#its 8.2 inches tall

[straitjacketprincess]

fffjdfhf I'm fucking myself on my dildo rn n it's hurt so good nbbg

[amazinganimalsfacts]

It might surprise you, but the Maine Coon cat is no longer the biggest domestic cat breed. Since the mid-1980s, the Savannah cat has taken the top spot. Yet, Maine Coons are still quite large, with males up to 25 pounds and females up to 18 pounds. They are often called "gentle giants" by cat lovers. Maine Coon cats stand out with their unique looks, like tufted ears and hair between their toes. They also have a long, lion-like mane. Their size can change a lot, depending on their diet, family history, and gender. It takes them 3 to 5 years to fully grow, which is longer than most other domestic cats. Key Takeaways: Maine Coon cats are considered the largest domestic cat breed, though they were surpassed by the Savannah cat in the mid-1980s. Male Maine Coons can weigh up to 25 pounds, while females can reach 18 pounds, with a healthy weight range between 10-20 pounds. Maine Coon cats can grow up to 16 inches tall and 38 inches long, including their tail, which can be as long as 14 inches. Maine Coons take 3 to 5 years to reach their full adult size, much longer than other domestic cat breeds. Maine Coons are known for their distinctive features, such as tufted ears, hair between the toes, and a lion-like mane. Introducing the Maine Coon: The Gentle Giant The Maine Coon is a favorite cat breed known for its size and gentle nature. These cats are often called the "gentle giants" of the cat world. They have a unique look that makes them stand out from other breeds. Key Characteristics of Maine Coon Cats Maine Coon cats are big and strong, with tufted ears and long, flowing coats. They have broad heads, large paws, and bushy tails. Their toe tufts help them move through the cold winters of their maine coon breed origins in the Northeastern United States. Why Maine Coons Grow to Impressive Sizes Maine Coons grew big because they were originally why maine coons are large barn cats. They needed to be big to survive the cold winters. Over time, selective breeding made these maine coon cat breed characteristics even more pronounced. https://youtube.com/watch?v=bsWvFMecphM Now, the Maine Coon is one of the biggest domestic cat breeds. Some can weigh up to 18 pounds (8 kg) or more. Their size and majestic look have made them popular pets for many cat lovers worldwide. maine coon cats size: Averages and Ranges Maine Coon cats are known for their impressive size. Let's dive into the average weights, heights, and lengths of these big cats. Average Weight: Males vs. Females Male Maine Coon cats usually weigh between 18 to 22 pounds (8.2 to 10 kg). Females are a bit smaller, weighing about 12 to 15 pounds (5.4 to 6.8 kg). Average Height and Length Measurements Maine Coons vary in height, with males reaching 10 to 16 inches and females 8 to 14 inches. Both males and females are long, measuring 19 to 40 inches from nose to tail tip. For comparison, regular house cats weigh 8 to 10 pounds and are 9 to 10 inches tall. Maine Coons are truly the big cats of the feline world. "Maine Coons can grow up to 30 pounds, although this is considered overweight. The Maine Coon cat holds the Guinness Book World Record for being the longest cat, with the record holder being 47.2 inches long from nose to tail tip." Factors Influencing Maine Coon Size Maine Coon cats are known for their large size. This size comes from their diet, nutrition, and their ancestors. These factors have shaped their size over many generations. Diet and Nutrition Good nutrition is key for Maine Coon cats to grow big and stay healthy. They need a diet rich in calories and protein. This supports their big size and active nature. Not feeding them well can harm their health and size. Ancestry and Lineage Maine Coons' size is also due to their genetics and selective breeding. Cats from certain Maine Coon lines, bred for size, are bigger than others. This careful breeding has made them known as "gentle giants."

BreedAverage WeightAverage LengthAverage HeightMaine Coon10 to 25 pounds25 inches (including tail)10 to 16 inchesNorwegian Forest Cat13 to 20 pounds (males), 12 to 15 pounds (females)Up to 36 inches (including tail)Slightly smaller than Maine CoonsRagdoll15 to 21 pounds (males), 8 to 15 pounds (females)35 to 40 inches (including tail)Comparable to Maine Coons Understanding what makes Maine Coons big, like their diet and genetics, helps us appreciate them more. These factors make them stand out in size and character. Maine Coon Growth Patterns When you bring a Maine Coon kitten home, you'll notice they're bigger than other kittens. This is just the start of their amazing growth. Maine Coon kittens grow a lot between 3 to 7 months old. They quickly get bigger and heavier during this time. Kitten Growth Spurts The Maine Coon kitten growth has several growth spurts. These happen around weeks 32 and 50. Kittens gain about 1 kilogram each month then. This makes them the big cats they're known as. Reaching Full Adult Size Maine Coon kittens look big early on, but they keep growing slowly as they get older. This slow growth helps their bones and muscles develop fully. Some Maine Coons don't reach full size until they are 4 to 5 years old. This is longer than many other cat breeds, which grow up in 12 to 18 months. Things like genetics, gender, and if the Maine Coon is purebred or mixed affect their growth. Good food and exercise are key to helping the Maine Coon grow into the big, beautiful cat they'll be. Record-Breaking Maine Coon Sizes Some Maine Coons are truly massive, breaking size records for the breed. Ludo, a Maine Coon in England, is the biggest, measuring 3 feet 10.59 inches long and weighing 35 pounds. Stewie, another famous Maine Coon, was the longest domestic cat at 48.5 inches before he passed away. These cats show how big some Maine Coons can get. Maine Coon world records include more than just a few cats. Moonwalk Magnum, from France, is Europe's biggest cat, weighing up to 28 pounds. Lotus, from Sweden, weighs about 22 pounds, making him one of the largest globally. Samson, from Miami, Florida, was over 3 feet long and weighed 28 pounds. The dimensions of record-setting Maine Coons are amazing. Cygnus, from Ferndale, Michigan, had the longest tail on a domestic cat but sadly passed away in a fire in 2017. Omar, from Australia, was 47.2 inches long and weighed 30 pounds. Ludo, from the UK, was the longest domestic cat, measuring 46.6 inches and weighing 34 pounds. More Maine Coons have set records, like Barivel from Italy, who was the largest cat at 47.2 inches. Stewie, from Reno, Nevada, is the largest Maine Coon cat at 48.5 inches long. These maine coon world records show how big and impressive this breed can be. "These record-breaking Maine Coons serve as a testament to the potential size that can be reached by this breed." Comparing Maine Coons to Other Cat Breeds Maine Coon cats are truly unique in size. They can grow to be quite tall and heavy, making them stand out among other cats. Let's explore how they compare to other breeds. Maine Coons vs. Domestic Shorthairs Domestic shorthairs usually weigh between 6.5 to 12 pounds and are 10 to 12 inches tall. Maine Coons are much bigger, with males weighing 18 to 22 pounds and females 12 to 15 pounds. They are also taller, measuring 10 to 16 inches. Their large size and long tails make them much bigger than domestic shorthairs. Maine Coons vs. Other Large Breeds Other big cat breeds like the Norwegian Forest Cat and Turkish Van are impressive, but Maine Coons outdo them. Norwegian Forest Cats can weigh up to 22 pounds, and Turkish Vans range from 9 to 20 pounds. But Maine Coons can reach a height of 19.05 inches and a length of up to 48.5 inches, making them the tallest and longest. BreedAverage WeightAverage HeightMaximum Recorded SizeMaine CoonMales: 18-22 lbs Females: 12-15 lbs10-16 inchesHeight: 19.05 inches

Length: 48.5 inchesDomestic Shorthair6.5-12 lbs10-12 inchesN/ANorwegian Forest CatUp to 22 lbsN/AN/ATurkish Van9-20 lbs9-11 inchesN/A Maine Coons are among the largest domestic cat breeds. They have impressive size and stature that sets them apart from other big cats. Their height and size make them unique in the feline world. Caring for a Large Maine Coon Cat Owning a Maine Coon cat means you need to think about their size. They need a big living space to move around. You should get strong, big cat furniture and toys for them. Also, they need regular grooming to keep their long fur from getting matted. Providing Appropriate Living Space Maine Coon cats are really big, reaching up to 40 inches long and standing 16 inches tall. They need lots of room to move, stretch, and play. Make sure they have tall scratching posts, lots of space for exercise, and cozy spots to relax. Grooming and Maintenance Regular grooming is key for a Maine Coon's health and looks. Their long fur can get matted if not brushed often. You should brush them every day with a metal comb and use slicker brushes sometimes. Sometimes, they might need a bath too, based on their needs. Looking after a big Maine Coon takes some extra work, but it's worth it. With the right living space and grooming, your Maine Coon will be happy, healthy, and a great addition to your family. The Personality of a Maine Coon Maine Coon cats are big but gentle, loving, and social. They bond deeply with their families and enjoy spending time together. These smart cats can learn tricks and love to play, especially when they're young. Maine Coons are friendly and laid-back, making them great family pets. They're often called "the dogs of the cat world" because they're so loyal and interactive. They love being around people and can even be trained to walk on a leash or play fetch. Maine Coon cats are also curious and adventurous. They love to explore and play, climbing, jumping, and even swimming. Their friendly nature makes them perfect for families with kids and other pets. The Maine Coon's size, smarts, and loving nature have made them a favorite among cat lovers and families. If you want a loyal friend or a playful pal, the Maine Coon will win your heart with its charm and character. "Maine Coons are known for their gentle, affectionate, and social personalities, making them excellent companions and family pets." Choosing the Right Maine Coon for Your Lifestyle Thinking about getting a Maine Coon? It's key to see if this regal breed fits your lifestyle. These cats are called "gentle giants" but they need a lot of space and attention. They also require regular grooming and love to play and be around people. Before you bring a Maine Coon home, think about these important points. Consider if the breed fits your lifestyle and if you can give them the space they need. With the right preparation, you and your family can enjoy the love and loyalty of these cats. Assessing Your Home and Lifestyle Maine Coons are big cats, with males weighing 15-25 pounds and females 10-15 pounds. Make sure your home can handle their size. They need lots of room to move, play, and stretch. Look at your home's size and think about getting big cat furniture, like tall scratching posts and big cat trees. Think about how much time you can spend brushing their long, silky coat. They need regular brushing to stay looking great and to prevent mats. Check how active your household is and if you can keep up with a playful, social cat. Maine Coons love to play and be around people. Thinking about these things will help make sure a Maine Coon fits well in your home. It also means you're ready to give them the care they need. Choosing the Right Maine Coon Breeder Finding a good Maine Coon breeder is important. Look for one who is honest about the breed's traits, health, and needs. Ask about the breeder's Maine Coon program, including their health tests and how they socialize the kittens.

Find out about the size and personality of the kittens to make sure they fit your home and lifestyle. Ask for references and try to visit the breeder to see the kittens and their home. Finding a good breeder increases your chances of getting a healthy, happy Maine Coon. Factors to ConsiderImportanceAvailable Living SpaceHighGrooming Time CommitmentHighHousehold Activity LevelModerateBreeder Reputation and TransparencyHigh By thinking about these things and choosing a good breeder, you can find the perfect Maine Coon for your family. Enjoy the many rewards of owning one of these amazing cats. Conclusion The Maine Coon is a cat breed that has won the hearts of many around the world. They are known for their big size and their gentle, loving nature. These "gentle giants" are among the biggest domestic cats out there. They can weigh up to 25 pounds for males and 8 to 12 pounds for females. This size is both impressive and charming. Maine Coons are also very social, smart, and make great family pets. Their beautiful looks and friendly nature have made them very popular. With the right care, feeding, and grooming, Maine Coon owners get to enjoy life with these amazing cats. They can watch these cats grow and change over many years. Maine Coons have even set world records for their size, like Barivel, the longest living cat. Maine Coons are loved for their size, personality, and how well they fit into different homes. This has made them a favorite among cat lovers everywhere. FAQ What are the key characteristics of Maine Coon cats? Maine Coons are big cats with tufted ear tips and furry toes. They have long, flowing coats. People call them "gentle giants" because they are friendly and love people. Why do Maine Coons grow to such impressive sizes? Maine Coons grew big because they were barn cats in the Northeastern U.S. They needed to be tough to survive harsh winters. Over time, selective breeding made them even bigger. What are the average weights and dimensions of Maine Coon cats? Male Maine Coons usually weigh 15-25 pounds and stand 10-16 inches tall. Females weigh 10-15 pounds and are 8-14 inches tall. Both males and females are quite long, measuring 19-40 inches from nose to tail. What factors contribute to the large size of Maine Coon cats? Good nutrition is key for Maine Coons. They need a diet high in calories and protein to grow big. Their size also comes from their ancestry and selective breeding over the years. How long does it take for a Maine Coon to reach its full adult size? Maine Coon kittens grow fast between 3-7 months old. But they slow down as they get older. It can take up to 5 years for them to fully grow. Are there any record-breaking Maine Coon cats in terms of size? Yes, some Maine Coons have set size records. Ludo, a Maine Coon from England, is the biggest at 3 feet 10.59 inches long and 35 pounds. Stewie was once the longest domestic cat at 48.5 inches long. How do the size of Maine Coons compare to other domestic cat breeds? Domestic shorthairs are much smaller, weighing 8-11 pounds and standing 9-10 inches tall. Maine Coons are much bigger, reaching up to 25 pounds and 16 inches tall. They are also bigger than breeds like the Norwegian Forest Cat and Turkish Angora. What special considerations are needed when owning a Maine Coon? Owners need a big living space and sturdy furniture for their Maine Coons. Regular grooming is also important to keep their long coats healthy. What is the personality of a Maine Coon like? Maine Coons are big but gentle and loving. They bond strongly with their families and love to play. They are smart and can learn tricks, especially when they're young. What factors should be considered when choosing a Maine Coon as a pet? Thinking about your lifestyle is important before getting a Maine Coon. They need a lot of space and attention. They also have high grooming needs and like to be social.

Owners should be ready to provide what they need.

[topreviewin]

Picture: Michelle Larson for Bob VilaYou’ve heard it earlier than and should have even mentioned it earlier than: “I’ll never buy a corded vacuum again.” However not so quick! I lately examined the Shark Rocket Pet corded stick vacuum for almost 2 months, and after my expertise, you’ll by no means hear these phrases spoken from my mouth once more.I used the favored Rocket mannequin from Shark in common every day cleansing and staged exams involving rice, dust, and grass on exhausting flooring, space rugs, and carpeting. I acquired out a ladder and tried an attachment on my uncared for and disgusting ceiling fan, laid the entire vacuum down flat to wash underneath all my lowest furnishings, and saved the slim stick parked subsequent to the kitty litter to tidy up the worst half about having a cat. And after beforehand shopping for a competitor’s stick vacuum that value about 4 instances as a lot, I've some scorching takes on them each. See how this moderately priced stick vac from Shark stood as much as my exams on this hands-on assessment.Shark Rocket Pet Corded Stick Vacuum: At a LookRanking: 9/10Picture: Michelle Larson for Bob VilaSPECSWire size: 25 ftWeight: 8.2 kilos whole, 3.01 kilos hand vac solelyDustbin capability: 0.31 quartsPROSWonderful worth; converts to handheld vacuum, comes with 3 helpful attachments, and is rather more highly effective than anticipatedFingertip controls allow you to swap immediately from exhausting flooring to carpet8-pound weight is mild sufficient to be used on stairs and even lifting above your head to achieve cobwebs in cornersSwivel steering makes it straightforward to maneuver round and underneath furnishingsCONSWorking noise of 75 decibels is throughout the norm for a vacuum, however too loud and whiny to speak overYou sacrifice some mobility and comfort by needing to remain inside 25 ft of an outletGet the Shark Rocket vacuum at:What's the Shark Rocket vacuum?The Shark Rocket Pet is a corded stick vacuum that performs powerfully as a conventional stick vacuum or a handheld corded vacuum. It has settings particular to reveal flooring, space rugs, and high-pile carpets and comes with three attachments: a crevice software, an upholstery software, and an anti-allergen mud brush.The Shark Rocket Pet options swivel steering that makes it straightforward to wash round and underneath furnishings. Its low-profile design lays absolutely flat to achieve underneath obstacles, and for the reason that important cleansing head is simply 4.5 inches tall, this stick vac can clear beneath virtually any chair or cupboard. For objects with underneath 2 inches of clearance, it’s straightforward to modify to the crevice software to seize particles and clear away mud.Whereas many individuals choose cordless vacuums, this corded mannequin includes a substantial 25-foot wire that permits you to cowl a big space with out altering shops. There’s additionally one thing to be mentioned about realizing you aren’t racing the clock on a cordless unit’s runtime or slowly dropping battery energy through the years. In my testing, the cleansing head of the Shark stick vacuum solely acquired twisted up on the wire as soon as, and the vacuum’s connected wire keeper saved every part tidy as soon as I used to be finished testing.Picture: Michelle Larson for Bob VilaHow straightforward is the Shark Rocket vacuum to make use of?Typically talking, vacuums aren’t a very difficult product to make use of, and the Shark Rocket isn't any exception. It’s the definition of a plug-and-play software that proves that there’s magnificence in simplicity. As a result of it’s a corded vacuum, you don’t have to fret about charging earlier than use or whether or not the battery will final for the rooms you continue to have left to wash.The Shark Rocket Pet corded stick vacuum requires precisely three steps for setup:Connect the cleansing wand to the specified cleansing head: both the ground nozzle, crevice software, upholstery software, or anti-allergen mud brush.

Click on the hand held vacuum into the cleansing wand.Plug in.Not like different stick vacuums I’ve used, the Shark has a user-friendly on/off swap that doesn’t require you to carry it down throughout operation. Whereas this does imply you need to take a second to modify it off when transferring areas or if the hem of a blanket inadvertently will get sucked in, it additionally prevents your hand from getting drained from always making use of strain to an influence set off.One other side of the Shark’s design that I like is the flexibleness to make use of it as a handheld vacuum. The ability wire is connected to the three.01-pound motor portion, so the hand held part is appropriate with the primary cleansing head and all three attachments. I discovered pairing the upholstery and crevice instruments with the hand held vacuum excellent for cleansing underneath sofa cushions and eradicating canine hair from the again of the automobile. It’s additionally nice when used with the anti-allergen brush for eradicating nice mud on furnishings and different surfaces.The Shark Rocket vacuum doesn't present any onboard area for unused attachments, however one distinctive factor it does present is freestanding storage. As an alternative of drilling holes within the wall to hold the vacuum or attempting to rigorously lean it towards the wall solely to have the canine knock it over, you merely organize the vacuum and its attachments collectively to retailer neatly standing on their very own. Detach the hand held vacuum portion, line up the storage hook slot on the again with the storage hook positioned on the tube, after which wrap up the wire. Now you've got a condensed and secure unit that shops in any area. It measures a petite 36 inches tall by 10.5 inches huge by 9.5 inches deep.Picture: Michelle Larson for Bob VilaIs the light-weight design of the Shark Rocket good for stairs?Our dwelling has three flooring, which implies loads of stairs. With the primary dwelling areas on the bottom flooring, bedrooms upstairs, and laundry within the basement, our carpeted stairs see loads of foot site visitors. I could also be alone on this, however my home at all times feels further clear when the carpet on the steps is fluffed up from a recent vacuuming.I used a conventional corded upright vacuum on my stairs for over 10 years, which implies I’m used to this activity being a cumbersome chore. With the 8-pound Shark Rocket ultralight corded stick vacuum, I'm persistently impressed and grateful for a way a lot simpler it now could be to hoover the steps. I discover lifting its mild weight fairly easy, and its swiveling head conveniently adapts to all the sides. For a fair deeper clear, I merely pop the included crevice software onto the hand held portion or the full-length wand and end clearing away any bits embedded within the corners.I additionally tried the Shark Rocket on my ceiling fan, and whereas I had excessive hopes that it will simplify this terrible chore as successfully as the steps, it didn’t. With the 29.75-inch tube and anti-allergen brush attachment put in, I climbed a ladder and hoisted the stick vac over my head. Whereas it’s not significantly heavy, it’s additionally not straightforward to carry it up whereas on a ladder attempting to wash one thing that strikes. Ever industrious, I used a brush to carry the fan blades in place with one hand whereas making an attempt to maneuver the vacuum with the opposite. With my 5-foot-4-inch body considerably unstably perched on a 4-foot ladder whereas attempting to achieve a 10-foot-high ceiling fan, let’s simply say I acquired the massive chunks.Picture: Michelle Larson for Bob VilaHow effectively does the Shark Rocket corded stick vacuum carry out?Figuring out the ability of a vacuum isn’t as simple as I believe it ought to be. After some analysis, I discovered that the Shark Rocket Pet has a 4.2 amp motor, which is considerably lower than the 14.8 amps of my different stick vacuum. In a side-by-side comparability, that distinction was not evident.

To check the Rocket’s efficiency, I laid out a thick strip of rice, a pile of moist soil from the backyard, and a pair handfuls of freshly torn-out grass on our wooden flooring, space rug, and backside stair step. Spoiler alert: The Shark did higher in each take a look at! It picked up each grain of rice and about 80 % of the grass and dust. My spendy stick vacuum topped out at about 70 % on all three exams, leaving little piles in entrance of the cleansing head the place it pushed the supplies ahead as a substitute of selecting them up and random bits behind the comb head right here and there.To be truthful, I didn’t swap cleansing heads between exams on my fancy vacuum, however the truth that I didn’t must on the Shark and will merely alter between flooring settings on the machine is one other win for the Shark. After I do take the time to modify heads as wanted, I can say every machine persistently pulls loads of gunk out of each floor I take advantage of them on. However I nonetheless don’t discover that the rather more costly mannequin has over thrice the ability of the extra budget-friendly Shark.One place I can see the distinction is in working noise. The Shark operates at about 75 decibels, which is fairly typical for a vacuum and proper according to my different one. There’s one thing harder to articulate concerning the high quality of the sound it produces, although. When utilizing the Shark, I don’t even attempt to speak over it—the noise is simply too loud, whiney, and jarring. Despite the fact that it’s simply as loud, my different stick vac doesn’t appear as intrusive, and its sound is in some way rather more nice than that of the Shark.Tips on how to Clear a Shark Rocket Vacuum One different factor I don’t love concerning the Shark Rocket vacuum is emptying the dustbin. It’s positioned on the hand held portion of the vacuum, which can also be the place the motor is housed and the wire attachment is positioned. With each vacuum I’ve had, I choose to take the dustbin immediately out to our massive waste assortment can within the storage to keep away from a misfire that leaves mud and hair throughout my indoor trash. With the Shark, which means hauling the unfastened 25-foot wire alongside for the trip, which is each annoying and a tripping hazard. As soon as there, nevertheless, emptying it's as simple as pushing a single button and letting all of the gunk you possibly can’t consider you reside with fall out.The Shark has three filters that the producer recommends cleansing month-to-month. Two filters sit in a compartment on the highest of the hand held portion, and one is fitted over the air consumption on the again. All filters must be rinsed with plain water and left to dry. Failing to do that frequently will have an effect on the vacuum’s suction energy.This model of the Shark Rocket ultralight is the pet model, which implies it’s constructed to deal with hair, and our home has loads of it. A canine, a cat, and two females with past-shoulder-length hair leave loose strands in each room, solely to ultimately get wrapped across the Shark’s brush roll. With previous vacuums, I’ve hacked at these tangles with scissors and pulled at them with pens to free the mess from the vacuum’s clutches. The Shark makes it a lot simpler with a detachable brush roll design; it’s really easy to detach that I merely used a paperclip to unlock the slot’s cowl fairly than going downstairs for a flathead screwdriver. I made a few slices alongside the size of the brushroll and unraveled all that icky collected hair for straightforward disposal.Picture: Michelle Larson for Bob VilaIs the Shark Rocket definitely worth the cash?The Shark Rocket pet corded stick vacuum is completely definitely worth the cash, particularly in case you can snag it on sale, a chance that appears to return up usually. Having lately spent almost $700 on a vacuum I assumed I cherished, I now can’t say the $500 distinction is substantial sufficient that I’d make the identical choice once more.

This mannequin from the extremely popular and revered model, Shark, appears to be a type of examples of a product which will have been thought of fancy years in the past however, as expertise has improved, is now simply plain ol’ good, nay, nice—significantly for the worth. It really works higher than anticipated, comes with an affordable variety of helpful instruments, and appears strong and dependable whereas being handy to make use of. I nonetheless travel on the corded side, however for the worth and assurance that I can vacuum all of the flooring in a single session, it’s a reasonably incredible vacuum.Do you have to purchase the Shark Rocket vacuum?Except the wire is a deal-breaker for you, I believe the Shark Rocket Pet vacuum is a hard-to-beat alternative for many patrons. It’s light-weight, compact, versatile, and efficient. It could not have fairly as many attachments as dearer fashions (most of which, to be trustworthy, you’d by no means use anyway) or have as highly effective a motor (on paper), however outcomes are outcomes. The Shark Rocket Pet corded stick vacuum exceeded my expectations and will even exchange a handheld vacuum in properties the place having two separate instruments simply means extra stuff to retailer. Selecting to purchase this vacuum means scoring an enormous cleansing win.The place to Purchase the Shark Rocket VacuumGet the Shark Rocket vacuum at:Meet the TesterMichelle Larson is an assistant editor at BobVila.com, the place she spends her days offering construction for product opinions and asking questions on commas. She’s been a author and editor for greater than 10 years within the fields of well being, enterprise, and the house. As a result of she’d fairly spend a bit extra up entrance than purchase a software or equipment twice, she strongly believes within the energy of analysis and opinions for locating high quality objects that should final. #Overview #Shark #Rocket #Pet #Vacuums #Wire #Didnt #Journey #Assessments

[mynachopaper]

Tickle Anomaly Files #7

Codename: Shivering Strings

Subject: An oversized cello originally found in Belfast, Ireland.

Description: Standing at 2.5 metres (8.2 feet) it is impossible to play properly, the bow found with it is also much too large for a human to feasibly play.

The wood forming its frame is dark brown, testing revealed it to be maple. There are also strands of unknown material woven into the strings and body. The bow itself appears to use human hair instead of horse hair. DNA tests have found no match.

Found in a run-down inn 37 miles from the city, the cello was collecting dust in the basement of 'The Qurvering Quail' until a recent incident. The owners reported strange music mixed with screaming emanating from the basement. Once they rushed down they only found their barmaid, she was shivering and covering her ears. Beside her was said subject, leaning against the wall. The barmaid would refuse to speak on her experience and soon went catatonic.

The owners claimed they had been gifted said subject years ago by a relative for their wedding. However they were more than happy to be rid of it as it made them uncomfortable. Foundation agents retrieved the subject and brought it to site zero.

Once the preliminary examination was complete the foundation decided a live victim would be perfect for testing. Luckily we had a recent capture.

23 year old Olivia Broen was recently caught trespassing near the east wing. She had broken into the lower archives, once caught she claimed she was only searching for "Some CIA shit to sell on the web not kinky SCP fanfics". Unfortunately she had seen too much of our sensitive data and had to be made a permanent test subject. Her reaction to the news was quite severe, thankfully we gagged her before her screams disturbed our agents.

We brought her to test chamber 9, once there we removed the blindfold and gag. Next we stripped her of her shoes and jacket, leaving her in basic clothing to make her vulnerable before we bring in the subject. We left, locking the door. She was alone in the empty white room. After some time she became hysterical, slamming the walls and kicking the frame. Eventually she tired herself out and simply laid down.

Behind the two way mirror sat agents Londra and Prentiss. The following information was recorded in their report.

P- She seems to have curled up on the floor, I think she's doing some breathing exercises. Her hair is frazzled and she's biting her nails.

L- Glad we have a live one today. It's always nice to be first to witness something magical happen.

We unlocked the door and wheeled in the cello. Olivia leapt back and clung to the wall. She seemed to be terrified of the subject. We stood it in the corner of the room before leaving.

P- It's much more intimidating than the photos give credit. It's tall dark curves seem to permeate the glass. I'm not sure how anyone could physically play it.

L- Tall, dark, and handsome. I wish I could meet it's maker. Surely a giant creature perhaps, or a large otherworldly being. In any case my ears hunger for its song.

Hours passed, neither the subject or Olivia changed. Eventually she succumbed to her fate and crumpled to the floor, sleeping in the fetal position.

The agents also fell asleep a few hours later.

2:37 am. The microphone picked up a soft hum. Motion cameras detect slight vibrations emanating from the subject. Olivia is still sleeping, the agents are given a soft alert.

P- We've woken up in the early morning, the system is detecting some sound and movement. I can feel a low hum shake through my bones.

L- I can feel its presence, it reverberates in my core. I can taste the cruelty in the air. I can't help but smile.

Olivia wakes up. She slowly turns towards the subject. Her eyes widen as she crawls back, softly whimpering. The frame of the cello hums, vibrating in the low light. The bow twitches on the ground, small jerks of movement inch it towards Olivia.

P- The subject is active. Cameras are running to capture the event.

L- The calm before the storm, such thunder shall crash...

The strings of the cello snap off, lashing out as they snake along the floor. The sound of scraping echoes in the chamber as they crawl along the tiles. Olivia screams as they approach her, desperately trying to sink into the corner as they wrap around her ankles. She is pulled to the ground, her hands grasping at any form of grip as she is slowly dragged towards the dark figure.

P- Oh God, it's like nothing I've ever seen. The strings seem to be longer than they appear, they seem to act intelligent, cruel.

L- Such spectacle, a terrifying display of predatory prowess. I am both jealous and fearful.

As Olivia is dragged closer she starts begging. "PLEASE! PLEASE! I'M SORRY, HELP ME!". Her arms clinging to what little traction they can find. The strings separate, two latch around her wrists while the other two hold her ankles. They slowly pull her upright, displaying great tensile strength. She is stretched over the cello, aligning perfectly where the strings would be.

P- I wish I could help her, her begging was terrifying. I cannot possibly imagine the fear coursing through her.

L- Such sweet begging, I cannot possibly imagine the fear saturating her lovely skin.

The bow shakes violently on the ground, the sound causing Olivia to shudder. It starts to levitate, slowly floating towards her body. Suddenly a quick cut rips through her shirt leaving her midriff and ribs completely vulnerable. She yelps as the tattered remains gently fall to the ground.

The bow rests on her side, she is frozen as the tension builds.

Slowly it begins to draw across her stomach, gliding along her sensitive skin. She shrieks as it passes over her belly button. Each slow drag extracting squeals from her. A low sound can be heard, actual chords being played. No known tune or symphony is recognised.

P- It's so alien, unnatural. I am not familiar with this piece, or if it is even of this earth.

L- Strange is the beauty of sound. There will always be a unique song somewhere in the universe.

The bow picks up its pace, switching to her ribs as it begins to play over each one. Sending her into a crescendo of screams as it spreads ticklish shocks throughout her body. Making her squeal an octave higher once it glides between her ribs.

P- It's playing her with such precision. Whatever made this intended it to merge torture with music. Every sound a part of a nightmarish harmony.

L- It pierces my soul. This beauty could only have been made by such a connoisseur of ticklish suffering. My heart swells as her screams send shivers down my back.

Olivia starts to lose her mind, her body drained of its energy as she is played beyond her limits. Her hair whips around her head as she cackles into the night. Tears stream from her eyes as she slowly loses herself in the music.

After 6 hours the bow stops playing, the subject releases Olivia, letting her slump to the floor, exhausted. Its strings slink back into place as the humming fades away.

In the morning Olivia is taken to the recovery ward. However, it has been noted that the usual classical music played during lunch hours has caused her to panic. Full restraints have been employed to keep her safe for the duration of her stay.

Agent Prentiss has requested 2 days of leave for psychological recovery. Status: Granted

Agent Londra has requested both the subject and Olivia to be moved to her quarters for personal enetertainment.

Status: Granted

Object class: Tool

[isfeed]

This customizable smart display is a fun desk accessory in need of a purpose

This customizable smart display is a fun desk accessory in need of a purpose

Part desk clock, part status board, all Nyan Cat When the Tidbyt, which its creators describe as a “personal pixel display,” arrived at my house, I liked it before I even knew what to do with it. With its walnut paneling and its ultra-pixelated display, it kind of looks like what would happen if you asked someone in 1956 to design an Echo Show for Amazon. It’s 8.2 inches long, 4.4 inches tall,…

[tachtutor]

4-year-old discovers impressive dinosaur footprint on Wales beach

4-year-old discovers impressive dinosaur footprint on Wales beach

A 4-year-old girl walking on a beach with her family in Wales has discovered the best-preserved dinosaur track from the area.  The track is from a beach known for footprints from crocodilians, extinct ancestors of modern crocodiles. The dinosaur that made the print probably stood 30 inches (75 centimeters) tall and 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) long. Its 4-inch (10 cm) track looks similar to that of the…

[perksofwifi]

Will Kandi Crush Our Expectations With Its $17,499 EV?

Tiger King introduced us to characters such as Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, as well as the weird world of big cat collectors and rescuers. It also reminded us about the existence of the $10,599 Kandi Coco, which briefly appears in scenes of the series filmed at Exotic’s Oklahoma zoo. Nearly a decade ago, the Chinese brand’s small, Smart-like electric vehicle was available to Oklahomans for as little as $865 thanks to then-available federal and state tax credits. 

Now, Kandi is back with two new EVs it plans to sell in the United States: the Model K27 and Model K23. Curiously, the numerically higher Model K27 is the cheaper, lower-performance version of the two. That said, it’s also the better looking of this pair. Mind you, looks are subjective and the K27 is anything but pretty. 

2021 Kandi Model K27 Highlights

Still, we have an affinity for this $17,499 (before tax incentives) model’s Kei-car-like styling, which includes features such as expressive ovoid headlamps, stubby and tall proportions, and a set of small, 14-inch wheels and tires. At 136.2 inches long and 63.6 inches high, the four-door Model K27 casts a shadow 8.2 inches shorter and 3.8 inches taller than the 2019 Fiat 500 hatchback. The Model K27’s price merely applies to the first 1,000 customers to purchase the small EV. Expect the model’s base price to rise to $19,999 once those initial cars are sold.

As its size suggests, the Model K27 is a city car. That’s for the best, too, as the less than 30 hp produced by the car’s front-mounted electric motor leaves this 2,271-pound EV with a top speed of 63 mph. Driving range, meanwhile, stands at a manufacturer-estimated 100 miles with the car’s 17.7-kWh battery pack fully charged. Replenishing the little Kandi’s battery requires 7.0 hours when hooked up to a 240-volt charger, per the automaker. Despite its relatively cheap starting sum, the Model K27 sports standard kit such as a 9.0-inch touchscreen infotainment system, dual-front airbags, and anti-lock brakes.

2021 Kandi Model K23 Highlights

If the Model K27 fails to suit your EV needs, then maybe the 20.2-inch longer Model K23 is the Kandi EV for you. At $27,499 (before tax incentives), however, the bigger Model K23 makes less of a case for itself as a value proposition—especially given the fact that price applies to the first 1,000 Model K23 customers.Expect the model’s base price to rise to $29,999 once those initial cars are sold. Consider the 2020 Nissan Leaf, which starts at $32,525, offers more palatable styling, and packs more than four times the horsepower from its electric motor. 

That said, the 2,954-pound Model K23’s less than 30-hp electric motor and 41.4-kWh battery pack manage a manufacturer-estimated 188 miles of driving range on a full charge—39 more miles than the Leaf’s EPA-estimated range. With a top speed of 70 mph, though, the front-wheel-drive Model K23 will surely spend more time scurrying about in the right lane. Recharging the pack is a 7.5-hour affair on a 240-volt charger, according to Kandi.

Inside, the Model K23 features a 10.0-inch touchscreen infotainment screen. We also anticipate the car’s larger size nets it additional cargo and passenger space relative to the smaller Model K27. 

Still, we struggle to find any justification for buyers to pull the trigger on the Model K23 when the boring, but well-equipped 2020 Nissan Leaf costs a mere $2,526 more. Regardless, if you find either Kandi model sweet, then you can put down a refundable $100 deposit to secure one of these EVs for yourself.

Update: This post was originally published on August 3, 2020, and has been updated to reflect the cars’ lower starting prices.

The post Will Kandi Crush Our Expectations With Its $17,499 EV? appeared first on MotorTrend.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/2021-kandi-model-k27-k23-ev-details-price-photos/ visto antes em https://www.motortrend.com

[newstfionline]

The Really Big One

By Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, July 20, 2015 Issue

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan--that one was the third of the week--and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.

When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three. The conference was wrapping up for the day. He was thinking about sushi. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The earthquake was not particularly strong. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The shaking intensified. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside.

It was March. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow on the ground. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the ground. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. It was, Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas. The quake passed the two-minute mark. The trees, still hung with the previous autumn’s dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. Goldfinger lurched over to take a look. The base was lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the yard. He thought better of it, and lurched away. His watch swept past the three-minute mark and kept going.

Oh, s--t, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in amazement. For decades, seismologists had believed that Japan could not experience an earthquake stronger than magnitude 8.4. In 2005, however, at a conference in Hokudan, a Japanese geologist named Yasutaka Ikeda had argued that the nation should expect a magnitude 9.0 in the near future--with catastrophic consequences, because Japan’s famous earthquake-and-tsunami preparedness, including the height of its sea walls, was based on incorrect science. The presentation was met with polite applause and thereafter largely ignored. Now, Goldfinger realized as the shaking hit the four-minute mark, the planet was proving the Japanese Cassandra right.

For a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake science. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool, because Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in Kashiwa knew what was coming. One of them pulled out a cell phone and started streaming videos from the Japanese broadcasting station NHK, shot by helicopters that had flown out to sea soon after the shaking started. Thirty minutes after Goldfinger first stepped outside, he watched the tsunami roll in, in real time, on a two-inch screen.

In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. The shaking earlier in the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in the nation’s recorded history. But for Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world’s leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come.

Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2--a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop--the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent--and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way--your first two fingers, say--the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west--losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs fema’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger--or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.

In May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, together with their Corps of Discovery, set off from St. Louis on America’s first official cross-country expedition. Eighteen months later, they reached the Pacific Ocean and made camp near the present-day town of Astoria, Oregon. The United States was, at the time, twenty-nine years old. Canada was not yet a country. The continent’s far expanses were so unknown to its white explorers that Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the journey, thought that the men would come across woolly mammoths. Native Americans had lived in the Northwest for millennia, but they had no written language, and the many things to which the arriving Europeans subjected them did not include seismological inquiries. The newcomers took the land they encountered at face value, and at face value it was a find: vast, cheap, temperate, fertile, and, to all appearances, remarkably benign.

A century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of quiet. It took another fifty years to uncover and interpret the region’s seismic history. Geology, as even geologists will tell you, is not normally the sexiest of disciplines. But, sooner or later, every field has its field day, and the discovery of the Cascadia subduction zone stands as one of the greatest scientific detective stories of our time.

The first clue came from geography. Almost all of the world’s most powerful earthquakes occur in the Ring of Fire, the volcanically and seismically volatile swath of the Pacific that runs from New Zealand up through Indonesia and Japan, across the ocean to Alaska, and down the west coast of the Americas to Chile. Japan, 2011, magnitude 9.0; Indonesia, 2004, magnitude 9.1; Alaska, 1964, magnitude 9.2; Chile, 1960, magnitude 9.5--not until the late nineteen-sixties, with the rise of the theory of plate tectonics, could geologists explain this pattern. The Ring of Fire, it turns out, is really a ring of subduction zones. Nearly all the earthquakes in the region are caused by continental plates getting stuck on oceanic plates--as North America is stuck on Juan de Fuca--and then getting abruptly unstuck. And nearly all the volcanoes are caused by the oceanic plates sliding deep beneath the continental ones, eventually reaching temperatures and pressures so extreme that they melt the rock above them.

The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major earthquake--or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest--several, in fact, if you had them to spend--and not feel so much as a quiver. The question facing geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction zone had ever broken its eerie silence.

In the late nineteen-eighties, Brian Atwater, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey, and a graduate student named David Yamaguchi found the answer, and another major clue in the Cascadia puzzle. Their discovery is best illustrated in a place called the ghost forest, a grove of western red cedars on the banks of the Copalis River, near the Washington coast. When I paddled out to it last summer, with Atwater and Yamaguchi, it was easy to see how it got its name. The cedars are spread out across a low salt marsh on a wide northern bend in the river, long dead but still standing. Leafless, branchless, barkless, they are reduced to their trunks and worn to a smooth silver-gray.

What killed the trees in the ghost forest was saltwater. It had long been assumed that they died slowly, as the sea level around them gradually rose and submerged their roots. But, by 1987, Atwater, who had found in soil layers evidence of sudden land subsidence along the Washington coast, suspected that that was backward--that the trees had died quickly when the ground beneath them plummeted. To find out, he teamed up with Yamaguchi, a specialist in dendrochronology, the study of growth-ring patterns in trees. Yamaguchi took samples of the cedars and found that they had died simultaneously: in tree after tree, the final rings dated to the summer of 1699. Since trees do not grow in the winter, he and Atwater concluded that sometime between August of 1699 and May of 1700 an earthquake had caused the land to drop and killed the cedars. That time frame predated by more than a hundred years the written history of the Pacific Northwest--and so, by rights, the detective story should have ended there.

But it did not. If you travel five thousand miles due west from the ghost forest, you reach the northeast coast of Japan. As the events of 2011 made clear, that coast is vulnerable to tsunamis, and the Japanese have kept track of them since at least 599 A.D. In that fourteen-hundred-year history, one incident has long stood out for its strangeness. On the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of the Genroku era, a six-hundred-mile-long wave struck the coast, levelling homes, breaching a castle moat, and causing an accident at sea. The Japanese understood that tsunamis were the result of earthquakes, yet no one felt the ground shake before the Genroku event. The wave had no discernible origin. When scientists began studying it, they called it an orphan tsunami.

Finally, in a 1996 article in Nature, a seismologist named Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the work of Atwater and Yamaguchi, matched that orphan to its parent--and thereby filled in the blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny specificity. At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku.

Once scientists had reconstructed the 1700 earthquake, certain previously overlooked accounts also came to seem like clues. In 1964, Chief Louis Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British Columbia, told a story, passed down through seven generations, about the eradication of Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people. “I think it was at nighttime that the land shook,” Nookmis recalled. According to another tribal history, “They sank at once, were all drowned; not one survived.” A hundred years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah tribe, recounted a similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the water had receded from Washington State’s Neah Bay, then suddenly poured back in, inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found canoes hanging from the trees. In a 2005 study, Ruth Ludwin, then a seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough information to estimate a date range for the events they described. On average, the midpoint of that range was 1701.

The reconstruction of the Cascadia earthquake of 1700 is one of those rare natural puzzles whose pieces fit together as tectonic plates do not: perfectly. It is wonderful science. It was wonderful for science. And it was terrible news for the millions of inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. As Goldfinger put it, “In the late eighties and early nineties, the paradigm shifted to ‘uh-oh.’”

Goldfinger told me this in his lab at Oregon State. Thanks to his work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long--long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line--and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.

It is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and eleven, but also of eighteen and two. It is not possible, however, to dispute the scale of the problem. The devastation in Japan in 2011 was the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and what the region was prepared to withstand. The same will hold true in the Pacific Northwest--but here the discrepancy is enormous. “The science part is fun,” Goldfinger says. “And I love doing it. But the gap between what we know and what we should do about it is getting bigger and bigger, and the action really needs to turn to responding. Otherwise, we’re going to be hammered. I’ve been through one of these massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If that was Portland”--Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his head before he finished it with words. “Let’s just say I would rather not be here.”

The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.

Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, canisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off--or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (dogami), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings--more than three thousand of them schools--will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.

The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region--up to thirty thousand of them in Seattle alone, the city’s emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. So is Oregon’s critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of Portland through which flows ninety per cent of the state’s liquid fuel and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas terminals. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties--and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins. They will be notified to do so only by the earthquake itself--”a vibrate-alert system,” Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, jokes--and they are urged to leave on foot, since the earthquake will render roads impassable. Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. “When that tsunami is coming, you run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (osspac), says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.”

The time to save people from a tsunami is before it happens, but the region has not yet taken serious steps toward doing so. Hotels and businesses are not required to post evacuation routes or to provide employees with evacuation training. In Oregon, it has been illegal since 1995 to build hospitals, schools, firehouses, and police stations in the inundation zone, but those which are already in it can stay, and any other new construction is permissible: energy facilities, hotels, retirement homes. In those cases, builders are required only to consult with dogami about evacuation plans. “So you come in and sit down,” Ian Madin says. “And I say, ‘That’s a stupid idea.’ And you say, ‘Thanks. Now we’ve consulted.’”

These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out. Twenty-two per cent of Oregon’s coastal population is sixty-five or older. Twenty-nine per cent of the state’s population is disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties. “We can’t save them,” Kevin Cupples says. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly.’ No. We won’t.” Nor will anyone save the tourists. Washington State Park properties within the inundation zone see an average of seventeen thousand and twenty-nine guests a day. Madin estimates that up to a hundred and fifty thousand people visit Oregon’s beaches on summer weekends. “Most of them won’t have a clue as to how to evacuate,” he says. “And the beaches are the hardest place to evacuate from.”

Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one. A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water--not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.

To see the full scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you would need to be in the international space station. The inundation zone will be scoured of structures from California to Canada. The earthquake will have wrought its worst havoc west of the Cascades but caused damage as far away as Sacramento, California--as distant from the worst-hit areas as Fort Wayne, Indiana, is from New York. FEMA expects to coordinate search-and-rescue operations across a hundred thousand square miles and in the waters off four hundred and fifty-three miles of coastline. As for casualties: the figures I cited earlier--twenty-seven thousand injured, almost thirteen thousand dead--are based on the agency’s official planning scenario, which has the earthquake striking at 9:41 a.m. on February 6th. If, instead, it strikes in the summer, when the beaches are full, those numbers could be off by a horrifying margin.

Wineglasses, antique vases, Humpty Dumpty, hip bones, hearts: what breaks quickly generally mends slowly, if at all. OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities. On the coast, those numbers go up. Whoever chooses or has no choice but to stay there will spend three to six months without electricity, one to three years without drinking water and sewage systems, and three or more years without hospitals. Those estimates do not apply to the tsunami-inundation zone, which will remain all but uninhabitable for years.

How much all this will cost is anyone’s guess; FEMA puts every number on its relief-and-recovery plan except a price. But whatever the ultimate figure--and even though U.S. taxpayers will cover seventy-five to a hundred per cent of the damage, as happens in declared disasters--the economy of the Pacific Northwest will collapse. Crippled by a lack of basic services, businesses will fail or move away. Many residents will flee as well. OSSPAC predicts a mass-displacement event and a long-term population downturn. Chris Goldfinger didn’t want to be there when it happened. But, by many metrics, it will be as bad or worse to be there afterward.

The Cascadia situation, a calamity in its own right, is also a parable for this age of ecological reckoning, and the questions it raises are ones that we all now face. How should a society respond to a looming crisis of uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions? How can it begin to right itself when its entire infrastructure and culture developed in a way that leaves it profoundly vulnerable to natural disaster?

The last person I met with in the Pacific Northwest was Doug Dougherty, the superintendent of schools for Seaside, which lies almost entirely within the tsunami-inundation zone. Of the four schools that Dougherty oversees, with a total student population of sixteen hundred, one is relatively safe. The others sit five to fifteen feet above sea level. When the tsunami comes, they will be as much as forty-five feet below it.

In 2009, Dougherty told me, he found some land for sale outside the inundation zone, and proposed building a new K-12 campus there. Four years later, to foot the hundred-and-twenty-eight-million-dollar bill, the district put up a bond measure. The tax increase for residents amounted to two dollars and sixteen cents per thousand dollars of property value. The measure failed by sixty-two per cent. Dougherty tried seeking help from Oregon’s congressional delegation but came up empty. The state makes money available for seismic upgrades, but buildings within the inundation zone cannot apply. At present, all Dougherty can do is make sure that his students know how to evacuate.

Some of them, however, will not be able to do so. At an elementary school in the community of Gearhart, the children will be trapped. “They can’t make it out from that school,” Dougherty said. “They have no place to go.” On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a wide, roadless bog. When the tsunami comes, the only place to go in Gearhart is a small ridge just behind the school. At its tallest, it is forty-five feet high--lower than the expected wave in a full-margin earthquake. For now, the route to the ridge is marked by signs that say “Temporary Tsunami Assembly Area.” I asked Dougherty about the state’s long-range plan. “There is no long-range plan,” he said.

Dougherty’s office is deep inside the inundation zone, a few blocks from the beach. All day long, just out of sight, the ocean rises up and collapses, spilling foamy overlapping ovals onto the shore. Eighty miles farther out, ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea, the hand of a geological clock is somewhere in its slow sweep. All across the region, seismologists are looking at their watches, wondering how long we have, and what we will do, before geological time catches up to our own.

[magzoso-tech]

Nokia 5.3 Price, Key Specifications Tipped Ahead of Launch

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/nokia-5-3-price-key-specifications-tipped-ahead-of-launch/

Nokia 5.3 Price, Key Specifications Tipped Ahead of Launch

HMD Global, the Nokia-brand licensee, is set to launch its next generation of smartphones at an event in London on March 19. Reports suggest that the company will launch the Nokia 8.2 5G, the company’s first 5G phone and the Nokia 5.3 – the successor to HMD Global’s budget to mid-range offering, the Nokia 5.1, among other smartphones. A new leak has revealed the phone’s possible colour options and most of the alleged specifications that suggest two variants – a 3GB and a 4GB RAM option, coupled with 64GB of storage. The phone was earlier tipped to be named as the Nokia 5.2, but this new leak also indicates that the company will name its upcoming budget offering as the Nokia 5.3.

According to a report by Nokia Power User, HMD Global is calling the Nokia 5.1 successor as the Nokia 5.3, contradictory to the earlier reports that suggested at the Nokia 5.2 nomenclature. It further indicated what the possible specifications of the phone could be. The report said that the Nokia 5.3 could come with 3GB and 4GB RAM options, coupled with 64GB of storage. It also said that there could be another 6GB RAM variant but suggested that the company might bring that later. The phone is said to come with Android 10 and will be a part of the Android One program. The phone is tipped to come to feature 4,000mAh battery as well.

The report also said the Nokia 5.1 successor might come with three colour options – a Charcoal and a Cyan option, with a third unknown colour. The phone is expected to come with a quad-camera setup, as earlier leaks have also suggested. The publication said that there will be a 16-megapixel camera, a 5-megapixel shooter, and two 8-megapixel sensors on the back. The front camera will also be an 8-megapixel shooter. The phone’s alleged design hints at a tall aspect ratio, falling at 18.5:9 with a 6.55-inch display.

The phone had recently been spotted on Geekbench, with ‘Captain America’ codename that also indicated at 3GB RAM option and a Qualcomm processor. It is said that the Nokia 5.3 will come packed with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 660/665 processor.

Additionally, The Nokia Power User report said that the 6GB + 64 GB version of the smartphone may carry a price tag of $180 (roughly Rs. 13,200).

Nokia is said to launch a number of smartphones at its March 19 event, including the company’s first 5G phone and a few other offerings. If reports are to be believed, the company will launch the Nokia 8.2 5G (its first 5G offering), the Nokia 5.3, the Nokia 1.3 and an entry-level android phone – the Nokia C2.

[owensrhodes]

York Heating and Cooling

Image: Jo Ann Snover/Shutterstock

Based in York, Pennsylvania, York International Corporation is an HVAC company founded in 1874. The corporation initially manufactured ice cream machines before switching its focus to air conditioners.

York offers a variety of HVAC products that emphasize comfort, safety, and reliability. To help you navigate the array of HVAC solutions available, this guide reviews all York products.

Key definitions

Understanding the following industry definitions can help you evaluate the efficiency of York products.

Energy efficiency ratio: A unit’s EER rating indicates its efficiency in outdoor temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

Annualized fuel utilization efficiency: A furnace’s AFUE rating illustrates how efficiently it uses fuel. Higher ratings indicate more efficient units.

Seasonal energy efficiency ratio: The SEER rating shows the efficiency of an AC unit. The SEER rating is calculated by dividing the unit’s cooling output during a given season by the energy used.

Heat season performance factor: A heat pump’s efficiency is illustrated by its HSPF rating, which measures the total heating output against the total energy used. More efficient heat pumps have higher HSPF ratings.

British thermal unit: One BTU represents the amount of heat energy needed to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit at sea level. Units with higher BTUs can cool spaces more quickly.

York furnaces

York gas furnaces deliver reliable performance during winter. The company offers efficient units that can help you reduce energy bills without compromising on comfort. York categorizes its gas furnaces into three series: Affinity, LX Series and Latitude.

Affinity series

York offers two Affinity series furnace models: the YP9C and YPLC. These premium, high-efficiency furnaces each feature a ClimaTrak Comfort System, which selects the ideal operating cycle for your space. Each unit has communicating capabilities and a modulating burner design that continuously adjusts heating levels.

A variable-speed ECM motor provides quiet operation, efficient circulation, and even temperature control. The Affinity furnaces are only 33 inches tall, to fit in any living space. The YP9C furnace is Energy Star qualified, with an AFUE rating of up to 98 percent. This unit has a capacity of 60 to 120 MBH input and costs about $2,600.

LX series

The LX series includes some of York’s most popular furnace models: the TM9V, TM9T, TM9Y, TM9E, TM8V, TM8Y, TM8T and TM8X. York’s LX models are highly efficient and can help you save on energy bills. The LX series includes single-stage and two-stage furnaces.

Single-stage options include the TM9E, TL9E, and the TL8E. The TM9V model is the most popular LX furnace, with Energy Star certification, a two-stage motor, and an integrated ClimaTrak system. The variable-speed ECM fan motor is quiet, and the unit has an AFUE rating of up to 96 percent. The TM9V generally costs $2,000 to $3,000.

Latitude series

The Latitude series includes compact, economical options delivering quality and dependability. The TG9S and TG8S models are single-stage furnaces, each with a constant-speed PSC fan motor. The TG9S furnace is available in capacities between 40 and 130 MBH and efficiencies of up to 95.5 percent AFUE. The average price of this unit ranges from $1,000 to $2,000.

York air conditioners

York delivers air conditioner models under the Affinity and LX series.

Affinity series

The Affinity Series includes the YXV and YXT air conditioner models. The YXV is a variable-speed unit, while the YXT is a two-stage air conditioner. Both models control temperature and humidity. York’s Affinity AC units are communicating capable, are energy efficient and feature QuietDrive sound reduction.

The YXV and the YXT are available in sizes between two and five tons. The YXV air conditioner features ClimateSet, which helps maximize cooling efficiency. The unit has a maximum efficiency of 21 SEER and costs about $2,779 for the unit alone.

LX series

LX air conditioners include the energy-efficient YFK and YCG models. The LX series also includes an economy category, with units of standard efficiency. The LX series includes single-stage and two-stage units.

To choose the best option for your home, you should understand each model’s features. The YFK air conditioner is a single-phase unit with a two-stage compressor and a tube-in-fin coil. The YFK is available in sizes ranging from two to five tons. This AC unit has a SEER rating of up to 17.

York heat pumps

York heat pumps deliver year-round comfort and excellent efficiency. Heat pumps remove warm air to keep you cool during summer, and they draw heat into your home during winter. York heat pumps are available in Affinity and LX series models.

Affinity series

Affinity heat pumps are highly efficient. The variable-speed YZV model and the two-stage YZT model have communicating capabilities for improved dehumidification and comfort control. QuietDrive sound reduction promotes quiet operation, and you can fine-tune blower operations to your exact specifications.

The tube-in-fin coils offer durability and long-lasting performance. The YZV heat pump is Energy Star qualified and has a 21 SEER rating and an 11 HSPF rating. The unit features a touch-screen thermostat and a built-in ClimateSet feature for enhanced temperature and humidity control. This model costs about $2,580, including installation.

The YZT model is a two-stage communicating heat pump. The Energy Star-certified model has a SEER rating of 19 and an HSPF rating of 10. The quiet heat pump operates as quietly as 67 decibels.

LX series

The LX series includes the advanced and energy-efficient YHM and YHG models. The YHE heat pump is an economical LX model that delivers standard efficiency. The YHG heat pump is Energy Star certified and has a single-stage compressor. The unit features a tube-in-fin coil that promotes defrosting and water shedding during harsh weather, and automotive-grade powder paint reduces corrosion. The YHG has a maximum cooling efficiency of 17 SEER and a heating efficiency of 10 HSPF.

York packaged systems

York packaged systems are compact and efficient, and they combine several components of a traditional HVAC system into a single unit. Packaged systems are installed outside your house. York only offers these systems under the LX series.

LX series

The LX Series includes both advanced and economy packaged systems. The advanced models feature high efficiency and are available in single-phase and three-phase models. Advanced models include the PCE6, PCG6, PHE6, and PHG6 systems. Economical options deliver standard efficiency and include the PCG4, PCE4, PHG4, and PHE4 models. Packaged systems in either category are available in sizes ranging from two to five tons. The PCE6 packaged system is a two-stage cooling unit that delivers high levels of temperature and humidity control. The Energy Star-certified unit has efficiency ratings of up to 16 SEER and 12.5 EER.

The PHE6 model is a two-stage packaged heat pump. The system is Energy Star certified and reduces power consumption without compromising on comfort. This unit can help you to save space and comes in single-phase and three-phase options. With capacities of two to five tons, this system has efficiency ratings of up to 16 SEER and 8.2 HSPF.

York warranties

York HVAC products often deliver reliable performance for many years. To protect its customers, York offers warranties on every unit. The Affinity series split-system air conditioners and heat pumps carry a 10-year limited parts warranty, a lifetime limited compressor warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty.

Affinity, LX and Latitude series furnaces come with a lifetime limited heat exchanger warranty, a 10-year limited parts warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty. LX Series split-system air conditioners and heat pumps carry a 10-year limited compressor warranty, a 10-year limited parts warranty, a 10-year limited supplemental electric heat warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty.

LX Series packaged units come with a 10-year limited parts warranty, a 10-year limited compressor warranty, a 10-year compressor electric heat exchanger limited warranty and a one-year limited labor warranty.

York reviews

To choose the best York HVAC product for your home, you should understand your options. Comparing models will help you choose the unit that best suits your needs. One way to gather information about HVAC products is to read customer reviews. While reading reviews, focus on each unit’s performance, capacity, efficiency, maintenance needs, and warranty. Additional factors to consider include sound ratings, price and maintenance costs. You can read York product reviews on Freshome.com.

York is a reliable HVAC manufacturer that offers products to meet various heating and cooling needs. Visit Freshome.com to learn more about products from York and other HVAC brands.

The post York Heating and Cooling appeared first on Freshome.com.

[jovialsoulinfluencer]

York Heating and Cooling

Image: Jo Ann Snover/Shutterstock

Based in York, Pennsylvania, York International Corporation is an HVAC company founded in 1874. The corporation initially manufactured ice cream machines before switching its focus to air conditioners.

York offers a variety of HVAC products that emphasize comfort, safety, and reliability. To help you navigate the array of HVAC solutions available, this guide reviews all York products.

Key definitions

Understanding the following industry definitions can help you evaluate the efficiency of York products.

Energy efficiency ratio: A unit’s EER rating indicates its efficiency in outdoor temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

Annualized fuel utilization efficiency: A furnace’s AFUE rating illustrates how efficiently it uses fuel. Higher ratings indicate more efficient units.

Seasonal energy efficiency ratio: The SEER rating shows the efficiency of an AC unit. The SEER rating is calculated by dividing the unit’s cooling output during a given season by the energy used.

Heat season performance factor: A heat pump’s efficiency is illustrated by its HSPF rating, which measures the total heating output against the total energy used. More efficient heat pumps have higher HSPF ratings.

British thermal unit: One BTU represents the amount of heat energy needed to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit at sea level. Units with higher BTUs can cool spaces more quickly.

York furnaces

York gas furnaces deliver reliable performance during winter. The company offers efficient units that can help you reduce energy bills without compromising on comfort. York categorizes its gas furnaces into three series: Affinity, LX Series and Latitude.

Affinity series

York offers two Affinity series furnace models: the YP9C and YPLC. These premium, high-efficiency furnaces each feature a ClimaTrak Comfort System, which selects the ideal operating cycle for your space. Each unit has communicating capabilities and a modulating burner design that continuously adjusts heating levels.

A variable-speed ECM motor provides quiet operation, efficient circulation, and even temperature control. The Affinity furnaces are only 33 inches tall, to fit in any living space. The YP9C furnace is Energy Star qualified, with an AFUE rating of up to 98 percent. This unit has a capacity of 60 to 120 MBH input and costs about $2,600.

LX series

The LX series includes some of York’s most popular furnace models: the TM9V, TM9T, TM9Y, TM9E, TM8V, TM8Y, TM8T and TM8X. York’s LX models are highly efficient and can help you save on energy bills. The LX series includes single-stage and two-stage furnaces.

Single-stage options include the TM9E, TL9E, and the TL8E. The TM9V model is the most popular LX furnace, with Energy Star certification, a two-stage motor, and an integrated ClimaTrak system. The variable-speed ECM fan motor is quiet, and the unit has an AFUE rating of up to 96 percent. The TM9V generally costs $2,000 to $3,000.

Latitude series

The Latitude series includes compact, economical options delivering quality and dependability. The TG9S and TG8S models are single-stage furnaces, each with a constant-speed PSC fan motor. The TG9S furnace is available in capacities between 40 and 130 MBH and efficiencies of up to 95.5 percent AFUE. The average price of this unit ranges from $1,000 to $2,000.

York air conditioners

York delivers air conditioner models under the Affinity and LX series.

Affinity series

The Affinity Series includes the YXV and YXT air conditioner models. The YXV is a variable-speed unit, while the YXT is a two-stage air conditioner. Both models control temperature and humidity. York’s Affinity AC units are communicating capable, are energy efficient and feature QuietDrive sound reduction.

The YXV and the YXT are available in sizes between two and five tons. The YXV air conditioner features ClimateSet, which helps maximize cooling efficiency. The unit has a maximum efficiency of 21 SEER and costs about $2,779 for the unit alone.

LX series

LX air conditioners include the energy-efficient YFK and YCG models. The LX series also includes an economy category, with units of standard efficiency. The LX series includes single-stage and two-stage units.

To choose the best option for your home, you should understand each model’s features. The YFK air conditioner is a single-phase unit with a two-stage compressor and a tube-in-fin coil. The YFK is available in sizes ranging from two to five tons. This AC unit has a SEER rating of up to 17.

York heat pumps

York heat pumps deliver year-round comfort and excellent efficiency. Heat pumps remove warm air to keep you cool during summer, and they draw heat into your home during winter. York heat pumps are available in Affinity and LX series models.

Affinity series

Affinity heat pumps are highly efficient. The variable-speed YZV model and the two-stage YZT model have communicating capabilities for improved dehumidification and comfort control. QuietDrive sound reduction promotes quiet operation, and you can fine-tune blower operations to your exact specifications.

The tube-in-fin coils offer durability and long-lasting performance. The YZV heat pump is Energy Star qualified and has a 21 SEER rating and an 11 HSPF rating. The unit features a touch-screen thermostat and a built-in ClimateSet feature for enhanced temperature and humidity control. This model costs about $2,580, including installation.

The YZT model is a two-stage communicating heat pump. The Energy Star-certified model has a SEER rating of 19 and an HSPF rating of 10. The quiet heat pump operates as quietly as 67 decibels.

LX series

The LX series includes the advanced and energy-efficient YHM and YHG models. The YHE heat pump is an economical LX model that delivers standard efficiency. The YHG heat pump is Energy Star certified and has a single-stage compressor. The unit features a tube-in-fin coil that promotes defrosting and water shedding during harsh weather, and automotive-grade powder paint reduces corrosion. The YHG has a maximum cooling efficiency of 17 SEER and a heating efficiency of 10 HSPF.

York packaged systems

York packaged systems are compact and efficient, and they combine several components of a traditional HVAC system into a single unit. Packaged systems are installed outside your house. York only offers these systems under the LX series.

LX series

The LX Series includes both advanced and economy packaged systems. The advanced models feature high efficiency and are available in single-phase and three-phase models. Advanced models include the PCE6, PCG6, PHE6, and PHG6 systems. Economical options deliver standard efficiency and include the PCG4, PCE4, PHG4, and PHE4 models. Packaged systems in either category are available in sizes ranging from two to five tons. The PCE6 packaged system is a two-stage cooling unit that delivers high levels of temperature and humidity control. The Energy Star-certified unit has efficiency ratings of up to 16 SEER and 12.5 EER.

The PHE6 model is a two-stage packaged heat pump. The system is Energy Star certified and reduces power consumption without compromising on comfort. This unit can help you to save space and comes in single-phase and three-phase options. With capacities of two to five tons, this system has efficiency ratings of up to 16 SEER and 8.2 HSPF.

York warranties

York HVAC products often deliver reliable performance for many years. To protect its customers, York offers warranties on every unit. The Affinity series split-system air conditioners and heat pumps carry a 10-year limited parts warranty, a lifetime limited compressor warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty.

Affinity, LX and Latitude series furnaces come with a lifetime limited heat exchanger warranty, a 10-year limited parts warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty. LX Series split-system air conditioners and heat pumps carry a 10-year limited compressor warranty, a 10-year limited parts warranty, a 10-year limited supplemental electric heat warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty.

LX Series packaged units come with a 10-year limited parts warranty, a 10-year limited compressor warranty, a 10-year compressor electric heat exchanger limited warranty and a one-year limited labor warranty.

York reviews

To choose the best York HVAC product for your home, you should understand your options. Comparing models will help you choose the unit that best suits your needs. One way to gather information about HVAC products is to read customer reviews. While reading reviews, focus on each unit’s performance, capacity, efficiency, maintenance needs, and warranty. Additional factors to consider include sound ratings, price and maintenance costs. You can read York product reviews on Freshome.com.

York is a reliable HVAC manufacturer that offers products to meet various heating and cooling needs. Visit Freshome.com to learn more about products from York and other HVAC brands.

The post York Heating and Cooling appeared first on Freshome.com.

from https://freshome.com/york-heating-and-cooling/ via York Heating and Cooling

[cessanderson]

York Heating and Cooling https://ift.tt/2PVd6OX

Image: Jo Ann Snover/Shutterstock

Based in York, Pennsylvania, York International Corporation is an HVAC company founded in 1874. The corporation initially manufactured ice cream machines before switching its focus to air conditioners.

York offers a variety of HVAC products that emphasize comfort, safety, and reliability. To help you navigate the array of HVAC solutions available, this guide reviews all York products.

Key definitions

Understanding the following industry definitions can help you evaluate the efficiency of York products.

Energy efficiency ratio: A unit’s EER rating indicates its efficiency in outdoor temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

Annualized fuel utilization efficiency: A furnace’s AFUE rating illustrates how efficiently it uses fuel. Higher ratings indicate more efficient units.

Seasonal energy efficiency ratio: The SEER rating shows the efficiency of an AC unit. The SEER rating is calculated by dividing the unit’s cooling output during a given season by the energy used.

Heat season performance factor: A heat pump’s efficiency is illustrated by its HSPF rating, which measures the total heating output against the total energy used. More efficient heat pumps have higher HSPF ratings.

British thermal unit: One BTU represents the amount of heat energy needed to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit at sea level. Units with higher BTUs can cool spaces more quickly.

York furnaces

York gas furnaces deliver reliable performance during winter. The company offers efficient units that can help you reduce energy bills without compromising on comfort. York categorizes its gas furnaces into three series: Affinity, LX Series and Latitude.

Affinity series

York offers two Affinity series furnace models: the YP9C and YPLC. These premium, high-efficiency furnaces each feature a ClimaTrak Comfort System, which selects the ideal operating cycle for your space. Each unit has communicating capabilities and a modulating burner design that continuously adjusts heating levels.

A variable-speed ECM motor provides quiet operation, efficient circulation, and even temperature control. The Affinity furnaces are only 33 inches tall, to fit in any living space. The YP9C furnace is Energy Star qualified, with an AFUE rating of up to 98 percent. This unit has a capacity of 60 to 120 MBH input and costs about $2,600.

LX series

The LX series includes some of York’s most popular furnace models: the TM9V, TM9T, TM9Y, TM9E, TM8V, TM8Y, TM8T and TM8X. York’s LX models are highly efficient and can help you save on energy bills. The LX series includes single-stage and two-stage furnaces.

Single-stage options include the TM9E, TL9E, and the TL8E. The TM9V model is the most popular LX furnace, with Energy Star certification, a two-stage motor, and an integrated ClimaTrak system. The variable-speed ECM fan motor is quiet, and the unit has an AFUE rating of up to 96 percent. The TM9V generally costs $2,000 to $3,000.

Latitude series

The Latitude series includes compact, economical options delivering quality and dependability. The TG9S and TG8S models are single-stage furnaces, each with a constant-speed PSC fan motor. The TG9S furnace is available in capacities between 40 and 130 MBH and efficiencies of up to 95.5 percent AFUE. The average price of this unit ranges from $1,000 to $2,000.

York air conditioners

York delivers air conditioner models under the Affinity and LX series.

Affinity series

The Affinity Series includes the YXV and YXT air conditioner models. The YXV is a variable-speed unit, while the YXT is a two-stage air conditioner. Both models control temperature and humidity. York’s Affinity AC units are communicating capable, are energy efficient and feature QuietDrive sound reduction.

The YXV and the YXT are available in sizes between two and five tons. The YXV air conditioner features ClimateSet, which helps maximize cooling efficiency. The unit has a maximum efficiency of 21 SEER and costs about $2,779 for the unit alone.

LX series

LX air conditioners include the energy-efficient YFK and YCG models. The LX series also includes an economy category, with units of standard efficiency. The LX series includes single-stage and two-stage units.

To choose the best option for your home, you should understand each model’s features. The YFK air conditioner is a single-phase unit with a two-stage compressor and a tube-in-fin coil. The YFK is available in sizes ranging from two to five tons. This AC unit has a SEER rating of up to 17.

York heat pumps

York heat pumps deliver year-round comfort and excellent efficiency. Heat pumps remove warm air to keep you cool during summer, and they draw heat into your home during winter. York heat pumps are available in Affinity and LX series models.

Affinity series

Affinity heat pumps are highly efficient. The variable-speed YZV model and the two-stage YZT model have communicating capabilities for improved dehumidification and comfort control. QuietDrive sound reduction promotes quiet operation, and you can fine-tune blower operations to your exact specifications.

The tube-in-fin coils offer durability and long-lasting performance. The YZV heat pump is Energy Star qualified and has a 21 SEER rating and an 11 HSPF rating. The unit features a touch-screen thermostat and a built-in ClimateSet feature for enhanced temperature and humidity control. This model costs about $2,580, including installation.

The YZT model is a two-stage communicating heat pump. The Energy Star-certified model has a SEER rating of 19 and an HSPF rating of 10. The quiet heat pump operates as quietly as 67 decibels.

LX series

The LX series includes the advanced and energy-efficient YHM and YHG models. The YHE heat pump is an economical LX model that delivers standard efficiency. The YHG heat pump is Energy Star certified and has a single-stage compressor. The unit features a tube-in-fin coil that promotes defrosting and water shedding during harsh weather, and automotive-grade powder paint reduces corrosion. The YHG has a maximum cooling efficiency of 17 SEER and a heating efficiency of 10 HSPF.

York packaged systems

York packaged systems are compact and efficient, and they combine several components of a traditional HVAC system into a single unit. Packaged systems are installed outside your house. York only offers these systems under the LX series.

LX series

The LX Series includes both advanced and economy packaged systems. The advanced models feature high efficiency and are available in single-phase and three-phase models. Advanced models include the PCE6, PCG6, PHE6, and PHG6 systems. Economical options deliver standard efficiency and include the PCG4, PCE4, PHG4, and PHE4 models. Packaged systems in either category are available in sizes ranging from two to five tons. The PCE6 packaged system is a two-stage cooling unit that delivers high levels of temperature and humidity control. The Energy Star-certified unit has efficiency ratings of up to 16 SEER and 12.5 EER.

The PHE6 model is a two-stage packaged heat pump. The system is Energy Star certified and reduces power consumption without compromising on comfort. This unit can help you to save space and comes in single-phase and three-phase options. With capacities of two to five tons, this system has efficiency ratings of up to 16 SEER and 8.2 HSPF.

York warranties

York HVAC products often deliver reliable performance for many years. To protect its customers, York offers warranties on every unit. The Affinity series split-system air conditioners and heat pumps carry a 10-year limited parts warranty, a lifetime limited compressor warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty.

Affinity, LX and Latitude series furnaces come with a lifetime limited heat exchanger warranty, a 10-year limited parts warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty. LX Series split-system air conditioners and heat pumps carry a 10-year limited compressor warranty, a 10-year limited parts warranty, a 10-year limited supplemental electric heat warranty, and a one-year limited labor warranty.

LX Series packaged units come with a 10-year limited parts warranty, a 10-year limited compressor warranty, a 10-year compressor electric heat exchanger limited warranty and a one-year limited labor warranty.

York reviews

To choose the best York HVAC product for your home, you should understand your options. Comparing models will help you choose the unit that best suits your needs. One way to gather information about HVAC products is to read customer reviews. While reading reviews, focus on each unit’s performance, capacity, efficiency, maintenance needs, and warranty. Additional factors to consider include sound ratings, price and maintenance costs. You can read York product reviews on Freshome.com.

York is a reliable HVAC manufacturer that offers products to meet various heating and cooling needs. Visit Freshome.com to learn more about products from York and other HVAC brands.

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Ali Dunlap

[smythfamilytree]

Lassen Peak pool. Lassen Peak, also known as Mount Lassen, is the southernmost active volcano in the Cascade Range. It is part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc which is an arc that stretches from southwestern British Columbia to northern California.

The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. 

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.

When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three. The conference was wrapping up for the day. He was thinking about sushi. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The earthquake was not particularly strong. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The shaking intensified. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside.

It was March. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow on the ground. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the ground. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. It was, Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas. The quake passed the two-minute mark. The trees, still hung with the previous autumn’s dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. Goldfinger lurched over to take a look. The base was lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the yard. He thought better of it, and lurched away. His watch swept past the three-minute mark and kept going.

Oh, shit, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in amazement. For decades, seismologists had believed that Japan could not experience an earthquake stronger than magnitude 8.4. In 2005, however, at a conference in Hokudan, a Japanese geologist named Yasutaka Ikeda had argued that the nation should expect a magnitude 9.0 in the near future—with catastrophic consequences, because Japan’s famous earthquake-and-tsunami preparedness, including the height of its sea walls, was based on incorrect science. The presentation was met with polite applause and thereafter largely ignored. Now, Goldfinger realized as the shaking hit the four-minute mark, the planet was proving the Japanese Cassandra right.

For a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake science. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool, because Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in Kashiwa knew what was coming. One of them pulled out a cell phone and started streaming videos from the Japanese broadcasting station NHK, shot by helicopters that had flown out to sea soon after the shaking started. Thirty minutes after Goldfinger first stepped outside, he watched the tsunami roll in, in real time, on a two-inch screen.

In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. The shaking earlier in the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in the nation’s recorded history. But for Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world’s leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come.

Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

“Perhaps I’ve said too much.”

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.

“I’ll do what everybody does—sell this startup just before we have to hire a female employee.”

In May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, together with their Corps of Discovery, set off from St. Louis on America’s first official cross-country expedition. Eighteen months later, they reached the Pacific Ocean and made camp near the present-day town of Astoria, Oregon. The United States was, at the time, twenty-nine years old. Canada was not yet a country. The continent’s far expanses were so unknown to its white explorers that Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the journey, thought that the men would come across woolly mammoths. Native Americans had lived in the Northwest for millennia, but they had no written language, and the many things to which the arriving Europeans subjected them did not include seismological inquiries. The newcomers took the land they encountered at face value, and at face value it was a find: vast, cheap, temperate, fertile, and, to all appearances, remarkably benign.

A century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of quiet. It took another fifty years to uncover and interpret the region’s seismic history. Geology, as even geologists will tell you, is not normally the sexiest of disciplines; it hunkers down with earthly stuff while the glory accrues to the human and the cosmic—to genetics, neuroscience, physics. But, sooner or later, every field has its field day, and the discovery of the Cascadia subduction zone stands as one of the greatest scientific detective stories of our time.

The first clue came from geography. Almost all of the world’s most powerful earthquakes occur in the Ring of Fire, the volcanically and seismically volatile swath of the Pacific that runs from New Zealand up through Indonesia and Japan, across the ocean to Alaska, and down the west coast of the Americas to Chile. Japan, 2011, magnitude 9.0; Indonesia, 2004, magnitude 9.1; Alaska, 1964, magnitude 9.2; Chile, 1960, magnitude 9.5—not until the late nineteen-sixties, with the rise of the theory of plate tectonics, could geologists explain this pattern. The Ring of Fire, it turns out, is really a ring of subduction zones. Nearly all the earthquakes in the region are caused by continental plates getting stuck on oceanic plates—as North America is stuck on Juan de Fuca—and then getting abruptly unstuck. And nearly all the volcanoes are caused by the oceanic plates sliding deep beneath the continental ones, eventually reaching temperatures and pressures so extreme that they melt the rock above them.

The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major earthquake—or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver. The question facing geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction zone had ever broken its eerie silence.

In the late nineteen-eighties, Brian Atwater, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey, and a graduate student named David Yamaguchi found the answer, and another major clue in the Cascadia puzzle. Their discovery is best illustrated in a place called the ghost forest, a grove of western red cedars on the banks of the Copalis River, near the Washington coast. When I paddled out to it last summer, with Atwater and Yamaguchi, it was easy to see how it got its name. The cedars are spread out across a low salt marsh on a wide northern bend in the river, long dead but still standing. Leafless, branchless, barkless, they are reduced to their trunks and worn to a smooth silver-gray, as if they had always carried their own tombstones inside them.

What killed the trees in the ghost forest was saltwater. It had long been assumed that they died slowly, as the sea level around them gradually rose and submerged their roots. But, by 1987, Atwater, who had found in soil layers evidence of sudden land subsidence along the Washington coast, suspected that that was backward—that the trees had died quickly when the ground beneath them plummeted. To find out, he teamed up with Yamaguchi, a specialist in dendrochronology, the study of growth-ring patterns in trees. Yamaguchi took samples of the cedars and found that they had died simultaneously: in tree after tree, the final rings dated to the summer of 1699. Since trees do not grow in the winter, he and Atwater concluded that sometime between August of 1699 and May of 1700 an earthquake had caused the land to drop and killed the cedars. That time frame predated by more than a hundred years the written history of the Pacific Northwest—and so, by rights, the detective story should have ended there.

But it did not. If you travel five thousand miles due west from the ghost forest, you reach the northeast coast of Japan. As the events of 2011 made clear, that coast is vulnerable to tsunamis, and the Japanese have kept track of them since at least 599 A.D. In that fourteen-hundred-year history, one incident has long stood out for its strangeness. On the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of the Genroku era, a six-hundred-mile-long wave struck the coast, levelling homes, breaching a castle moat, and causing an accident at sea. The Japanese understood that tsunamis were the result of earthquakes, yet no one felt the ground shake before the Genroku event. The wave had no discernible origin. When scientists began studying it, they called it an orphan tsunami.

Finally, in a 1996 article in Nature, a seismologist named Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the work of Atwater and Yamaguchi, matched that orphan to its parent—and thereby filled in the blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny specificity. At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku.

Once scientists had reconstructed the 1700 earthquake, certain previously overlooked accounts also came to seem like clues. In 1964, Chief Louis Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British Columbia, told a story, passed down through seven generations, about the eradication of Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people. “I think it was at nighttime that the land shook,” Nookmis recalled. According to another tribal history, “They sank at once, were all drowned; not one survived.” A hundred years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah tribe, recounted a similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the water had receded from Washington State’s Neah Bay, then suddenly poured back in, inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found canoes hanging from the trees. In a 2005 study, Ruth Ludwin, then a seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough information to estimate a date range for the events they described. On average, the midpoint of that range was 1701.

It does not speak well of European-Americans that such stories counted as evidence for a proposition only after that proposition had been proved. Still, the reconstruction of the Cascadia earthquake of 1700 is one of those rare natural puzzles whose pieces fit together as tectonic plates do not: perfectly. It is wonderful science. It was wonderful for science. And it was terrible news for the millions of inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. As Goldfinger put it, “In the late eighties and early nineties, the paradigm shifted to ‘uh-oh.’ ”

Goldfinger told me this in his lab at Oregon State, a low prefab building that a passing English major might reasonably mistake for the maintenance department. Inside the lab is a walk-in freezer. Inside the freezer are floor-to-ceiling racks filled with cryptically labelled tubes, four inches in diameter and five feet long. Each tube contains a core sample of the seafloor. Each sample contains the history, written in seafloorese, of the past ten thousand years. During subduction-zone earthquakes, torrents of land rush off the continental slope, leaving a permanent deposit on the bottom of the ocean. By counting the number and the size of deposits in each sample, then comparing their extent and consistency along the length of the Cascadia subduction zone, Goldfinger and his colleagues were able to determine how much of the zone has ruptured, how often, and how drastically.

Thanks to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.

It is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and eleven, but also of eighteen and two. It is not possible, however, to dispute the scale of the problem. The devastation in Japan in 2011 was the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and what the region was prepared to withstand. The same will hold true in the Pacific Northwest—but here the discrepancy is enormous. “The science part is fun,” Goldfinger says. “And I love doing it. But the gap between what we know and what we should do about it is getting bigger and bigger, and the action really needs to turn to responding. Otherwise, we’re going to be hammered. I’ve been through one of these massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If that was Portland”—Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his head before he finished it with words. “Let’s just say I would rather not be here.”

“This heat is killing me. Let’s get a drink in Little Antarctica.”

The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.

Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.

Certain disasters stem from many small problems conspiring to cause one very large problem. For want of a nail, the war was lost; for fifteen independently insignificant errors, the jetliner was lost. Subduction-zone earthquakes operate on the opposite principle: one enormous problem causes many other enormous problems. The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region—up to thirty thousand of them in Seattle alone, the city’s emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. So is Oregon’s critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of Portland through which flows ninety per cent of the state’s liquid fuel and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas terminals. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins. They will be notified to do so only by the earthquake itself—“a vibrate-alert system,” Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, jokes—and they are urged to leave on foot, since the earthquake will render roads impassable. Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. “When that tsunami is coming, you run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC), says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.” [#unhandled_cartoon]

The time to save people from a tsunami is before it happens, but the region has not yet taken serious steps toward doing so. Hotels and businesses are not required to post evacuation routes or to provide employees with evacuation training. In Oregon, it has been illegal since 1995 to build hospitals, schools, firehouses, and police stations in the inundation zone, but those which are already in it can stay, and any other new construction is permissible: energy facilities, hotels, retirement homes. In those cases, builders are required only to consult with DOGAMI about evacuation plans. “So you come in and sit down,” Ian Madin says. “And I say, ‘That’s a stupid idea.’ And you say, ‘Thanks. Now we’ve consulted.’ ”

These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out. Twenty-two per cent of Oregon’s coastal population is sixty-five or older. Twenty-nine per cent of the state’s population is disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties. “We can’t save them,” Kevin Cupples says. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly.’ No. We won’t.” Nor will anyone save the tourists. Washington State Park properties within the inundation zone see an average of seventeen thousand and twenty-nine guests a day. Madin estimates that up to a hundred and fifty thousand people visit Oregon’s beaches on summer weekends. “Most of them won’t have a clue as to how to evacuate,” he says. “And the beaches are the hardest place to evacuate from.”

Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one. A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.

To see the full scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you would need to be in the international space station. The inundation zone will be scoured of structures from California to Canada. The earthquake will have wrought its worst havoc west of the Cascades but caused damage as far away as Sacramento, California—as distant from the worst-hit areas as Fort Wayne, Indiana, is from New York. FEMA expects to coördinate search-and-rescue operations across a hundred thousand square miles and in the waters off four hundred and fifty-three miles of coastline. As for casualties: the figures I cited earlier—twenty-seven thousand injured, almost thirteen thousand dead—are based on the agency’s official planning scenario, which has the earthquake striking at 9:41 A.M. on February 6th. If, instead, it strikes in the summer, when the beaches are full, those numbers could be off by a horrifying margin.

Wineglasses, antique vases, Humpty Dumpty, hip bones, hearts: what breaks quickly generally mends slowly, if at all. OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities. On the coast, those numbers go up. Whoever chooses or has no choice but to stay there will spend three to six months without electricity, one to three years without drinking water and sewage systems, and three or more years without hospitals. Those estimates do not apply to the tsunami-inundation zone, which will remain all but uninhabitable for years.

How much all this will cost is anyone’s guess; FEMA puts every number on its relief-and-recovery plan except a price. But whatever the ultimate figure—and even though U.S. taxpayers will cover seventy-five to a hundred per cent of the damage, as happens in declared disasters—the economy of the Pacific Northwest will collapse. Crippled by a lack of basic services, businesses will fail or move away. Many residents will flee as well. OSSPAC predicts a mass-displacement event and a long-term population downturn. Chris Goldfinger didn’t want to be there when it happened. But, by many metrics, it will be as bad or worse to be there afterward.

On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

[#unhandled_cartoon]

This problem is bidirectional. The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s “San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.

That problem is not specific to earthquakes, of course. The Cascadia situation, a calamity in its own right, is also a parable for this age of ecological reckoning, and the questions it raises are ones that we all now face. How should a society respond to a looming crisis of uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions? How can it begin to right itself when its entire infrastructure and culture developed in a way that leaves it profoundly vulnerable to natural disaster?

The last person I met with in the Pacific Northwest was Doug Dougherty, the superintendent of schools for Seaside, which lies almost entirely within the tsunami-inundation zone. Of the four schools that Dougherty oversees, with a total student population of sixteen hundred, one is relatively safe. The others sit five to fifteen feet above sea level. When the tsunami comes, they will be as much as forty-five feet below it.

In 2009, Dougherty told me, he found some land for sale outside the inundation zone, and proposed building a new K-12 campus there. Four years later, to foot the hundred-and-twenty-eight-million-dollar bill, the district put up a bond measure. The tax increase for residents amounted to two dollars and sixteen cents per thousand dollars of property value. The measure failed by sixty-two per cent. Dougherty tried seeking help from Oregon’s congressional delegation but came up empty. The state makes money available for seismic upgrades, but buildings within the inundation zone cannot apply. At present, all Dougherty can do is make sure that his students know how to evacuate.

Some of them, however, will not be able to do so. At an elementary school in the community of Gearhart, the children will be trapped. “They can’t make it out from that school,” Dougherty said. “They have no place to go.” On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a wide, roadless bog. When the tsunami comes, the only place to go in Gearhart is a small ridge just behind the school. At its tallest, it is forty-five feet high—lower than the expected wave in a full-margin earthquake. For now, the route to the ridge is marked by signs that say “Temporary Tsunami Assembly Area.” I asked Dougherty about the state’s long-range plan. “There is no long-range plan,” he said.

Dougherty’s office is deep inside the inundation zone, a few blocks from the beach. All day long, just out of sight, the ocean rises up and collapses, spilling foamy overlapping ovals onto the shore. Eighty miles farther out, ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea, the hand of a geological clock is somewhere in its slow sweep. All across the region, seismologists are looking at their watches, wondering how long we have, and what we will do, before geological time catches up to our own. ♦

*An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the area of impact.

Read more »

Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” her story on the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.”

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Earthquakes

Seismology

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[perksofwifi]

Will Kandi Crush Our Expectations With Its $19,999 EV?

Tiger King introduced us to characters such as Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, as well as the weird world of big cat collectors and rescuers. It also reminded us about the existence of the $10,599 Kandi Coco, which briefly appears in scenes of the series filmed at Exotic’s Oklahoma zoo. Nearly a decade ago, the Chinese brand’s small, Smart-like electric vehicle was available to Oklahomans for as little as $865 thanks to then-available federal and state tax credits. 

Now, Kandi is back with two new EVs it plans to sell in the United States: the Model K27 and Model K23. Curiously, the numerically higher Model K27 is the cheaper, lower-performance version of the two. That said, it’s also the better looking of this pair. Mind you, looks are subjective and the K27 is anything but pretty. 

2021 Kandi Model K27 Highlights

Still, we have an affinity for this $19,999 (before tax incentives) model’s Kei-car-like styling, which includes features such as expressive ovoid headlamps, stubby and tall proportions, and a set of small, 14-inch wheels and tires. At 136.2 inches long and 63.6 inches high, the four-door Model K27 casts a shadow 8.2 inches shorter and 3.8 inches taller than the 2019 Fiat 500 hatchback. 

As its size suggests, the Model K27 is a city car. That’s for the best, too, as the less than 30 hp produced by the car’s front-mounted electric motor leaves this 2,271-pound EV with a top speed of 63 mph. Driving range, meanwhile, stands at a manufacturer-estimated 100 miles with the car’s 17.7-kWh battery pack fully charged. Replenishing the little Kandi’s battery requires 7.0 hours when hooked up to a 240-volt charger, per the automaker. Despite its relatively cheap starting sum, the Model K27 sports standard kit such as a 9.0-inch touchscreen infotainment system, dual-front airbags, and anti-lock brakes.

2021 Kandi Model K23 Highlights

If the Model K27 fails to suit your EV needs, then maybe the 20.2-inch longer Model K23 is the Kandi EV for you. At $29,999 (before tax incentives), however, the bigger Model K23 makes less of a case for itself as a value proposition. Consider the 2020 Nissan Leaf starts at $32,525, offers more palatable styling, and packs more than four times the horsepower from its electric motor. 

That said, the 2,954-pound Model K23’s less than 30-hp electric motor and 41.4-kWh battery pack manage a manufacturer-estimated 188 miles of driving range on a full charge—39 more miles than the Leaf’s EPA-estimated range. With a top speed of 70 mph, though, the front-wheel-drive Model K23 will surely spend more time scurrying about in the right lane. Recharging the pack is a 7.5-hour affair on a 240-volt charger, according to Kandi.

Inside, the Model K23 features a 10.0-inch touchscreen infotainment screen. We also anticipate the car’s larger size nets it additional cargo and passenger space relative to the smaller Model K27. 

Still, we struggle to find any justification for buyers to pull the trigger on the Model K23 when the boring, but well-equipped 2020 Nissan Leaf costs a mere $2,526 more. Regardless, if you find either Kandi model sweet, then you can put down a refundable $100 deposit to secure one of these EVs anytime after August 18, 2020.

The post Will Kandi Crush Our Expectations With Its $19,999 EV? appeared first on MotorTrend.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/2021-kandi-model-k27-k23-ev-details-price-photos/ visto antes em https://www.motortrend.com

[antlerscolorado]

chapter 8, part 1

“What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o'er his base into the sea, And there assume some other horrible form, Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness? think of it: The very place puts toys of desperation, Without more motive, into every brain That looks so many fathoms to the sea And hears it roar beneath.”                                                                            - Horatio, Hamlet

The Jones house feels somehow bigger than Austin remembers it. Maybe it’s from not seeing it for so long, or maybe it’s from living in a cramped apartment with two other humans and five ghosts, but having more than enough room to breathe is almost unnerving. Austin tries not to think too hard about it - he feels jetlagged, even though he drove to Havenwood, and only about twelve hours a day before stopping to rest. Hell, he didn’t even do any of the driving himself. But his mind is scrambled, a combination of anxiety over Jacob and the strange, disjointed feeling of being back in a town he didn’t think he’d see again this soon.

Austin carefully unlaces his boots and leaves them next to the door. It’s warm in Havenwood - not as warm as it was in Antlers, but August humidity is still thick in the air. Hopefully some of his clothes are still up in his old room, and not in storage. He didn’t exactly have time to pack for this trip, and even if he had, Hall and Oates and Jenny were already peeling out of the neighborhood as soon as he’d stepped out of the car.

Nothing’s changed, Austin thinks to himself, climbing the stairs to the second floor landing. His room is the closest to the stairwell, unlocked, and nearly untouched from the day he left. He and Jacob had only settled in to the Jones house once Jacob had turned eighteen, once they’d stopped living with the Hart family, but Austin’s room looks like he’s lived in it all his life. It somehow feels more his than the bedroom he shares with Otter - the band posters tacked lopsidedly on the walls, the closet overflowing with clothes he’d missed, then forgotten.

Being back here feels like being in a dream. Austin touches the door frame to ground himself, remind himself that he really is here, in Havenwood, and crosses the room to his closet. He picks out clothes almost at random, not allowing himself to think about what will fit and what won’t. He wants to visit Jacob, and soon, but first he has to wash off all the sweat and get his head on straight.

Austin strips down, laying his clean clothes out on the bed and ducking out into the hall to grab a towel from the linen closet. The biggest bathroom in the house is diagonally across from his bedroom. It’s fitted with both a large bathtub and a glass-enclosed shower - Austin picks the shower, standing just outside the door as he twists it on, waiting for the water to get hot before he steps in.

There’s a sudden, muffled, slamming noise that he initially thinks is the pipes, before realizing that it’s the sound of a door being shut. Austin tenses, holding his towel tight around his waist. No one else should be here. Jacob’s still in the hospital, and Auggie’s out on a mission - well, as far as I know. Even if he’s not, he lives in the guest house. Did I lock the front door when I came in?

He can’t tell if the steady, throbbing sound in his ears is the sound of someone climbing the stairs to the second floor, or the sound of his own heartbeat. Austin swallows, his mouth suddenly dry.

“Hello?” he calls.

No one answers. Austin inches towards the door, scanning the bathroom countertop for anything even remotely useful as a weapon. It’s slim pickings. He settles for a hairbrush with a handle that looks relatively sharp, holding it like a stake in his hand.

“Hello?” he asks again, standing against the wall just slightly to the left of the door. It should give him the jump on anyone who opens it, let him get an attack in before they realize where he’s lying in wait.

“Austin?” a voice, vaguely recognizable, asks from the hallway. “Is that you?”

Austin hesitates, his grip on the hairbrush loosening. “Cillian?”

“Yes,” the voice affirms. “I came to see if you were home yet - are you in the shower? I can come back…”

Austin relaxes, realizing his jaw has been clenched painfully tight in anticipation. He slides the hairbrush back onto the counter, lets his towel fall onto the floor, and steps quickly into the shower. Probably best not to let Cillian know he could have mistakenly lost an eye to a hairbrush handle.

“Yeah, I’m in here,” Austin says, raising his voice to be heard over the shower. He feels instantly more relaxed with the hot water raining down on his skin, plastering his hair down to his scalp. “You can come in if you want.”

“Are you sure?” Cillian asks.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want to, ah, overstep boundaries,” Cillian says, sounding slightly closer than before, probably just outside the door. His voice is deeper than Austin remembers it - not entirely unexpected, given that he had only started hormone replacement therapy a year or two before Austin left home. “I can come back later when you’re not -”

“Cillian,” Austin says, “you’ve known me since I was, like, a baby. I’m pretty sure we’re past the point of overstepping boundaries.”

The doorknob of the bathroom audibly jiggles in its socket. Austin watches through the frosted glass of the shower door as the door opens just enough for Cillian to slip inside, then close it again behind him. Even with the low visibility, Cillian looks similar to how Austin remembers him, tall and pale with short, neatly-cropped, coppery red hair. His body language reads extremely anxious, and he turns away from the shower, facing off towards the bathtub.

“How’s Jacob?” Austin asks.

“Good. Conscious.” There’s a note in obvious relief in Cillian’s voice that Austin can empathize with. “He should be cleared to come home in a day or two, though I’m not completely sure that home is the safest place for him to be.”

“What do you mean?”

Cillian makes a strained noise. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather Jacob tell you himself?”

“I don’t really care who I hear the news from.” Austin grabs a bottle of shampoo from the shower rack and starts lathering it into his hair, closing his eyes and massaging his scalp with his fingers. “Did you figure out who stabbed him?”

“We didn’t ‘figure it out’. He made himself known to Jacob. Twice.”

“So why haven’t you caught the bastard already?” Austin asks, ducking back into the stream of water to rinse out his hair.

“We don’t know where he is,” Cillian says. He sounds apologetic - embarrassed, almost.

“And you want my help.”

“Personally, I think you’re a little close to the case, and I didn’t exactly expect you to hitch a ride with a group of mercenaries as soon as you heard Jacob had been stabbed,” Cillian says, spitting out “mercenaries” like it’s a dirty word. “But Jacob wants me to put you on the case.”

Austin pauses. “Because he’s hoping I’ll stay when I’m done?”

“Because he knows you’ll be absolutely insufferable if we don’t let you help,” Cillian says dryly. “Among other reasons.”

“He’s right.” Austin laughs, getting a mouthful of soapy water, and spitting it out. “So, who are we tracking down?”

“Abbott Kilgannon,” Cillian says. The name rings a bell - Austin remembers hearing it mentioned in passing, but can’t recall any specific context. “He was a scientist who worked at the Department for several years, but was fired by your father in 1980. He dropped off the map after that, but Jacob found him teaching science at a college out of state and re-hired him -”

“Why?” Austin blurts out. Hiring a guy who Richard fired back in the day? That sounds beyond ill-advised.

“We were short-handed,” Cillian says sheepishly. “Jacob contacted a lot of former employees about resuming their jobs at the Department. And Abbott used to be the best of the best. Unfortunately, the more unsavory part of his records were sealed by the president who took over after your father’s death, until Jacob came of age to run the Department. Only Jacob can access those records, and, well, he’s hospitalized.”

“So what can I do about that?” Austin asks, reaching for a bottle of body wash. God, if he asks me to take over as acting president -

“Do you still talk to your father?” Cillian asks, a little tentatively, like he’s not sure if he’s broaching a sore subject or not.

“Richard? Sure.” Austin pours a generous amount of body wash into his hands and rubs them together. He hasn’t seen Richard for more than ten minutes at a time since leaving Antlers - it was hard to talk to him in front of Jenny and Hall and Oates without feeling completely crazy. But Richard knows what’s up vis-a-vis Jacob’s stabbing, and no doubt is here in the house somewhere, waiting for Cillian to leave and Austin to get dressed and head out for the hospital.

“Good,” Cillian says. He takes a deep breath, and Austin can see him lean heavily against the counter. “I need you to ask him why he fired Abbott.”

intermission: thanks for your time || 8.2

[tech-battery]

Lenovo ThinkVision M14 Portable Monitor Review: Standout Kickstand

When it comes to a portable display, you need something that’s easy to carry around, easy on the eyes and, preferably, easy to set up and use. Lenovo’s ThinkVision M14 ($236, Alt Mode over USB-C only, no DisplayLink or connecting via other port types) checks the first two boxes with a light, slim build and a panel that looks great whether you’re crunching spreadsheets or watching a movie while working.

But the kickstand is the true standout, ensuring the 14-inch, USB-C FHD monitor stays put from -5 to 90-degree tilts or even in portrait mode.

Sturdy Kickstand

The ThinkVision M14 stands tall where other portable monitors have failed in that it’s easy to prop up and get to work. Many portable monitors come with a fold-up case that requires you summon your origami skills in order to bend it into a shape that’ll prop up the display. But those types of stands take up space, which may be limited upon, for example, a hotel room’s small desk. Plus, they’re inherently not that sturdy, meaning the display is easily tipped over. The M14, however, has a real built-in stand, as well as a flip-out foot for added height and tilting options.

The stand extends out from the display and offers sturdy positioning from anywhere between a -5 and 90 degree tilt. It’s easy to push the display back with one hand to your exact desired angle or fold it up so the package is virtually flat. Since it’s so easy to lay it flat, this is where a touchscreen would come in handy, but that would also eat up more power.

Thanks to the kickstand, the monitor even feels steady in portrait mode. Although, without any cable management, the included 1m USB-C cable will be jutting into the air.

A flip-out foot coming out from the center of the bottom bezel offers 0-90 degree tilt for as much as about 1 inch of extra height, helping it line up better with your laptop’s display. The foot is hard, solid plastic and also has strong resistance, staying put at any position.

Design

With its light weight, thin build and fold-up stand the ThinkVision M14 is very easy to transport to work trips, your home office, or a conference room for a presentation. It measures just 12.73 x 8.2 x 3.8 inches and weighs 1.3 pounds (0.6 kg). The monitor is easy to slide across the desk but doesn’t budge unnecessarily.

With a 14-inch screen, the M14 is smaller and lighter than the Asus ZenScreen MB16AC, which has a 15.6-inch display, measures 14.2 x 8.9 x 0.3 inches and weighs 1.7 pounds. But you can still get a larger screen without adding too much weight. The 15.6-inch Viotek LinQ P16C is just barely heavier than the Lenovo (1.4 pounds versus 1.3 pounds) than the Lenovo, despite being 16 inches and having speakers.

The ThinkVision M14 is mostly black plastic, which doesn’t lend to the most luxurious design but helps keep its weight low and matches Lenovo’s ThinkPad laptops. However, the soft-touch back classes things up a bit while also picking up fingerprint smudges.

Bezels are Raven Black, as Lenovo calls it, and on the thinner side (0.2 inch each) save for the bottom bezel, which is a chunky 0.9-inch and looks pretty bare, with nothing on it but a ThinkVision logo. With the bezel so thick, this might’ve been place to place the monitor’s only buttons and make them more accessible than having to reach around back to the kickstand.

The IPS panel itself is just 4mm thick. There is some shake to it if you’re, say, typing on a wobbly table. And you’ll notice a little give if you flex it. But overall it feels relatively solid for such a slim device.

To access the M14’s few buttons or ports, you’ll have to reach around to the kickstand. On the left side of the stand is a USB-C port, brightness adjustments and a button for activating low blue light mode. By holding the latter for two seconds, you can turn on or off the feature, which casts a warm glow on the screen for fighting eye fatigue. But confusingly, if you hold it down for longer than two seconds the low blue light button also opens up a small menu for turning overdrive on or off. I occasionally found myself opening the overdrive menu instead of toggling low blue light.

The stand’s right side has the power button, another USB-C port and a Kensington lock slot. With the device so small and portable, it could be tempting for the devious to snatch up, so a security slot isn’t a bad idea.

As mentioned, there are two USB-C ports, on each side, and Lenovo advertises this as a way to make it easier to display the monitor to the left or right of your laptop. However, with the included 1m-long USB-C cable, you could probably achieve the same effect even without two USB-C ports. Including an HDMI port instead would have added more versatility by allowing the monitor to easily connect to more device types, like a TV or Raspberry Pi. But with USB-C you can connect the monitor to a tablet or smartphone too.

When connected to your laptop, the monitor receives power through its USB-C port, so it should never run out of battery if your laptop’s plugged in. Additionally, through USB-C power passthrough, the monitor can deliver up to 65W of power. If can plug one end of a USB-C to USB-C cable into the monitor and the other into a wall adapter, you can connect your laptop, smartphone or other USB-C device to the monitor via its second USB-C port and charge it. One situation where this is helpful is if your laptop charges over USB-C only and only has one USB-C port. Since there’s no DisplayLink, you need to ensure your laptop’s USB-C port supports DisplayPort 1.2 Alt Mode and USB Power Delivery 2.0 or better.

Unfortunately, the M14 lacks cable management for its long wire. This was particularly noticeable when I wanted to extend the laptop’s display to the M14 and have the two as close together as possible for a more seamless desktop.

Each ThinkVision M14 comes with a thin protective sleeve that feels like felt on the outside and a lesser quality suede-like material inside. Sadly, there’s no way to close it, leaving the monitor partially exposed. You’ll want to buy a more rugged one, especially if you plan on traveling with the M14 a lot. Lenovo also includes two clips for ensuring the stand stays folded during travel.

Image Quality

The ThinkVision M14 does a solid job of depicting movies, pictures, productivity apps and the like. With 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution in a 14-inch package, it boasts high pixel density. Its 157 pixels per inch (ppi), equates to sharpness and clarity (we typically peg 110ppi as our sweet spot) meant numbers in Excel spreadsheets or text in lengthy documents were easy to read with sharp, distinct lines.

When I watched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on the screen, it was plenty bright but with a non-offensive matte feel from the anti-glare screen. Colors, like the white of Gandalf’s beard, the gray undertones of Gollum’s skin and the green earth beneath a dragon, carried through. The movie was just as pleasant to watch as on a similarly sized laptop screen.

In my well-lit office and with the whole display turned perpendicularly toward me, I could still see my favorite hobbits without interfering glare. This means sharing the screen with a couple of people, perhaps for a presentation, is certainly possible. With the monitor almost flat, it seemed a touch less bright but, as expected, but the movie was still watchable.

Our testing found that the ThinkVision M14 averages 244.2 nits brightness. I’d rather see it hit its specced 300 nits, but this is still significantly brighter than the Asus ZenScreen MB16AC, a 1080p, 15.6-inchs IPS monitor. And, as mentioned, I had no trouble watching Lord of the Rings, be it dark or light scenes, in my bright office on the M14.

The Lenovo also did a better job at color production than the Asus in all three color gamuts we tested for: sRGB, Adobe RGB and DCI-P3. The biggest difference was in the sRGB color gamut, where the Lenovo hit 98% coverage and the Asus only reached about two-thirds of that (66.4%).

If you activate overdrive on the monitor (through the low blue light button), the ThinkVision M14 will have a 6ms response time. Coupled with a 60 Hz refresh rate, you likely won’t be doing any hardcore competitive gaming here, but it should be able to handle some light gaming.

Bottom Line

The Lenovo ThinkVision M14 does almost everything you want a portable monitor to do. It’s very light and folds up for easy portability. But it doesn’t sacrifice a quality stand for a slim form factor. In fact, both its stand and flip-out foot offer strong resistance and firm positioning.

With its long USB-C cable, I wish there was some form of cable management. You won’t be able to tweak its display much beyond brightness or use different display profiles, like you can with the Asus ZenScreen MB16AC, and, unlike the larger and barely heavier Viotek LinQ P16C, there are no speakers. Plus, if you plan to take this on the go often, as is intended, you’ll almost certainly want to buy a replacement carrying case to replace the flimsy one Lenovo includes. Also, the display only works with USB-C (DisplayPort 1.2 over Alt mode); there’s no DisplayLink tech, so some laptops won’t support it.

But with decent color gamut coverage and brightness and strong viewing angles, the ThinkVision M14 is an easy way to carry and connect a quality second display to your laptop that you can rest assured will stay put, however you position it.