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.

Listening to the universe

One of the radio telescopes at Lord’s Bridge at dusk today.

Quotations, schmotations

As someone who collects quotations, I was pleased to get this for Xmas — and even more pleased to discover one quotation by me in it. (I once said that comedienne Ruby Wax “talked like a cement mixer from Brooklyn” — which was unfair to cement mixers btw). But the clueless compilers have managed to get my name wrong, not once, but twice! I’m “Naughton, Denis” in the index, and “David Naughton” on the page. Scholarship, like nostalgia, is not what it used to be. Sigh.

The problem with dictionaries of quotations is that they are often lazy compilations — consisting mainly of recycling of the hoary old annuals and leavening the mix with the froth of the last few years. There’s rarely any sign of intelligent editorial life. They all, for example, recycle the celebrated exchange between Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker:

Benchley: Calvin Coolidge is dead!
Parker: How can they tell?

The only problem with this is that Benchley replied “He had an erection”, but this wonderful payoff line was judged too scandalous by quotation hunters and so was discreetly excised from the records, leaving Parker with the credit for the joke. Benchley’s widow went to her grave lamenting this slight upon her late husband’s wit.

Shoots and leaves

It was snowing in Derbyshire yesterday, but some plants were unimpressed by their covering.

Slate bought by Washington Post

Looks like Slate‘s gone mainstream. Microsoft has sold it. But Gates and Co deserve credit for having nurtured it to maturity. Of course one could argue that the costs of running an online mag amounted to just loose change to a profitable monopoly, but still…

The Christmas queue

One of the great Cambridge traditions is the Carol Service in King’s College chapel on the afternoon of Christmas Eve (broadcast worldwide by the BBC). Associated with this is the traditional orderly queue in the biting East Anglian wind.

Christmas comes early in Luxembourg

Judge Bo Vesterdorf, president of the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, upheld the ruling of the European Commission on Microsoft’s bundling of media players with Windows. The Commission had ordered the company to offer a version of its Windows operating system without its software for playing digital music and movies on personal computers. It also ordered the company to (i) offer personal computer makers and consumers in Europe a stripped-down Windows with Microsoft’s media player removed and (ii) license to competitors the technical information for Microsoft’s software for servers, which would give rivals equal footing.

It also fined Microsoft 497 million euros ($665.5 million) which the company deposited in an escrow account. Microsoft is appealing the ruling, and had argued that the proposed sanctions should be suspended pending the outcome of the appeal (which of course will take years to work it way through the courts). But Judge Vesterdorf would have none of it.

The ruling applies only to Europe, but it represents the first time since antitrust challenges to Microsoft began in the 1990’s that the company will be forced to alter its core business strategy of bundling its software products and features with Windows. The commission ruled that Microsoft had abused its monopoly power to stifle competition in the markets for media players and operating systems on servers.

According to the New York Times report, “Microsoft will post the information for licensing its server software on a Web site within a day, the company said. Next month, Mr. Smith [Microsoft’s general counsel] said, Microsoft will have a stripped-down version of Windows available for PC makers, and that alternative should be available in the European marketplace by February.”

Wow! Who says there’s no such thing as Father Christmas?