THE SHAKY VIDEO and fragmentary breathless descriptions are like something from a disaster movie: giant waves appearing without warning, houses and trees swept away, tall hotels toppled.

• The Command Post has quite a thorough coverage including a reasonably comprehensive list of aid agencies.
• Glenn Reynolds provides a short roundup at GlennReynolds.com and over at Tech Central Station this article about relative risk.
• Alan Brain takes the time to respond thoughtfully to a typically childish letter to the SMH and also gives us some direct coverage with a photo and an email from a friend of his in the disaster zone.
• Tim Blair is logging numerous updates in his post entitled TSUNAMI LATEST
• Hit this link for Number Watch and scroll down to the item labelled Tsunami for John Brignall's take on "the pathetic hubris of mankind in claiming to have mastered nature".
• Another Tim Blair post, this time mentioning a couple who resented having to fly back from Phuket on their scheduled flight. It also mentions a bloke who behaved the way we all hope we would behave in the circumstances; his family, who had been trying to find him, discovered he had been hard to contact because he was helping out at the local hospital. That's at least a little bit inspirational.
• At the risk of making light of a shocking situation, the Iowa Hawk has posted a magnificent coverall for the Religious Green coverage. [thanks Slatts, well spotted, detached retina and all!]
• Arthur C. Clarke's comments are worth reading. Interestingly, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon, presumably) was quite hard hit in a very similar event when Krakatoa went up in 1883. Despite the movie title, Krakatoa is West of Java.

Friday the 13th of April 2029 has a 1 in 62.5 chance of being a Bad Day if you're in the wrong spot.
According to the latest data from NASA, an asteroid has been detected and tracked with that chance of hitting the Earth on that date.
If it happens, the impact would be the equivalent of an explosion of about 2,200 Megatonnes of TNT.

• Manangatang
• Wangaratta
• Tangambalanga (The current syllabic record holder)
• Barnawartha
• Yackandanda
• Wagga Wagga (so good they named it twice!)
• Talangatta
• Balhannah
• Hallam
• Ararat
• Ballarat
• Walhalla
• Baw Baw
• Maffra
• Yarram
• Yarra
• ...

• Atlanta
• Tampa
• Canada
• Malaya
• Mandalay
• Alaska
• Arkansas
• Kansas
• Aach (in Germany)
• Aamba (in Zaire)
• Aantaara (a double double from Somalia
• ...

"There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically.... The evidence has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up.... Meteorologists are almost unanimous [that] the resulting famines could be catastrophic.... A survey completed last year reveals a drop in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere.... The present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.... Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate, [like] melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot.... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."

These include the greater than three-year delay in the approval of misoprostol, a drug for the treatment of gastric bleeding, which is estimated to have cost between eight and fifteen thousand lives per year; and the lag in the approval of streptokinase for the treatment of occluded coronary arteries, which may have caused the loss of more than ten thousand lives per year.

The 23-year-old hotel heiress tells Rolling Stone magazine: "I'm not a sexual person, really."

[The doctor] who has been a GP for 30 years and who trains young doctors would be "pleased to hear from anyone, medical or otherwise, who could teach him the correct way to carry out a cervical smear on a 34-year-old male".

"... Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portraits the patron wants done. And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends..."

Ten Moments In Rock History That I Would Go Back And Stop From Happening If I Had Access To Some Manner Of Time Machine

Semi, check this out.
NASA's top administrator, Sean O'Keefe has resigned. His reason? Because he can't afford to get his kids a decent education if he remains "in public service".
At NASA he was on $US158,100 pa. (Seems a tad low for that job!) He has applied for (and presumably expects to get) the job as Chancellor of Louisiana State University, at $US500,000 pa!

And in Australia, we complain about HECS...

"... My attacks on George Bush have nothing to do with science or the scientific method. I just can’t stand the man’s style, the way he swaggers and struts and smirks and the way he looks sly and deceitful and the way Americans can’t see it. I’m irritated by the way they think he’s just a regular guy you can have a drink with.”

Anti-Americanism keeps intruding in the new book. There is a very irrational paragraph on nuclear strategy that stoops to lampooning Bush’s pronunciation — “nucular” — and even an anti-foxhunting footnote which, I point out to him, is utterly illogical. He agrees.

Keys scoffed at height-weight charts, calling them "arm-chair concoctions starting with questionable assumptions and ending with three sets of standards for 'body frames' which were never measured or even properly defined." Like their Seven Countries Study, the Framingham, Albany, Tecumseh, Chicago People's Gas, and Chicago Western Electric studies all found that people 20 to 40% over the insurance company weight charts lived the longest. In fact, those most at risk are at or below the charts, or at the very extreme of obese, rather than the average or even moderately obese groups, he concluded.

no life is wasted if there are six social workers on duty to watch it disintegrate