Monthly Archives: September 2004

Unrest in the world…

Mount St. Helens before...and after...Volcanic unrest, that is. It appears that Mount St. Helens is rumbling a bit, enough so that scientists have posted a warning of volcanic unrest.

Seismic activity at Mount St. Helens has changed significantly during the past 24 hours and the changes make us believe that there is an increased likelihood of a hazardous event, which warrants release of this Notice of Volcanic Unrest. The swarm of very small, shallow earthquakes (less than Magnitude 1) that began on the morning of 23 September peaked about mid-day on 24 September and slowly declined through yesterday morning. However, since then the character of the swarm has changed to include more than ten larger earthquakes (Magnitude 2-2.8), the most in a 24-hr period since the eruption of October 1986. In addition, some of the earthquakes are of a type that suggests the involvement of pressurized fluids (water and steam) or perhaps magma. The events are still occurring at shallow depths (less than one mile) below the lava dome that formed in the crater between 1980 and 1986.

Shake, rattle and roll.

I remember observing the eruption from the relatively safe area around Portland, but we still got inches of ash on the ground. Quite a mess. Let’s hope for a more mild show.

Blogging statistics?

Dave Slusher was musing about a peculiar statistic of his audio blogging experiments: all the commentors appear to be male. That set me to wondering what the statistics of your average blogger was. Luckily, Livejournal maintains statistics that I found rather interesting.

Despite Dave’s experience, on LiveJournal only one in three bloggers who chose to identify their sex claimed to be males: women outnumber men 2 to 1. 98% of them use free accounts. The age distribution is heavily skewed towards teenagers. Only 1.1% of them are over age 40 (like myself). The most popular age for bloggers is eighteen.

This explains a great deal about the popularity of my blog.

Another milestone.

My email server has been up for just four days, and is mentioned only in a single post on my weblog. Today I received the first of what I suspect will be many spam emails. Their product?

Advancement of your business by direct e-mail marketing. 
We offer e-mail mass mailing to any country.

In other words, spam. What a surprise.