Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Mother (including Human) Nature, alpha terrorist

From Unstoppable Gee-Gees, buy Gwynne Dyer:

Worst hit will be harbours and estuaries that funnel the waves inland: goodbye Halifax, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and islands like the Bahamas and Barbados. Likely death toll, if there is no mass evacuation beforehand? A hundred million people, give or take fifty million. (Thanks to Howard Greenstein for the pointer.)

To spread the paranoia evenly to all corners, there's this and this. Also this, which offers a bit of encouragement.

[Later...] The following apparently didn't make it in earlier, but is important to include...

Then there's this about Mega Tsunami Hazards, from Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis's Tsunami Page site:

Most recently, the Discovery Channel has replayed a program on alleging potential destruction of coastal areas of the Atlantic by tsunami waves which might be generated in the near future by a volcanic collapse in the Canary Islands. Other reports have involved a smaller but similar catastrophe from Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawai`i. They like to call these occurences "mega tsunamis". We would like to halt the scaremongering from these unfounded reports. We wish to provide the media with factual information so that the public can be properly informed about actual hazards of tsunamis and their mitigation.

Here are a set of facts, agreed on by committee members, about the claims in these reports:

- While the active volcano of Cumbre Vieja on Las Palma is expected to erupt again, it will not send a large part of the island into the ocean, though small landslides may occur. The Discovery program does not bring out in the interviews that such volcanic collapses are extremely rare events, separated in geologic time by thousands or even millions of years.

- No such event - a mega tsunami - has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history. NONE.

- The colossal collapses of Krakatau or Santorin (the two most similar known happenings) generated catastrophic waves in the immediate area but hazardous waves did not propagate to distant shores. Carefully performed numerical and experimental model experiments on such events and of the postulated Las Palma event verify that the relatively short waves from these small, though intense, occurrences do not travel as do tsunami waves from a major earthquake.

- The U.S. volcano observatory, situated on Kilauea, near the current eruption, states that there is no likelihood of that part of the island breaking off into the ocean.

- These considerations have been published in journals and discussed at conferences sponsored by the Tsunami Society.

As for Dr. P-C's c.v., dig this:

My name is George Pararas-Carayannis and my Tsunami Pages also include information on earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, other natural disasters, as well as some of my papers, presentations and miscellaneous writings and publications.

I was involved with Tsunami Research at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics of the University of Hawaii and with scientific organizations of the U. S. Government. I served as Director of the World Data Center A-Tsunami and as Director of the International Tsunami Information Center (ITIC), under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO. Additionally, I served as consultant to different United Nations scientific organizations, several international governmental and non-governmental organizations and to private industry (brief bio-summary). Concurrently - for more than twenty years - I served as the Tsunami Advisor for the State of Hawaii's Civil Defense. I was co-founder and officer of two prestigious scientific organizations: The Tsunami Society and the International Hazards Society.

Anyway, I didn't know Dyer had a web site. Good to know. His seven-part television documentary titled War is the best thing I have ever seen on TV. I still remember it, close to a quarter-century after it ran.

The world in 2004 is a piece Dyer wrote for the Jordan Times, datelined yesterday. The important part:

The United States no longer dominates the international system except in terms of hard military power, and that is an instrument that often breaks in the hands of American governments because the US public hates casualties. Sooner or later American voters will rebel against the human and financial cost of trying to be Globocop. So just wait it out, and sooner or later normal service will be restored in Washington. That is the right strategy, and there is at least a couple of years' worth of patience in other capitals before anybody gives up on it. With luck, that may be enough.

I had some small hope that Iraq would not be a failed U.S. project, until I read Getting an Education in Jihad, in today's L.A. Times:

In the beginning, the schoolteacher had struggled to decide how he felt about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It spelled humiliation and sorrow to Arabs. But as an Arab who had tasted the despair of despotism, he had a small spot of hope.

"At first, I thought, 'OK, the Americans want to bring democracy to the region,' " he said.

That was before he turned on the television to the grainy images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. "The human triangle. The woman dragging the man by the leash," said the teacher, a broad man with a clipped beard and intense gaze. "These images affected me deeply. The shame the Americans brought. I was fervently monitoring the TV images, not so much the words as the pictures."

He remembered that President Bush called the war on terrorism a "crusade." He thought about American helicopters being used by the Israeli army to attack Palestinians. And he decided that sitting impotently in Lebanon wasn't enough.

Over dates and sweet coffee in a middle-class living room here, he recently spoke in measured tones about his fervor to fight in behalf of Muslims against U.S. troops — and his decision to leave the battle in Iraq to make his way home again.

This teacher is wrong about the U.S., and misunderstands the U.S. mission in Iraq. But he's not alone. The U.S. has horrible PR in the world, and I don't see it getting any better.

1) Start Podcasting at IT Garage

Eric Norlin: Actually set aside some time today to work on "goal setting for 2005" -- a useful, if incredibly hard exercise, because it forces you to take inventory of 2004 and do some pretty criticial self assesment and planning for 2005.....

The other two are harder. And I'm working on them.

Look out

Comet Machholz is now visible to the naked eye. It will pass the Pleiades from Janary 6-8.

Authorating

The most constructive work we do in blogland isn't "delivering" the commodity we call "information," but rather exercizing the verbs from which the noun information is derived. We inform each other. As human beings, we are what we know, and we know more because we listen to and read and watch sources that enlarge our knowledge. We are therefore literally formed by those processes. (All of which, Steve Gillmor will hasten to point out, follow our attention.)

As either Tim O'Reilly or I said in a conversation we once had about this process, We are all authors of each other. (Apparently somebody else wrote this as well, but it costs $25 to read the text, so I guess the author won't be authoring too many of us.)

After I wrote that "blogging is about "making and changing minds", Jay Rosen and his commenters enlarged the idea, both informing and forming my own additional thinking about the subject.

Traditional big-J journalism is so much about delivering finished information, rather than thinking out loud about stuff we all need to know more about, I think we need a noun for the latter. That's what I'm vetting in the headline for this post.

This all came to mind this morning when I discovered that Glenn Reid, who fathered iPhoto and iMovie at Apple, is blogging as the CEO of FiveAcross, a "workgroup instant messaging company."

Glenn's most recent post is a thinking-out-loud volley back at this, by Google's Adam Bosworth. One sample:

The problem is that customization isn't particularly easy, and most people don't bother. People don't pick Preferences or Settings from the menu.

Likewise, Adam's post begins, I have been reading an indignant post about my talk written by Jean-Jacques Dubray.

Which brings to mind what Dave wrote the other day about something I said on The Gillmor Gang's identity discussion:

Doc Searls, bless his heart, offered RSS and podcasting as examples of technologies that were simple, therefore successful, and suggests that identity, if it were to be approached the same way, might have similar success. Bzzzt. Wrong. RSS was not easy, it was hard, for exactly the same reasons identity is hard. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Two ways to do identity is one too many.

Politics spoiled identity, and would have spoiled RSS had the major players not converged on RSS 2.0. The difference this time was that there was a Switzerland, me, to guide RSS through its gauntlet, and I clearly wasn't in bed with any of the major publishers or vendors. The Harvard connection didn't hurt because it's a highly respected university that hadn't been involved in tech standards. Had identity had that kind of champion-ship it might not be the mess it is today.

If Dave had written this as an editorial in a newspaper, I might have been inclined to write a defensive letter to the editor*. Instead, I'm inclined to look toward the minds that have formed, and continue to form, the thoughts about identity that gave rise to whatever it was I said in that Gillmor Gang discussion (which I don't remember, and don't have time to look up). Those authorators include Andre Durand, Bryan Field-Elliot, Craig Burton, Drummond Reed, Jamie Lewis, Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron, to name six. There are more. If you're offended that I didn't just list you, let me know. :-)

Woops... Eric Norlin too.

So, here are some points I would like to make about identity. They aren't finished, by any means. And they will be hard to finish, if they ever are finished, for exactly the reasons Dave gives about RSS being hard.

First, politics hasn't spoiled identity yet, because identity has hardly started as a topic, much less as a useful service for anybody on the Net. For all the effort that's gone into identity, it's still newer than RSS was when it still stood for Rich Site Summary (or whatever it was) rather than the Really Simple Syndication all of us bloggers employ today. And while the Liberty Alliance its participants deserve credit for all their work around federation, that's still mostly BigCo stuff that benefits us as individuals mostly on the back ends of our relationships with various companies. We need something that works for us, as individuals, in a simple and obvious way.

Second, identity won't happen as a service unless it comes up from the grass roots, from independent developers, the users who support them, and the big guys who follow indie developers and users into the marketplace. (Think about how the big publishers have deployed RSS, for example.)

Third, identity needs a Dave Winer: an independent developer and free-range technologist who tirelessly advocates something that will work for everybody — and for users and developers diggin' together. I'd like to name names, but I'd rather see somebody step forward.

* It was Dave who once pointed out something that so formed me that I can't forget it: Writing a letter to the editor is pathetic, because the writer is always in a position of weakness, relegated to the Letters page. That's why letters of disagreement are always self-dismissing, and letters of agreement are always fawning. That said, as an editor I do like to get the things, whether they're published or not.