I had an earthquake engineering course in my geological engineering undergraduate program, and an excellent teacher, but man, the math gave me fits! Well, apparently my time has finally come to make the effort to understand it again. A retired Canadian geophysicist/engineer is writing a series of articles on seismic analysis. Read more... (Photo by trochee)

Harold W. Asmis has spent his career studying earthquakes for the nuclear power industry in Ontario Canada. He is now retired, and has his own blog, Ontario-geofish, where he discusses rock mechanics, earthquake preparedness, seismic analysis and design, and the politics and geo-engineering of nuclear power plants. He has a very humorous writing style and on some issues (ok, most), some strong political opinions.  I need to get his blog entries into my Other News and Blogs page, but I haven't yet only because some of his content is personal or off-topic from my perspective. But I might be able to figure something out.

I'm looking forward to his series, here's a snippet from his first post on the topic:

In this series, I will attempt to do something never done before by an engineer on a blog: I will start a legitimate seismic analysis from scratch, using programs I've never used before! I take the risk of looking like a complete fool, which is something that the 'distinguished' people would never do. I'm only keeping a 'live blog' to motivate me to do something that seriously hurts my brain!

And here's another teaser from the second post in the series:

Here, we pay homage to our hero in this difficult endeavor.

That's right, it's Shrek! That series of movies did more for the science of physics modeling, than 30 years of engineering. Those guys just recently won an Oscar for particle dynamics, which is used for simulating water, smoke, clouds, explosions, etc. They use big clusters of Linux computers, and each run probably uses more power than any seismic analysis. Unfortunately, all the smart guys are either working for Hollywood, or doing crash analysis for cars, and there isn't much literature available.

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