What about some historical info (geological history) as to how LA Basin became the LA Basin? That's kinda fun.. and why it' gonna shake like jello in the next quake?

I spent saturday morning over at Cal Tech last weekend - It was Alumni Day and a friend of ours is an alumni, so we get to attend as guests.. one of the seminars given was on how tall buildings in LA will be affected by the next 'Big One' - how the long period waves will act upon the structures and where the majority of the buildings will be that are hurt.. The interesting thing was there appears to be less damage if the san andreas fault ruptures south to north (like salton sea to tejon) rather than north to south - (like Parkfield to Cajon) - in either case, san fernando valley looks to get hit pretty hard -

Single story wood structures are of course very safe - and second story will fare well if the second story is not over an open space, like a parking area..

We also got to tour the Seismo labs - that was quite fun! And see their new Supercomputer used for modeling... it's got 4096 Intel Xeon processors! One of the top 10 computers in academics today.. all Dell blade computers and lord knows how many terrabytes of data!

Canie