The Binary Circumstance

I lived in San Francisco during the earthquake of 1989.  That earthquake was 7.1 on the Richter scale. The earthquake was powerful enough to cause freeways, buildings and a portion of the Bay Bridge to to collapse.

The Richter scale is a base-10 logarithmic scale.  What that means is that a magnitude 8 earthquake is 10 times more powerful than a magnitude 7.  A magnitude 9 is 100 times more powerful than a 7.

The recent 2004 Indian Ocean quake was approximately 100 times more powerful than the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 which I experienced and that was easily the scariest thing I’ve ever felt in my life.

Just think about it.  We’re not talking about 2 times more powerful or 3 times more powerful, but 100 times more powerful.

The quake was so powerful that it caused the earth to wobble on its axis and changed the map of Asia.  It also caused the giant tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people, left billions homeless and caused still-unkown billions of dollars in damage.

Wikipedia has an extensive article called the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake.

The New York Times [reg. req.] has an article about how blogs are reporting on the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia.

BoingBoing has an article with links to sites that are keeping lists of blogs related to the disaster.

Worldchanging has a list of major news organizations covering the disaster and also a list of what it considers "the best first-hand accounts."  They say they will update regularly.

It seems that the Republican party is laying the foundation for a legal challenge to the Democrat’s victory-producing recount that took the election away from Dino Rossi and gave it to Christine Gregoire.

The state Republican Party rolled out a long list of questions and accusations about the King County elections system yesterday that will likely be the foundation for contesting Democrat Christine Gregoire’s claim to the governor’s office.

Democrats called the litany a desperate attempt to keep Republican Dino Rossi in the race even after he lost the manual recount by 130 votes out of 2.8 million cast.

Rossi won the first count and the mandatory mechanical recount by 261 votes and 42 votes, respectively.

[…]

Contrary to state law, a significant but unknown number of ballots were permanently and irrevocably altered, [Chris] Vance said. "You might have had your mark permanently filled in with a black pen," Vance said. "You might have had nothing done to it. You might have had it whited out."

He said although the inconsistency was the rule it consistently benefited Gregoire, who picked up 179 votes in King County during the hand recount.

I think that one of the problems here is that a single manual recount, produced an entirely different result from the two automated counts.  Rossi won two out of three times.  Gregoire won only after several hundred previously rejected ballots in King County were added into the process, and that was after the Supreme Court had ruled that a recount was a re-tallying of votes that had already been counted.

The Supreme Court less than a week later ruled that King County’s previously uncounted ballots had to be included in the recount, apparently oblivious to the fact that those two decisions contradict each other.

I continue to be awestruck by the magnitude of the tsunami in Southeast Asia.  The death toll continues to rise and a report on TV this evening said it may reach 80,000.

It’s so strange to hear some of the survivors on TV say that God was watching out for them.  They are implying that God turned a blind eye to the thousands of others that weren’t so lucky.

People live. People die.  Natural disasters have been around since the beginning of time.  They are just part of the reality of living on our planet.  There is no deeper meaning to them though much can be learned from them.

One lesson is that the natural forces at work on our planet are extremely powerful, much more powerful than man.  They command our respect.

In only wish that people would seek to understand the power of natural disasters to the same extent that they indulge in superstitions about them.

PONDICHERRY/MADRAS, India (Reuters) - Hundreds of Indians have scattered flower petals at sea and sacrificed chickens to pray for the
safe return of those carried away in a tsunami as aftershocks hit some areas.

Groups gathered on beaches in southern India as dawn broke on Monday to light incense and pray for thousands of missing.

But while some held on to fading hope, others broke down as they discovered loved ones among the loads of dead ferried to hastily erected
open-air morgues and authorities gouged out mass graves to bury bodies already rotting in the tropical heat.

Scatter flower petals? Sacrifice chickens? Pray?

To what end?

I’m sure that when those giant waves hit tens of thousands of people were praying as they were being swept out to sea only to be drowned or smashed between the houses and cars that were being tossed around like bathtub toys.

As long as we make tsunamis and other natural disasters something that they aren’t, say for example an act of "God," we will never learn what they really are.

Another lesson is that we need to enjoy our lives while we have them.  I don’t think there will be any opportunities for regrets after we die so avoiding regret in some afterlife should not be the purpose of one’s life, if we are to live rational lives.

And lesson is to experience life in all its many facets.  We don’t understand happiness without sadness and grief. 

It is how we deal with the tragedies of life that largely define who we are as individuals.  I learned that during the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco which was like living through a 15 year tsunami.

That period taught me lessons about myself that can only be learned when staring death straight in the eye.

All the relatives and friends of those who died in this disaster are experiencing great loss and confusion right now.  If 80,000 people died then I’m sure that millions of people will be touched by those deaths.  They will all be changed by it for the rest of their lives.

Nate Berkus who has often appeared in decorating segments on the Oprah Winfrey show was vacationing in Sri Lanka.  He lived to tell a frightening story. His friend is missing.

"We were completely devastated yesterday morning," Nate Berkus told CNN. "There was absolutely no warning."

Berkus, a regular contributor to "The Oprah Winfrey Show," said he and a friend were sleeping in a beachfront cottage at Arugam Bay on Sri Lanka’s eastern coast when he heard a loud noise and the roof was ripped off.

Berkus, 33, said they were swept into the sea along with debris, animals and other people.

The two grabbed a telephone pole, he said, but lost their grips when a second large wave hit. Berkus told CNN that he climbed onto the roof of a home; his friend was missing.

It sounds like a bad dream that you wake up to find out isn’t a dream at all.  It’s real.

Berkus said that lost everything he had with him.

"I’m sitting here with nothing — no passport, no money, no anything, in shorts that somebody gave me … the bottom line is, we desperately need help here."

No passport, no money, no friend.

How quickly his life and thousands of others changed forever.  That’s power!