I guess our denial mechanisms permit us to live distributed around the land and the globe accepting (or denying) various familiar risks instead of clustering in a few assumed "safe" zones somewhere. By the way, where ARE the "safe" zones?

It's not a denial mechanisms but a familiarity/conditioning effect that makes it how you perceive it. When you're little everything is equally terrifying but as you grow and learn about the world around you familiarity sets in and takes the fear factor out by your placing a danger factor weighting bias to everything that over time takes the perceived risk value down to a normally perceived inconsequential value.

The more you know about and experience something the less fear there is of it until many past fearable things actually become welcomed familiarities to you even if by any other rational measure they are as still potentially dangerous as hell. The -feels like home- effect. Home might be hell but it's your familiar and comfortable level of hell.

Its one of the more interesting sub-level bias systems we all build our lives on and don't even realize it. In a way it's also a huge source of conflict being that which is familiar to you often looks hellish and dangerous to me and should never be allowed to exist and vice versa but so long as we realizes that familiarity difference there is no conflict. but, if one of us start trying to force our familiarity based fears and own personal and less than equally informed rationalizations on the other, that's were huge pointless concerns and problems start.

You can't expect me to build my house to california earthquake standards simply because we don't have those here enough to be a concern and I can't expect you to build your home to our snow, wind and severe cold withstanding standards simply because you don't have such environmental issues as well.

In fact, that concept can be expanded on into every aspect of each of our live to no end for good or bad like with shortbusses concerns of oil wells and fracking. Sure, it has the real potential to cause very bad things there but where I am at it's harmless and neither one of us is wrong in our views of any of it until the other starts trying to force their views and reasonings on the other when they in fact do not apply outside of our own respective situations.

Does that make some sense?

 

It is important to note that what we are seeing in the initial posters videos is the resonant response of the cameras on their mounts to the mild shaking, NOT vertical shaking of the rooms as apparently seen in the video! Similar to what we would see if he poked the camera with a broomstick on a calm day.

Like thousands of others, I was awakened by the Jan 4th earthquake in the early morning hours in my home in the Rockridge district of North Oakland, seemingly directly above the epicenter described in the news as a few miles south of the UC Berkeley campus. It was one of the mildest earthquakes I've experienced in a lifetime of living in Oakland about 1000 feet from the Hayward fault. I do fear "the big one," but the January 4th event was barely noticeable even though sufficient to waken me and my wife.

Actually, the video looks exactly like what I felt here in the Marina District of S.F.

I'm on the second floor of a heavily reinforced concrete building so the ground motion is transmitted without resonance. I can describe the motion as being vertically elliptical and a frequency of about 3 cycles per second. The effect of earthquakes varies greatly with local geological conditions so one location will get whammed while others are tranquil.

 

Here are a couple "Hi Fidelity" sounds of nature:

This is the Halemaumau Crater of the Kilauea Volcano on the Big island of Hawaii. It's one of over 20 vents where magma flows up to the surface and form what is known as a "static" volcano.

 

I was on the third floor of an apartment building on Nob Hill in San Francisco when the foreshock to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake hit (8-8-89 M 5.4). It was quite jarring in the middle of the night.

 

6.7 Earthquake in Hokkaido

NHK coverage.

 

Anyone on AAC who lives in the San Francisco area is aware there have been two earthquakes (of about the same magnitude - 3.5) on the same segment of the Hayward Fault in the past 48 hours.

Both of them were centered in the Piedmont area and this had raised a lot of speculation about what nature has got up its sleeve. However, these quakes are more like business as usual in a highly active part of the earth's crust.

By the way, the city "fixed' an off set curb that goes directly over the Hayward Fault which has acted as an indicator of the creeping movement for over 50 years: