[Beowulf] Re: Disks fail at what acceleration?

[David Mathog]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 Karen Shaeffer wrote:

>I can say that really large earthquakes do create
> a lot of very chaotic motion.

During college I worked some summers at the HP optoelectronics
division on Page Mill road in Palo Alto. One year(1979?) we
had an earthquake that was around a 5.  The ground motion was
pretty low frequency but still there was a tremendous racket of glass
banging on glass and we all realized at about the same time
that the big reagent bottles of acid in the cabinets all along
the walls were smacking into each other.  So we ran out the
nearest emergency door and found ourseleves face to face
with the chemical storage facility - where the really nasty
stuff lived.  Luckily we weren't greeted by a wave of
hydrofluoric acid.

The (slight) relevance to the original thread is that even though the
shaking was pretty smooth the bottles did not move smoothly but 
instead bounced around pretty frenetically in their confined
space on the cabinet shelves. 

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech