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October 18, 2008
Link to the Quake Catcher Netowrk!
From Tech Review Laptops as Earthquake Sensors
The Quake Catcher Network team has developed software that turns Mac laptops into seismic sensors and displays seismic data on a screensaver. Apple laptops manufactured since 2005 are outfitted with accelerometers, as are many IBM (now Lenovo), Acer, and HP laptops. They detect sudden acceleration--as when a laptop falls from a table, for instance--and brace the hard drive for impact. It's a distributed computing network, like SETI@home, which searches for intelligent signals from space, and Folding@Home, which focuses on protein folding. Machines in the earthquake network would monitor motion and report big shakes to a central server.
Posted by pweil at October 18, 2008 11:48 AM