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Tsunami Satellite Images
JakeisBland writes "Here is a collection of before/after satellite pictures of the devastation in Asia due to the tsunami/earthquake."
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This is simply amazing. I think that every so often Mother Nature decides she needs to show everyone who's boss, a sort of bitchslap to bring the nations of the world together; if only for a little while.
it's worth noting that the pictures show Kalutara, a town about 25 miles south of Colombo, and situated on the west coast of Sri Lanka, which pretty much escaped major damage and loss of life compared to the the south and eastern coastlines.
Flooding caused at least 40 deaths in Kalutara, though...
Yep.
http://eobglossary.gsfc.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImage s/images.php3?img_id=16774Verye s/images.php3Devastating
http://eobglossary.gsfc.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImag
If you donated to lokitorrent but not this, I don't know what to say to you...
It's almost disgusting to see how much the color of the water changed... it's bad enough they have hundred upon hundreds of bodies lying around rotting, but the water looks disgusting even from the sky... just imagine the smell. I wonder how long it will take, with all the flooding and then the following withdrawl of the water, before it's a nice, clean blue ocean beach again?
From the CIA world book on Sri Lanka;
Buddhist 70%, Hindu 15%, Christian 8%, Muslim 7% (1999)
I can see why you wouldn't, but continue to play your banjo...
Here you can find videos of the tsunami captured by tourists.
Here you can find torrents of said videos in case the original site dies under the load.
Current death tolls approaching 130k people.
If you thought 9/11 was big think again, we are talking about FOUR HUNDRED 9/11s here.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
The Canadian one, at least, is a fast online credit-card donation. You can print out your tax receipt right away. (hey, before midnight gets it in for this tax year, right?)
Or, there are plenty of other organizations that would be happy to receive a donation.
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
It's a natural disaster. A large one, to be sure, but the Colombia volcano in 1985 killed around 25,000, Mont Pelee in 1902 killed 25,000, and let's not forget the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which killed between 250,000 and 650,000 people. There's a qualitative difference between something that happened because Mother Nature got titchy, and something that humans planned and carried out.
Different. You can't compare them on the same scale.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
9/11: Terrorists
Iraq: USA
This one: Nature
The indian ocean tectonic plates are historically very active. Look at the major earthquakes and a lot are in/round Java. Ditto volcano eruptions: Tambora 1813?? and Krakatau 1883 Just one of those things - it will happen again in due course when the plates move again. There were apparently three plate shifts - one of them almost immediately off the Andaman isalnds, but the first was down near Aceh.
i'm a sri lankan. i wasnt in the effected area but the footage that i saw was so disturbing i simply stopped watching tv after a few hours.
busses with people still in it were swept away as if they were paper boats. people who were trying to hold on to a building were swept away one by one. and while all this was happenning the people who were taping the scene along with a few others who were on a bridge could do nothing to help. it makes you feel completly helpless.
so many people have died that even identifying them is simply impossible. most of the dead are being buried in mass graves. and most of them havent even been identified.
its simply unbreable.
Speaking as an Indian, a big heartfelt THANKS for all of you who've empathised with the tragedy and have helped the rescue efforts. It's in trying times like these that one's faith in humanity is restored.
Thankfully, in spite of Indian bureacracy being well Indian bureaucracy, rescue and rehabilitation efforts are going on VERY effectively. An enormous number of people in India, be it the government, armed forces, or even the common woman/man is pitching in. Most companies here have setup collection boxes and at the very least, we're donating medicines, soaps, toothbrushes, disinfectants, clothes, utensils, non-perishable food items etc. There's also an army of volunteers who's landed in the disaster struck areas with truckloads of donated stuff and are distributing it to the needy.
Strangely enough, it seems that too many clothes are being donated! A friend of mine is physically helping out with the rescue efforts and he tells me that there's piles and piles of clothes lying around but of little use to anybody. Well, i guess too much help is always better than too little help.
Another thing that amazes me is the resilience of the common man or woman. Here are people living on the edge of poverty, getting hammered everyday with issues like eking out an existence. Perhaps they've scrounged and saved enough to get their daughters married, hidden a few hundred rupees in a hole in the wall. Perhaps they've just bought a shiny new radio or a bicycle. What do they wake up to? A tsunami that takes away their children, their friends, and everything they own. What do they do? Shrug it off eventually and mark it off as karma, god's will, or god's punishment depending on their religion (no, most poor Indians cannot afford the luxuries of athesim or agnosticism). Then, they take it one day at a time and slowly start rebuilding their lives.
You want to see miracles, mental strength, and the answer to life, the universe, and everything? You don't have to look far in times like these.
...President Bush and his International coalition (of which the next largest nation is contributing half of what we are) has just added Mother Nature to his axis of evil, saying that she is helping terrorists, as well as committing terrorist acts herself. Bush has given Mother Nature an ultimatum, telling her to leave this planet within the next 24 hours or we will declare war on her. It is expected that Mother Nature will stay and fight, but looks as if this will be another victory by the Bush administration.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
While there there has been an International Tsunami Warning system in place since 1965, the affected countries were not part of that system and had no mechanism in place to allow for early warning.
NPR has a few good reports on the problem.
Cringely has a rather interesting solution that does not rely on governmental action, though with a serious flaw. It only relies on earthquake data, which isn't necessarily conclusive, nor the only cause of Tsunami's.
Most (all?) of the official New Year celebrations and fireworks have been cancelled. The money will be given to aid helping those who suffered from the tsunami.
At the moment there are more than 200 Finns and over 2000 Swedes missing and most likely all of them are dead. To see things in perspective: Finland has a population of 5.2 million, Sweden around 9 million. Everyone with basic math skills can calculate what that would mean if it had happened for tourists from US.
40,000+ people die in car accidents every year. Thousands are killed in floods every few years. Millions die every year from famine.
Death, and to a lesser extent, death from natural disasters, is pretty common. A lot of death from a natural disaster is less newsworthy than a little death from a terrorist attack.
There's also an information problem - it was a lot easier to get information out of new york on 9/11 than it is to get information out of a devastated remote area in Thailand.
paintball
WWI: 16-18 million.
WWII: 40 million.
On a single day in the American Civil War, approximately 30,000 men were killed.
Feel free to dispute those figures, they vary from source to source. You'll not escape the orders of magnitude.
That's what war is like in the age of modern machinery. 9/11 was murder, not war.
...or make poor tsunami jokes when there were no pictures that showed the magnitude of the tragedy.
Seeing the BBC report that showed the young coupld silently carrying their two dead children and seeing the picture of the beach covered with debris -- and then realizing the "debris" consisted of human bodies -- brings the point home that real humans suffered a real tragedy halfway across the world.
Damn, I'm getting tears in my eyes just remembering those pictures.
Because if God overrules free will, even once, he's made the entire thing meaningless. If he, even once, says "Hey, humans, I'll save you from the consequences of your collective choices", he's just made free will meaningless, because its no longer free - its free 'to a point'. By giving us free will, God inherently relinquishes both his right and his duty to overrule our actions.
Trying to make a valid philosophical argument by comparing police to God is bunk, man. The police aren't omnipotent, omniscient, and they aren't the ones who have the ability to decide whether or not we get free will. Of course, anyone who stands by is partly culpable. However, if God intervenes, he destroys the idea of free will. The only way to maintain free will is to stay out of it; as such, by rigorously asserting free will, God becomes non-culpable - he has, in essence, said "I will not interfere, because the consequence of interfering once is to mean that I must take responsibility for all of your actions that I allow to occur." It is, in an odd sort of way, similar to the search engine DMCA exemption - software that indexes material is legal and non-culpable, even if it indexes illegal material, except if it ever filters out some undesirable material on basis of copyright or legality, at which point it immediately becomes culpable for all such infringing material found on the service.
This is just one more reason why God is a bunch of crap. Study the origin of ethics and look into hard vs. soft command, and you'll begin to come towards my point of view, which is that ethics in and of themselves point to the non-existence of God via contradiction.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
The sattelite images show the extent of damage, but remains impersonal. This picture graphically shows the actual devastation and number of deaths..
i ita4ft.jpg
http://img145.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img145&image=ruum
Denmark: 300M DKR (USD$55M) at a population of 5.4M .. that's $10,14 per capita .. .. that's $0,15 per capita
USA: USD$45M at a population of 293M
both theese sets of numbers are what the Government provides, not what is collected privately. (no taxreductions are given for donations in Denmark)
I guess that every country will give what it can.
here
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 22:04:31 -0200
From: Futurepower [futurepower_usa (-AT-) yahoo.com.br]
To: "U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center" [sedas (-AT-) neis.cr.usgs.gov]
Subject: NEIC: Why didn't you warn about the Tsunamis?
Question:
I haven't seen this discussed anywhere.
Why didn't the NEIC call the U.S. State Department, so that they could warn people about the Tsunamis?
The earthquake position and magnitude was known 6 hours before the waves arrived in Thailand, I understand. Wouldn't almost every person's life have been saved if Thailand, for example, had had warning?
Michael
_____________
Reply:
Michael,
Phone calls were placed to the State Department operations center, the White House situation room, the U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, as well as several other organizations within 90 minutes of the occurrance of this earthquake.
The problem is the absence of local warning systems in the countries surrounding the Indian Ocean. There were no systems or response plans in place to warn the local populace.
Stuart Sipkin
USGS/NEIC
_____________
Stuart,
I have a suggestion for a local tsunami warning system. There continues to be an enormous amount of earthquake activity in the area around Indonesia. It seems likely that there will be another big earthquake. Next time there is an earthquake that is likely to cause a tsunami, call me, any time of night or day. I will promise to call at least 30 hotels within 2 hours. I will promise to get 10 friends involved. They will promise to call 30 hotels each, also. We would each take a different country.
My suggestion is that we would use Google to find hotels, for example in Sri Lanka. This is one of the hotels I found there, a 5-star hotel with more than 400 rooms:
Galadari Hotel
The Businessman's Home in Sri Lanka
64, Lotus Road,
Colombo 1.
Sri Lanka.
Tel: 94-1-544544
Fax: 94-1-449875
E-Mail: galadari (-AT-) sri.lanka.net
"The Galadari Hotel is in the heart of the city in Colombo, over looking the beautiful Indian ocean."
Big hotels answer their phones 24 hours a day. Presumably there is a staff of at least 200 at that hotel, for three shifts. I think if one person were told, everyone else would know soon. They don't want their family and friends and neighbors near the water to die, and they know how to reach them, even if they have to ride a motorbike to those who don't have phones.
There are two easy ways to prove that a call about an earthquake is not a hoax. I would tell the person who answered the phone that it is an emergency and I need to talk to a manager. I would tell the manager to check the USGS web site at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/. Any 5-Star hotel, and most others of any size, have internet access. I would also tell the manager that, if the water at the beach receded, people had only a few minutes to get to safety. I would ask the manager to get staff members to call radio and TV stations in their area.
You said in your message, "The problem is the absence of local warning systems in the countries surrounding the Indian Ocean. There were no systems or response plans in place to warn the local populace."
It seems to me that this is a workable plan for a local tsunami warning system. It wouldn't cost much. Using Skype, a two minute call to any land line phone in Sri Lanka is about 40 U.S. cents, for example. Using iConnectHere's most expensive service, a two minute call is 80 cents.
in the last seven days here. The Andaman and Nicobar islands has experienced more than 60 aftershocks ! ..
In related news, the tsunami split one of the islands in Andaman & Nicobar into two. Here is what one of the officials say
Another island, Trinkat, appears to have been split in two, said S.B. Deol, inspector-general of Andaman and Nicobar. "Part of the island has been submerged, while one half is visible," he said.
>> Techflock-flock onto the best bits of technology
It's sad that this type of inward looking nationalistic thinking is the norm these days. When will people realize that we are responsible for all of humanity? Does no one teach social responsability anymore? Let me let you in to a little secret here. The rest of the world *is* under an obligation to help SE Asia. Under a *big* obligation. Why? Because of international treaties? Nope. Because of legislation, or UN decisions? Nope. As humans, we are morally responsable for the welfare and well-being of the rest of the world.
Not an aerial map, but still related to tsunami event. link.
Warning: Very gross and disturbing!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Well - I live in Europe and my guess is that the media will soon find a way to blame:
0. Bush (he's gotta have something to do with this, right?)
1. Global warming (since its clearly happening much more often now compared to last year; 1 tsunami compared to 0 during last year).
The images look a lot more powerful when you stack two in layers and set the top layer transparency to around 80%. You can really see all the homes under water. I put some together here
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
The amount of money donanted after 9/11 was large in relation to the need. That seems to be less likely with this disaster.
And Saddam took 15-20 years, where we've only had 2 so far. Give it time.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Hard to imagine that too many people living in tin-roofed cardboard shacks, and worrying about where their next meals is going to come from, are going to have property insurance. Now I understand why they are teaching critical thinking in public schools.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Shhh, hush now. You're spoiling it.
When asked "how many died in Vietnam war", nine out of ten Americans give the ballpark of "60,000". The two, perhaps three million Vietnamese deaths don't simply register.
Of course the USA still refuses to accept responsibility for the continuing tragedy caused by the massive Agent Orange contamination that is still killing and causing birth defects among the Vietnamese population.
More recently the US and UK war machines have scattered hundreds of tons of toxic and carcinogenic depleted uranium (used in hardening projectile shells) across Iraq. Does anyone think these two countries will ever take responsibility of the devastating consequenses affecting the current and future generations of Iraqi civilians?
While I can reason the deaths and injuries caused by the Indian Ocean Tsunami to be part of the cost of our existance on a living planet (I say this knowing that close friends of mine lost many friends and relatives, and my own relatives holidaying in Thailand only barely escaped death thanks to help by quick thinking locals), I find no good excuses for sending massive war machines to foreign countries to kill massive numbers of locals and to poison their lands for generations to come.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
I'm not a huge fan of Bush by any stretch of the imagination (I voted against him in November), but I can't fault the US government's behavior so far. They authorized a small amount of money to begin with, to help with the most urgent needs (sending food, clearing bodies, and so forth), and over the next few weeks and months will continue to increase the commitment as the specific needs of the countries who have been hurt are ascertained.
The world rallied around the US after 9/11, irrespective of past tensions and difficulties, and I don't think anyone here has forgotten that. We'll do everything within our power to help rebuild those countries devastated by the tsunami, just give us time to get through the bureaucracy, and to make sure our money is going to the right place (someone earlier posted about how in India, so many donations of clothing have been recieved that there are piles of stuff no one wants to wear just lying around. Imagine if the US sent over $100 MILLION of unnecessary clothing).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Why can't we get these images from Fallujah?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
As a Christian Libertarian... I half agree with you and halfway don't.
My faith says that yes, we should help our brother in time of need, however my political philosophy says the government shouldn't be the ones to do it.
Legally, internationally, politically we are under NO obligation or responsibility to do such - nor should we be. However since we do have an abundence of wealth, I don't see a problem with the government having am emergency aid fund, or even low interest loans for foreign countries in times of crisis. But this should be used rarely and saved for large scale disasters such as this.
I don't think that the US Gov should dispense money to anyone out there who has a papercut however. The country shouldn't be overly philantropic.
As a Christian, yes I feel obligated to help anyone who needs help when they do - it is just the right thing to do. I would rather give my money to a private fund that I know, respect, and trust to properly distribute my donations. The government is usually the LAST place to trust in terms of spreading goodwill.
Libertas in infinitum
If you are worried that your donations won't reach the right people then consider donating to CARE. They seem to have some of the lowest administration costs among relief agencies. Over 90% goes to affected victims.
Oh please, you're comparing apples and automobiles man, not even in the same class. You losing your posh home (by the standards of these people) and car is nothing compared to dying a miserable death from malaria, dysentery or starvation, or lack of potable water.
Not. Even. Fucking. Comparable.
AstroDab, nice concept. I've corrected the allignment and posted results here.
You're welcome to post these to your own site, crediting DigitalGlobe (as you should your own work) and myself.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?