...We have five hundred volcanoes and an eruption every two weeks.Earthquakes are continuous:a million and a half a year,a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every 10 days.Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months...
The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can't control the climate.
The reality is, they run from the storms.
- Michael Crichton's State of Fear
I haven't felt so sad in a long time. Those tiny corpses of kids, seemingly uninjured and yet lifeless was so overwhelmingly saddening. No matter what advances we make, we remain puppets in Nature's hands.
- From a friend's mail this morning,
BBC says that the number now is 24,000.
If you want a sample of the horrific images in the newspapers, see http://forum.only4gurus.org/index.php?showtopic=1328 (Warning:not for the faint-of-heart)
Unimaginable
Sorry for the non-technical post, but I had to post something about the earthquake and the resulting tsunami in South East Asia. I live in Chennai, one of India's largest cities on the south-eastern coast.And trust me -I don't think my city has ever seen a disaster of this magnitude. The newspapers are horrifying- people washed away as they walked on the beach in the morning, kids swept out to sea as they were playing cricket. People are still in shock- almost every conversation I had something about the quake in it.The images on TV are too terrible to describe - I cannot believe that so many people have died so close to my house - and in a placce where I've spent quite some time
Thankfully, my family and friends are safe - our house is some 15 kms from the beach and is in a residential area. We're worried about my mom's brother who lives in Indonesia - communication seems to be down, and though they live far away from where the earthquake hit, we're still worried.
If you want a sense of the scale of the disaster, you just have to look at this comment I saw from a BBC reporter this morning from some resort in Thailand - "This region has been relatively fortunate in that it has seen only around a thousand deaths". When people start saying that they're lucky 'coz only a 1000 people died, you know that things are bad.
The number right now is 12,000. That is a number I can't even begin to imagine. If you want a sense of scale, that's more than twice the number killed in 9/11. - I've no doubts this number will increase in the days to come and as communication lines are restored in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
We can only pray.
Update: Anand has posted about it too at http://www.dotnetindia.com/2004/12/earthquake_and_.html.
Scoble is posting to his linkblog (http://kunal.org/scoble)
Vivek feels the same way I do http://svivek.blogspot.com/2004/12/sunday-bloody-sunday.html