Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

This posting is a place for me to collect stuff about the horrible earthquake in China.

Nearly a million people live in Dujiangyan, which is inside the severe shaking zone. The irrigation system that starts there dates back to 250BC. I wonder about the dams.
Good, professional material about landslides, he estimates 50K square kilometers affected by landslides! This area appears to have a thousand people per kilometer.

Events like (and the cyclone in Burma) create a media vaccum - who get’s the blame. In Burma the dicators seem to be getting the blame, rather than say global warming. But for now it’s unclear what will step into the void, if anything.

While it is interesting to contrast the richer telecommunications in China to that in Burma I just want to say I found this pretty tasteless.

Update: ‘”extremely dangerous” cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan…’  Photo’s of this dam are here, and here.  It is 50 stories high.  This is really frightening, a million people?  The province’s irrigation system?

Chart of showing how folks get around based on a table posted here, note what’s being counted here is “trips” not distance.

I bet this is going to look lot different over the next few decades.

Four to six million people live in Yangon, aka Rangoon.  The recent cyclone swept away a lot of land, the photos below show that the city is now surrounded by water.  Of course lots of people lived on all the rest of that land.  Meanwhile scientists are a lot more confident that global warming is increasing the intensity and number of hurricanes/cyclones/et. al.

Via NASA

I still think lightning rockets are the coolest, but it appears that playing with high powered lasers some folks making similar trouble.

“eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects” — Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?