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dampew223 karma

Oh yeah but then where are you going to get the material for your big AMA?

dampew73 karma

Did they remove it all at once, or in multiple surgeries? How do they identify the cancerous tissue during surgery?

Did it feel funny to have all that mass removed?

dampew67 karma

You misunderstand (it's not a big deal)... Subsidies lower the price of corn for us because they lower costs for you. Without the subsidies you'd make less of a profit on corn and it wouldn't be as profitable to grow.

I'd like to ask a different question: Is there a large corn-growing community where you live? Can you tell us a bit about your culture and how your lives may be based around growing in ways some people might not appreciate?

dampew57 karma

What was wintering like? How did you pass the time? Would you do it again? Do you still talk to the people who were there with you? Any human drama?

dampew56 karma

Two questions:

  1. You say the average frequency of such an event is 1 in 300 years. Do you know if the distribution is roughly uniform? My guess is that it would tend to decrease over time -- but I've also just googled and found articles that suggest continental drift is actually speeding up. Or is the distribution of big earthquakes something that we don't really have a good handle on at the moment?

  2. I've heard and seen that the probability distribution of a large earthquake follows approximately a maxwell-boltzmann distribution (in other words, the probability of an earthquake with energy E varies like exp(-E*const)). On the other hand, I've seen you say that the maximum amount of energy in a fault system can produce an earthquake of approximately X amount. So I'd like to understand which statement is making the bigger approximation at large energies. Is there actually a probability that the Pacific Northwest can have, say, a 10.0 earthquake (exponentially less likely than a 9.0), or is it physically impossible for the fault system to store that much energy?