Chicken!

He’s called Basil and has a low opinion of photographers. Can’t entirely blame him.

Beached!

We went to Norfolk today, just to walk on a beach.

Strolling along in the wind, we talked about the tsunami disaster, and reckoned that one of the reasons why it touches such a chord is that we all have memories of holidaying on beaches and asssociating them with pleasure and safety. We wondered how we would fare if a tsunami suddenly appeared on the horizon. In Brancaster (where this picture was taken), one would have to run a couple of miles at least to reach a safe elevation. I’m sure nobody on this beach would have made it.

One reason for running Linux on an iPod…

I wondered the other day why anyone would want to do this. One reason, kindly suggested by Paul Downey, is to be able to circumvent Apple’s crippling of the iPod’s recording facility (which will only let one record at a measly 8kHz) and push it up to 96kHz. Just what one would need for recording, say, live music at reasonable audio quality!

There’s no money in hardware, folks. Ask IBM.

Bloomberg News report: I.B.M. said yesterday that the personal computer business it was selling to the Lenovo Group of China had not made a profit for three and a half years. I.B.M.’s personal computing division had a loss of $139 million in the six months ended June 30. It had losses of $258 million in 2003, $171 million in 2002 and $397 million in 2001, I.B.M. said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During that period, the PC division had sales of $34.1 billion.

Iraq: counting the cost

Interesting piece in The Atlantic pointing out that the numbers of American children bereaved by deaths of a parent in Iraq is unprecedently high. The reason? Past U.S. wars were mainly fought by single men, but 40 percent of the 1,256 GIs killed in Iraq as of November were married, and 459, including six women, had children. The defense analyst Anthony Cordesman forecasts that many more children will be bereaved if, as Donald Rumsfeld has indicated, U.S. forces stay in Iraq until 2008 or 2009. By then, Cordesman estimates, 5,038 U.S. troops will have died.

This is terrible, of course. But is anybody interested in compiling the corresponding estimates for Iraqis? Last Wednesday, for example, insurgents lured Iraqi policemen to a house in west Baghdad and set off a huge amount of explosives, killing at least 29 people, seven of them police. They had families and children too.

The Higher Thought

Susan Sontag has died at the age of 71. I was always slightly baffled by her. Lots of people whom I took seriously took her seriously, yet whenever I tackled something she had written I usually found it at best unsatisfactory and occasionally incomprehensible. I did, however, like her book On Photography, which I’ve just pulled out and have been re-reading. She’s had lots of appreciative obituaries, plus a predictably dyspeptic one by Roger Kimball, a doyen of the strand of American conservatism which is currently, er, triumphing in Iraq. Sontag would be delighted, I guess, by his piece. You can tell tell the quality of a woman by the enemies she makes.

Still life with flowers

Well, just the flowers actually. No signs of life.

Tsunami facts

There’s been a lot of talk on Blogs about why no early warnings were issued to countries and populations in the path of Sunday’s tsunami. Hmmm… It’s so easy to be wise after an event.

The Hindustan Times explores this idea:

“Thousands of lives could possibly have been saved if India and Sri Lanka had been part of a 26-nation group that operates an international tsunami warning system, say scientists of the US Geological Survey.

The US has its own warning centres in Hawaii and Alaska, but these are geared to monitoring occurrences of large seismic waves in the Pacific Ocean — and not in the Indian Ocean, where Sunday’s catastrophic tsunamis originated.

The international warning system can alert nations of potentially destructive waves some three to 14 hours before they hit the coast — sufficient time to make people flee inland. But without wave sensors in the Indian Ocean region, there was no way to determine the path of tsunamis.

Staffers at the US centres were aware of the grim possibility of tsunamis on Sunday following the massive earthquake, but they did not have a warning mechanism in this case.”

But until Sunday, the statistical probability of a tsunami disaster seemed small — as the Hindustan Times article goes on to point out:

” Tsunamis have been so rare in the Indian Ocean that people in countries of the region have never been taught to flee inland at the time of a big earthquake.

‘The last tsunami that affected the Indian Ocean was in 1883…The hazard was underestimated by a factor of 10,’ says Costas Synolakis, professor of civil engineering at the University of Southern California, explaining why experts had not pushed hard for a warning system for the Indian Ocean.

Synolakis told the Washington Post that just two weeks ago he had opened discussions with officials at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii about expanding the warning system to the Indian Ocean.

The international warning system was put in place in 1965, a year after massive tsunamis struck Alaska.”

OneWorld.net has a fascinating story about how a former wave-height monitor from Pondicherry in India now living in Singapore saw what was happening, realised its significance and telephoned home to warn them. His village was evacuated and everyone saved. But it’s difficult to see how the necessary evacuations could have been achieved in time across the region. This was a 40-foot wall of water that covered 750 miles in 100 minutes — that’s about 450mph. Just think about that — try to imagine that mass of water moving at that speed — and you get some idea of the devastating energy that pounded South Asian coastlines.

Linux on your iPod

Yep. Someone’s done a Linux installation for the iPod. Much as I love Linux, I cannot for the life of me imagine why it’s worth doing. Still, here is a review.

Brighteyes

This is one of the nicest little chaps I know.