StephanRoss.com

The seismology department at the University of Nevada Reno put out a call for locals interested in helping track all the earthquakes we've been having. Fayth signed us up online and sure enough, they picked our house as one of the spots they wanted to place a seismograph.

While we were at work, a couple of students came by and stuck the little guy in our back yard, right between my beautiful flowering dogwood tree and my obnoxious and viciously thorny pyrocantha. I hurried home and naively expected to find some kind of tootling, dial-spinning contraption straight out of Lost in Space.

Instead the gizmo - excuse me, Earthquake Monitoring Device - looks like a beef tenderloin wrapped in tinfoil with a couple of coaxial cables sticking out of the end. No flashing lights, vacuum tubes or rapidograph pens scritching lines onto a roll of graph paper. Not very visually stimulating at all, but still totally sweet—and we are doing our part to further the advancement of science.

Or at least help scientists gather data and hopefully get some grant funding to figure out when California is finally going to snap off and sink. Go, knowledge, go!