyone else, to make statements like what you're asking for. Anyone who does is either irresponsible or trying to sell you something.

As a relevant aside, for anyone musing on the potential benefits of true earthquake prediction in the sense outlined in my earlier answer (and sidestepping all of the reasons why we don't generally think it's possible), I would highly recommend this opinion piece by Dave Petley (a geologist who works on quantifying natural hazards). The general thesis is that basically, unless predictions (as defined above) are 100% accurate (which they never could be, even in the rosiest view of our future capabilities), they are unlikely to improve outcomes anymore than forecasts (as defined above) and would likely actually have significant negative outcomes potentially making "predictions" worse than "forecasts", i.e., the risks associated with either false negatives or false positives are very large both in an economic and human life sense.

H5N1 is more versatile than the vast majority of viruses. There are lots of viruses and H5N1 certainly isn't unique, but it is unusual.

H5N1 is among a fairly small number of viruses that have a very clear and obvious potential to cause human outbreaks, and for that reason public health groups have tracked it closely since it emerged in the 1990s.

Many of the other viruses in that category (obvious human pandemic potential) are also influenza viruses (H7N9, various swine influenza viruses), but there are many others - you've probably heard of Ebola, Monkeypox, and Zika, for example, but there are a dozen or two others including Nipah, Marburg, Lassa fever, MERS-CoV, and so on.

(Bat coronaviruses were also on that list since the early 2000s when SARS, and COVID proved the virologists right.)

Good question! So the duration of the ground motion in a specific place is not usually directly related to what we would call the "source time function" (STF), i.e., a description of how long the earthquake rupture on the fault took to occur.

Let's first consider the STF, this is typically considered in terms of moment rate per time (e.g., Figure 2 in Vallee, 2013) where the total seismic moment released during an earthquake (which directly relates to the mangitude, i.e., the moment magnitude) is effectively the area under a STF curve. From figure in the linked paper we can see that the same magnitude earthquake can have different patterns of moment release (i.e., Figure 2 a-c are all the same magnitude events and thus released the same total moment, but with either ruptures that occurred more slowly or quickly so moment rate varies between them). There are a variety of details of an earthquake where the STF is important, but as we'll see, duration of ground shaking at a location is not usually one of them.

If we shift our attention to the duration of ground motion, we can consider a range of empirical equations that have developed to try to estimate duration of shaking, specifically Table 1 from Yaghmaei-Sabegh et al., 2014, we can see that total moment (in the form of moment magnitude) appears in all of these equations, but none of them directly consider anything about the STF or speed of the rupture in a formal sense. Instead, you'll see that in addition to the magnitude, there are few other general earthquake properties (e.g., depth of the hypocenter), but then a lot of things specific to the "site" you're considering, both in the sense of things in relation to the specific earthquake (e.g., distance from the rupture) but also more generally (e.g., soil type, etc.). This reflects that broadly, while there are obvious controls from the available seismic energy (which will be dictated primarily by the total moment, i.e., magnitude, and the sites distance from the source), there are also a lot of site effects which can impact duration of shaking (and other important details, like peak ground acceleration, dominant period of the shaking, etc). In detail, the type of rocks and their geometry can play a large role in the specifics of shaking in a particular place. E.g., seismic waves in sedimentary basins tend to "reverberate" and thus the duration of shaking can be significantly longer than outside the basin and as they reverberate, they can have both constructive and destructive interference with each other and in many cases can amplify shaking at particular frequencies (which is very important to understand if you're trying to engineer a building to survive an earthquake).

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Over time rings will always get aligned with the rotation axis of the planet because all other configurations are unstable. That means all rings will be in the same plane. Very short-term you can have debris in other orbits but that won't form a nice ring. Here is a video explaining why.

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it's cheaper and more efficient to use a relay.

They have effectively zero contact resistance, but can switch the current only so fast and only do that so many times before wearing out and are fairly noisy, but even if they fail, they are readily available and easily replaced. This means compromises have to be made on the switching speed

if you wanted to have more granular control you would need power transistors/triacs to be able to switcher the current fast enough to modulate power, these would be more expensive, and less efficient, wasting power and requiring heat sinks for the components and extra circuitry to drive them correctly, increasing costs with no benefit as the food doesn't really care about how power is regulated

induction stoves need high frequency switching to work so they must use electronics, so they always have actual power control rather than "bang-bang" control

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Amazing explanation, thanks so much!

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The very unsatisfying answer is that nobody really knows. There aren't a lot of fossil beds immediately on either side of the K-Pg boundary, which means we don't really know how long the overall extinction took, let alone how long the recovery was, at least not on a global scale. There are estimates for the length of the extinction ranging from a few years to over 100,000.

Part of the problem is that you're dealing with an incredibly incomplete record. Preservation of fossils is rare, and finding them is difficult, so often researchers are trying to draw conclusions from very narrow sets of data and extrapolate it to the rest of the ecosystem. Like this one drawing conclusions from insect bites on fossilized leaves. They're making a lot of reasonable assumptions, but it's not exactly definitive even on a local scale.

It's also very difficult to narrow things down in geology/palaeontology to less than a few thousand years, so any numbers you find that are more precise than that aren't going to be based on actual data collected from the rocks. There's the convenient Iridium layer that generally lets you know which side of the K-Pg boundary you're on, but beyond that the most precise rock dates you can probably find would be +/-10,000 years.

So yeah. Any numbers you can get out of this are probably going to be large ranges, possibly overlapping each other.

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Has no one fed all historical earthquake data into some pattern-recognition machine??

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As others have said, no it is not particularly unique in terms of the amount of species hosts it affects.

Animal cells come in different shapes and sizes but other than that, they are they are functionally and anatomically the exact same across different species. It does not matter much that we humans are closely related to other primates and not closely to birds, sea lions, etc. because we have the same cells either way.

The relevant part in terms of whether the virus can attach or not is due to things like different animo acid / receptors / acids covering the animal cell and preventing the virus from binding, host body temperature, the virus not producing enough of a particular protein to duplicate given the size/ immune system of their host, etc.

For example, rabies does not typically live in squirrels because their blood is not warm enough for the virus to be comfortable (~95 degrees F), but it does in raccoons (101-106 degrees F). The difference is not that significant but is enough to affect who the virus typically host.

Also,

>I know diseases like HIV are thought to come from primates, which makes sense: we're so closely related

Humans are primates :)

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Thats fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

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Does the shake time correlate to the time it takes for the earth to move? I.e. if the quake lasts a minute, does that represent the time for the slip to take place in, or is the slip more instantaneous and the shake time measures the propagation of the rupture? Or something else?

Sounds like you know your stuff. Awesome post. I am curious, does this mean that you could give a risk assesment to certain areas? If so, where do you think the next bif earthquake will be? I know that generally contradicts exactly what you just said, but pretend you have to choose somewhere. Where would it be?

I intend to come back to this since this isn't nearly as thorough of answer as I'd like it to be.

Regardless, at least in my didatics, we were taught that there is a higher incidence of hematological malignancies, such as AML and CML, in those with autoimmune diseases due to the mechanism you described.

I can't remember the specific paper at the moment, but here are a few others: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31181268/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366644/

There's at least enough correlative evidence that this association has permeated into step and board exams.