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Arthur C. Clarke Reports From Sri Lanka
Jeff Patterson writes "Sir Arthur C. Clarke has filed a damage report from his home in Sri Lanka on the Clarke Foundation page. He is fine, however 'among those affected are my staff based at our diving station in Hikkaduwa and holiday bungalow in Kahawa -- both beachfront properties located in areas worst hit. We still don't know the full extent of damage as both roads and phones have been damaged. Early reports indicate that we have lost most of our diving equipment and boats. Not all our staff members are accounted for -- yet.'"
"Arthur C. Clarke Reports From Sri Lanka, Says It's Pretty Wet"
Wikipedia has two articles churning out information about things as they happen besides info about the disaster that have already happened and they contain plenty of links to other news sources. See, 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake in India
DG is fine, asshole.
Human death is always unfortunate, and tens of thousands dying is a major tragedy indeed. But there are so many people now, living on just about every habitable patch of ground on earth, that any kind of a natural disaster happening anywhere in the world kills massive numbers.
The thing is, vast majority of humans today still live in impoverished, technologically backward societies. 6 billion is too many people for a primitve infrastructure to handle.
Actually Earth can easily handle hundreds of billions, but we would need advanced technology like the Puppeteers. And not just advanced technology, but also advanced cultural and societal organization far ahead of what we have today... plus a fundamental change in how people think and behave. Now we can't just suddenly become a herbivorous herd society like the Puppeteers, but we can be nicer to others and try not to be such assholes.
Solution to earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters lie in advanced technolgy. Fleet of Worlds!
Moreover this region is not linked to the pacific ocean tsunami network. There are no bouys here. Now the Indian Govt is planning to place deep sea sensors as well as tsunami detection system. This data will be linked with pacific ocean tsunami network.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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I disagree. Here in the UK there has been rather a lot of coverage. Most of the newspapers here have several pages worth of articles covering how bad things are, and how the humanitarian efforts are proceeding in the various affected countries. I'm not sure how many British people died in this tragedy, but I think it's got to be a dozen at most. So this tragedy is no 'closer' to us personally in the UK than it is in the US, but if the media coverage really is as bad in the US as grandparent poster seems to imply, then I think that really is a clear indication of the different attitudes taken by the media in our two countries.
Santa's suicide mission go!
Some south asian bloggers have created a blog tsunamihelp.blogspot.com blogging about the latest news and information about the tsunami, agencies suppoting the victims and involved in relief, places where donations can be made, volunteering information and much more.
Sorry to disagree with you, but worst hit would be the natives that will stay there to face all the conseqences of the disaster, people that have lost everything they had, people that have lost their loved ones.
Sorry, but I got really pissed today watching the news and seeing a tourist comming back from Phuket complaining that they (he and his wife) lost everything they took on their holidays. What have you lost, little men? Two suitcases of clothes and a digital camera??? Look around you, little men, and see all those people that had little and now have nothing, look at the corpses floating and mothers mourning for their children. Then go on complaining about your digital camera little men. I won't cry for you.
I find that statement a little left of center. The worst hit will be the tourists? Hell no. The worst hit will be the hundreds of thousands of poor people whose livelihoods have been destroyed/changed forever. Not mention the fact that 1/3 of the dead are children.
Yes many tourists have lost their lives, but many of those who have not will be able to get back on the plane and go home to their easy lives back in suburbia. The citizens in the likes of Sri Lanka, Thailand etc have no way of escaping this nightmare.
*shrug* Maybe Im just being overly sensitive.
Medraut
Video here high bandwidth server, no worries. 4 different videos. Amazing footage.
Story here. Since that didn't work, they called the State Department, who ALSO tried to find out who to contact, but again, due to lack of adequate warning systems/organizations, they failed as well.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Any of you planning to donate some money? Dollar may be losing ground but it still has 44 times more value than Indian Rupees. So if you donate 100 dollars that means 4400 Indian Rupees (INR). And to give you an idea what this could mean.. a normal meal in India is around 40 INR while cheap clothing is around 100-200 INR. And medicines per day per person won't be more than 100-200 INR. Taking some conservative estimates, your 100 dollars can save an Indian for 10 days till things get under control and one can start living on one's own. Kindly consider donating... Visit my blog http://ritesh.blogspot.com/ and this blog http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/ for some info on how/where to donate. Redcross and UNICEF are also accepting donations now.
Regards, Ritesh
Short of a major loss or gain of mass, or impulse from a massive impact, the Earth just keeps trucking along in it's rut. While the energy is tremendous in an Earthquake, the energy just moves mass around within the same system.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The tsunami is detected by buoys that measure the tide. If the tide goes way up at the wrong time, it must be a tsunami. If the buoy is close to the epicenter, we can then warn people that are farther away. The buoys only work when they are in shallow water. It has been reported on the news that the buoys are very expensive and this is why the nations that were hit by this disaster did not invest in tsunami prediction. It seems to me that a shore based tide detector would be very cheap if it was connected by land line.
A massive displacement of the seafloor or an undersea landslide is required to create a tsunami. There doesn't seem to be any theory for predicting this other than going with the intensity measurement of the earthquake. There doesn't seem to be any large effort to place instruments on the ocean floor to detect this movement. (It would probably cost too much)
What about the high energy wave that travels vast distances through the ocean? Shouldn't there be some way to detect this wave?
All the recriminations now begin, even before the bodies are buried (or even counted). Bottom Line: This is an unprecedented natural disaster, and the same warning/response systems that existed in the pacific didn't really exist in that area of the world.
This is something so far out of the realm of most peoples experience, that it's quite natural to assume some incredulity on their part. Do you pay attention to the wide-eyed guy on the street corner with the sign that says "The end is near?" I thought not... most people ignore him, just as you probably do.
Just to add to the political fray, some reports have UN officials already complaining that the US and other western nations are being "stingy" with their aid packages... and even suggesting that those countries raise taxes on their citizens to pay for more aid (if you believe the Wash. Times).
Maybe some of these folks should focus more on helping, rather than wasting their breath trying to find a scapegoat.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Oddly enough, the Arthur C Clarke Foundation is actually working on just that. Setting up an alert system for Tsunamis:
http://www.clarkefoundation.org/projects
PROJECT WARN in Partnership with the Japan US Science Technology and Space Applications Program (JUSTSAP)
The purpose of Project Warn is combine enhanced communications and IT systems to provide warning of impending natural or man-made disasters and to provide on-going communications and remote sensing and GIS support during disaster relief operations. The Clarke Foundation is working with the Pacific Disaster Center, the Asian Disaster Mitigation Organization, the United Nations, and the US and Japanese Governments as coordinated through the JUSTSAP organization to carry out a suitable test and demonstration in this area. In particular a simulation and test is being planned in the Pacific Region in 2005 to determine to how to use the latest information and sensing technology more effectively in the advent of that a major Tsunami might impact an Asian country or island. Clarke Foundation personnel are providing technical advice and support on a volunteer basis to this project.
well in my homedown, the house i grew up in was in a depression. rain kinda puddled around my house. my dad did an EXCELLENT job of waterproofing the walls and stuff so that wasn't a problem.
The City of Abingdon, Illinois, doesn't like rainwater in their sewers, so they pump it out - and right into customer's homes. since my house was the lowest in town, all the rainwater from the sewers (and sewage that was carried with it) went into my basement. the entire town's turds and femine hygene products wound up in our basement after every heavy rain. The city would not stop pumping, even after legal action was taken. Apparently a city can do whatever it wants to protect city assets. Such is the case in Abingdon, Illinois, anyway.
My father took an old tire inner-tube, cut it from an "O" shape into a "C" shape, rubber cemented and wirewrapped the ends, waterproofing and airproofing them. then, we waited for a rain. when it began to rain hard, we shoved this tube down into the main house drain. in the basement, where the drainpipes left the house, there was a drain grate - we took the grate off, shoved the innertube down into the pipe that led outside, and inflated it. no more of my city's sewage found its way into our house! Yahoo! no more weekends spent hosing toilet paper off our basement walls... But the story does not end here.
When we blocked our sewer, we just diverted the problem. someone else had to deal with it now. then that person figured it out, and the next had a problem. eventually everyone connected to that pump blocked their sewage drains somehow, and the next time it rained, the city's pump kicked in, but that sewage had nowhere to go. The pipe outside our house (which later we learned had been cracked by a nearby tree root) failed, and our front yard erupted with the same familiar sewage. Since the pipe was between our house and the street the city declared the problem to be ours, and went on their merry way. our sewage made it out through that pipe okay, but when it rained, and with the route into every other house blocked, the sewage piled up in our front yard several times a month.
Legal action proved fruitless. My father started attending city council meetings and raising a "stink" about the problem. The city asked him to stop attending city council meetings. He did not comply. He would pull cops over (!) and ask them when the pipe would be patched. He would knock on the mayor's door and ask about the pipe at least once a week. He would bring the issue up with his dentist (also the mayor). He basically performed a very gentle and 100% polite campaign to annoy the decision makers into doing the right thing. None of that worked. This went on for 10 years.
I don't know the rest of the story, but from what I've heard he got a little help from some organization who had a lot of members in the city council. Next day the pipe was dug up, replaced, dirt put back on and new grass planted. My guess is that the Freemasons helped him but I don't know.
A year later, after all that work, my father died.
That's my flood story.
There seems to be a connection between suicide in whales and earthquakes. Around two weeks ago, an Indian Doctor had predicted this earthquake on Princeton's mailing list based on whale behaviour in Australia. Interesting...