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7.8 Earthquake Rocks Nepal, Hundreds Dead
An anonymous reader writes: Nepal was struck by an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 today, with an epicenter 80 km east of the country's second biggest city, Pokhara. Its effects were also strongly felt in the capital, Kathmandu. Casualty reports conflict, but authorities have indicated at least 500 are dead and many more are feared to be trapped. Nepal has declared a state of emergency for the affected areas, and asked for international humanitarian assistance. India and Pakistan have both offered help. Some Indian cities were affected by the earthquake as well, and there are reports of avalanches on Mt. Everest, which has many climbers at any given time.
This is /. so we can expect comments about 1) was Nepal ready to fight such a disaster, compared to, eg, Japan 2) what are the progresses in terms of EQ detection 3) what is the chance of such a strong EQ happening in that region 4) do we have more & more of such big disasters recently 5) is it linked to the Sun activity, linked to the human oil/gas digging 6) will China offers help to Nepal? ... All of this is rather interesting IMO, so wait and watch!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Pohkara is beautiful with about 400K people living in the area. My thoughts go out to all the people impacted.
Only spent a few weeks in Nepal around Holi time and found the people there to be wonderful, generous, and fun!
I was there upgrading the wifi network infrastructure at a Buddhist Monastery. The monks need their youtube. ;) Worked on my karma at the same time.
Getting help to that part of the country will be difficult.
depends if you are in LA..
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
obviously he hates pagans
Looks like at least 8 climbers dead from the avalanches at Everest.
Damn...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Depends even on more on whether "fracking" could be blamed for the disaster...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"Stop learning so much about the world around you. Knowing why complex natural events happen makes it harder to control people through fear of our magic invisible sky ruler."
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
We care about effective use of our tax dollars.
Where effective is enriching those who you support. Or who support you.
We care about curbing rampant illegal immigration.
You care about making it an issue to beat the drum and rally the base, but aren't interested in addressing it beyond clamoring for an ineffective and expensive border fence. That's REALLY popular.
We care about allowing free enterprise to flourish.
Which is why you do nothing when that enterprise exploits and abuses people, in particular, the above illegal immigrants, but also citizens in general, because we can't get in the way of business.
We care about freedom of speech.
Which is why so many Repubicans fell in love with the woman who illegally stole the property of a protesting group that was standing on a flag because she couldn't help herself from defending their freedom of speech.
Oh wait. That was the opposite.
We are Republicans.
That's certainly your slogan.
Reality may be somewhat different, Bobby, no matter how much you want everybody to take you at your word.
Missed a few:
1) This is the US's fault! Even left-wing politicians would be right-wingers in Western Europe.
2) This is the US's fault! Broadband adoption areas in rural areas are not nearly as good as those in Western Europe.
3) This is the US's fault! Copyrights go on for WAY too long.
4) This is the US's fault! Yada Yada Yada
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
This is the Flying Spaghetti Monster's retribution for Americans owning firearms.
Or Cthulhu is angry at Christians.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
In a few weeks, we'll typically have a new measurement of earth rotation speed. Large earthquakes that cause landslides under water triggering tsunamis often change the moment of inertia of the earth. This is probably in the same category. Since the mass moves from higher to lower, decreasing the mean radius of the earth, we typically speed up a little bit, from conservation of momentum. Maybe a few microseconds/day (1 part in 1E11 sort of magnitude)
Then, some later time, there will probably be some radar measurement of the area from orbit, and that will answer the question of where the mass was before and is now.
look, how many times do we have to go over this?
the 'sky ruler' is a false god.
this really pisses off the real god, the sky protractor. if you piss him off, he'll send all kinds of scary angles you way.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Poor undeveloped country has insufficient building standards for regular predictable natural disaster. People die.
Its not going to affect me, there is nothing I can do to help, and its hardly surprising, so why care? Not news for anyone, let alone nerds.
Empathy is a basic human emotion that refers to the capability to feel for other people. If you don't ever give a crap about anyone else, why should anyone else ever give a crap about you?
And by the way, I'd consider a earthquake capable of unleashing 7.8 Megatons of energy and leveling entire cities to be worthy of my morning news.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
You forgot the attempt to tie this into global warming, Chinese use of fossil fuels and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.(TM)
"Stop learning so much about the world around you. Knowing why complex natural events happen makes it harder to control people through fear of our magic invisible sky ruler."
“He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.”
Isaac Newton
If the earthquake were in... Antarctica or Greenland, you might have a good case.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
There have always been those things throughout history, what a load of bullshit
It's the Indian-Asian boundary. India is a subcontinent on its own tectonic plate which has been crushing into Asia for a long time. The place where the plates collide is in the Himalayas. Those mountains are still increasing in altitude because of that.
Where did you get the silly idea that massive earthquakes couldn't happen in the middle of a plate? They do.
It's not the US' fault, it's a fault in the Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
What fucked up ethical system do you have that doesn't start by saying human life is inherently valuable?
It is we who choose to make human life valuable or not. And there are easy to conceive global collapse scenarios such as a global famine where human life has negative value - each additional mouth to feed takes food from everyone else and causes more suffering.
My view on this is that the economic mechanisms of trade and private ownership of capital have done far more to make human life valuable than any system of ethics. One can say the same of technology progress, particularly in agriculture, transportation, and labor saving devices.
Like most people, they simply received a Christian "education" because their parents considered themselves as Christian, and they didn't know better, and didn't want to oppose their parents (plus seven-year-old kids generally don't want to go to Hell, and they want to do their "Communion" with their friends instead of risking being ostracized...).
Then, as adults, most of them used a Christian "cover", to limit the risk of being censored and attacked by the Church for their researches and discoveries.
Many of them also had some amount of pressure to "keep their good family name untainted by public accusations of anything" (most of them being from noble/aristocratic/bourgeois families).
Finally, as the pressure relaxed a bit, some (re)invented the "theory of the Great Architect" (so their "cover" would be more detached from specific characters and stories) and the "theory of God is nature" (so their "cover" would be more detached from the idea there is any character and story at all). They know it's still bullshit, they know it is regretable to mix this with the search for truth, but it still gives them some amount of protection even today.
It is very obvious from reading most old philosophical/alchemist/scientific publications (it's used by many "secret" societies too). It's a very typical boilerplate introduction.
"Oh yeah, before saying anything else, I'd like to say I'm very Faithful, I go to Church and all, The Great Awesome Only God probably guided me to find all this, that He no doubt Created from nothing by snapping His Holy Fingers, and commanded me to write about it for Its Eternal Glory, as Its Eternal very humble servant... please don't burn me at the stake, pretty please"...
Then you regularly read something similar around the most important researches and discoveries.
Sometimes the irony is quite obvious, particularly in alchemist texts, in which they regularly clearly had quite some fun writing these sorts of things.
They're not Christian, like most people considering themselves Christian, or saying they are Christian to others (even their family and friends), are not Christian. It's the same with most religions today and in the past, but particularly with Christianity today.
Fascinating
The *volume* of water changes with phase. Mass does not.
But then, you knew that and were just poking fun at the "everything is because of climate change" folks, right?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
You should read the comments from the people who have been there.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Donate what you can to save the needy in this hour of need!
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From what I read, their new high rise buildings were fine and the areas that were destroyed were the historic districts.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
If an individual life has negative value, then the total number of lives worth saving is 0, and there's no reason to care whether a particular act causes an increase in suffering or not.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Just accept that there is a reason for everything, and He has a plan.
His reasoning sucks and he is a horrible planner. I wonder if he has an MBA.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Why would God do such a thing to such innocent people?
Santa Claus also allowed this to happen. What does this say about Santa Claus?
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
"He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God."
Isaac Newton
Also, alchemy. Don't forget alchemy.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
It will be blamed on both Obama and the Republicans, the frackers, the socialists, the global warming deniers, the ecoterrorists, and the NIMBY crowd. And of course, they're all at fault as part of the One World Conspiracy.
Just don't blame for me, I voted for Kodos.
The Himalayas are there because they are on a plate boundary where one plate is colliding with another. At this one, instead of subduction, we have collision and uplift. And this uplift we happen to call the Himalayas.
I'm surprised that there aren't *more* earthquakes of high intensity there.
If an individual life has negative value, then the total number of lives worth saving is 0, and there's no reason to care whether a particular act causes an increase in suffering or not.
It's a marginal cost. Reducing the number of people can reach a regime where there is a positive value to people once again.
While I (vaguely) understand the notion that you are asserting, if the value of people can fluctuate (that is, human life has no intrinsic value), then what is the value standard in such a marketplace? Gold? dollars?
This also leads to a rather dismal world in which some murders are ok, and some are slightly more ok than others. Of the choices of available dystopias, this one sounds less appealing than average.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
. What does this say about Santa Claus?
It makes me suspect that Santa Claus is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. And only seasonally omnipresent.
Empathy? That is a reason _not_ to read about it and watch the news. The pointless loss and suffering is sickening.
So why is it "news"? To answer my own above rhetorical question - it is disaster porn.
The same reason people gawk at traffic accidents, stopping even after the ambulance is there. The same reason CNN still makes money showing 9/11 or any other disaster over and over.
Of course some disasters are more newsworthy than others. Fresh pictures are vital - if it takes a week for photos to get from a remote area, then too late - stale news.
And earthquakes sell more papers than floods. How many people know that floods in Bangladesh kill more people every year that this earthquake in Nepal. They didn't tell you that? No, all we remember is that building collapse that made better photos, but fewer deaths.
I hope those who can make a difference - nearby Indian and Chinese authorities - can get in fast. Time is everything.
But us? The Red Cross will be calling for donations, but while that might help them prepare for the next disaster, it makes no difference to this one.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/...
Google executive Dan Fredinburg was among 18 people killed on Mount Everest after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake ravaged Nepal on Saturday.
A woman who identified herself as Fredinburg's younger sister, Megan, said on his Instagram page that he had a major head injury after the avalanche triggered by the quake. He didn't survive.
The catastrophic earthquake Saturday killed more than 1,300 people and leveled ancient buildings in the Nepali capital of Kathmandu. The quake was so strong that it also killed people in nearby India, Bangladesh, and Tibet.
Fredinburg â" who was head of privacy for Google X â" survived last year's deadly avalanche on Mount Everest, according to media reports and his Instagram account.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Japan 2011 was M9.0, Nepal M7.8. Each whole magnitude number is 32x the energy. Japan gets M8s every century and is well prepared for that. The 2011 quake was the 5th largest every in 130 years of seismographs. Japan didn't expect that size of quake was possible and it's tsunami walls weren't tall enough. The Japan quake was three historical faults breaking at once, contributing to its large magnitude. Because a similar multi-quake occurred in Sichuan China recently, seismologists are more concerned about a multi-quake breaking California. Being a poor country, Nepal did not design for even a smaller quake. Routine M5 quakes in California merely crack plaster, but shatter buildings and kill in underdeveloped countries.
While I (vaguely) understand the notion that you are asserting, if the value of people can fluctuate (that is, human life has no intrinsic value), then what is the value standard in such a marketplace? Gold? dollars?
Whatever is traded in the market. I've found that even when there isn't a formal currency of trade (or the currency of trade is woefully inadequate for some reason such as a high rate of inflation or inability to use it for most trade in the market), markets tend to gravitate to a informal standard of trade.
And since human life is rarely traded directly, it is a tenuous connection in the marketplace, say to jobs that risk life and limb or in trade offs (such as where to live or what quality of tool to buy) which impose differing degrees of risk to a person's life.
This also leads to a rather dismal world in which some murders are ok, and some are slightly more ok than others. Of the choices of available dystopias, this one sounds less appealing than average.
It also happens to be the real world. Human life during a famine in Ethiopia is not as valuable as life in normal India (for example, the Thuggee cult, basically a small sect of serial killers, is supposed to have operated with near impunity for many centuries) which is not as valuable as a life in modern Sweden. This is also reflected in how crime is punished or not in these situations.
Ultimately, the poorer and more desperate a part of society is, the cheaper life becomes.
Libertarians: those evil statists are going to use this to justify their slate of freedom-hating legislation.
See how annoying that was?
These anticipatory posts about expected reactions are just as annoying as the supposed real reactions they are predicting.
The location of an ice sheet is a constant downward pressure on the bedrock that supports it.
As it melts, that mass goes out to sea. If it is a large ice sheet, the underlying tectonic plate rebounds as the pressure is relieved. Stresses at the boundaries of all plates change.
However, you are right, I was just poking fun at the "everything is because of climate change" mentality. Heck, it will be at least another 30 months before enough of Greenland's and Antarctica's ice has melted away to trigger anything bigger than a Richter 3 event. Except of course in Oklahoma, where those high pressure, deep enemas of dirty brine are giving Mother Earth the belly grumbles.
Will
Huh, I always thought those f'rs floated there. Learn something new every day.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Empathy is a basic human emotion that refers to the capability to feel for other people. If you don't ever give a crap about anyone else, why should anyone else ever give a crap about you?
It's never been a problem before that most of the world doesn't care about me.
Then you are poking fun at NASA and the USGS, who have been monitoring Alaskan glaciers and how their melting relates to the increase in earthquakes. I don't know why you're talking about Greenland and Antarctica, and conveniently forget to mention the Himalayan glaciers which have been receding for years and years.