Mark Frauenfelder:
The massive undersea earthquake that caused the tsunami gave a boost to our planet’s spin. As a result, days will be a fraction of a second shorter from now on.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth’s center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

Link
…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
Author and wireless geek Mike Outmesguine announces a disaster relief project aimed at bringing connectivity to tsunami victims cut off from communications services by the disaster.

I am working to organize a disaster relief effort to help those affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami. I’d like to send wireless equipment and expertise to damaged areas to help reconnect the people. I’m still working out the details and will update you as more develops. It will be organized with folks from the Southern California Wireless Users Group, SOCALWUG and other wireless groups that wish to participate. I started calling it the Post-Tsunami Reconnect.

Xeni Jardin mentioned the effort today on Fox News Channel during an interview about bloggers and the tsunami. I will have a video excerpt available soon. Here is a statement I sent to the Center for International Disaster Information about the effort:

“We are a Southern California based user community of experts and advocates of wireless data communications. Wireless community members supplied technical expertise and wireless equipment for the Florida hurricane relief efforts and to military personnel stationed in Iraq. We would like to organize, collect, and deliver wireless data equipment to disaster relief workers and others in the affected region to help maintain a high level of communication and internet access ability. We would also be able to send engineers into the area to help bring connections online.”

For more information or to discuss a donation of funds, equipment, or your expertise, contact Mike Outmesguine by email “mo at wifi-toys.com…” or voice:
+1-818-889-9445 ext. 102

www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
The group responsible for tsunamihelp.blogspot.com… have launched two new collaborative blogs: tsunami enquiry, with numbers for emergency help services in affected areas, and tsunami missing persons, which aims to assist people in connecting with loved ones.
…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
Strangely, amid massive loss of human life, there seems to be little or no dead wild animals in Sri Lanka. Snip:

Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned — the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast, but they can’t find any dead animals.

Link
…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:

John Schwartz wrote an insightful piece for the New York Times this week about the role blogs play in covering and responding to the tsunami disaster. I was interviewed for the piece, but the people who really have something interesting and valuable to say are the ones over there, on the ground — and the folks rolling up their geek sleeves to assist.

From relaying first-person accounts (like Sanjay/Morquendi’s SMS reports in Sri Lanka), to kick-starting relief efforts (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com…, and the Post-Tsunami Reconnect project), to questioning media coverage (Ethan Zuckerman’s post about Myanmar), there’s a lot going on here The amateur-shot image shown here ran in the NYT story. Snip:

“At sumankumar.com…, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: ‘Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites was in Southeast Asia on a break from reporting duties when the tsunami disaster took place. He’s now in Thailand, reporting — and back on the blog again, dispatching photos and first-person accounts. Snip:

One-hundred and fifty-nine pine coffins have been stacked in the garage — many of them big enough to hold refrigerators — built to accommodate the now bloated and rapidly decomposing bodies inside.

Thai soldiers, wearing surgical masks, race against time to arrest the process — before the bodies become impossible to identify.

In a well-choreographed drill — they use hammers to smash square blocks of dry ice, carrying the shards on sheets of plastic and dumping them inside the coffins with the remains. They work at a very high tempo — almost as if they were trying to rescue the living — rather than preserve the dead.

On the sides of the coffins are photographs of the deceased as they were found, special attention paid to jewelry or tattoos, anything that can help in identifying who they once were.

The pictures are grisly — bruised, blackened, bodies misshapen from the ferocious force of an angry ocean and all that travels with it. Old, young, small, large, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, English, Thais �- all victims of the earth’s unrest on a day when she seemed to have precious little mercy.

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
Waxy.org… has been collecting amateur video footage, here’s a roundup post: Link. Punditguy has more: Link

Chris Holland says,

I’ve used prodigem to create torrents for the South Asia tsunami videos. The more people use this torrent, the faster everyone else will be able to download the videos. See also this page to make it easy for people to put an amazon donation badge on their sites.

Link

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
The total number of dead is now believed to be more than 80,000, and rising. In some places, one in every four citizens have lost their lives. Many of the areas hit were extremely poor to begin with, and some 1/3 of the dead are children. Following up on previous BoingBoing posts about fundraising and relief efforts kick-started in the blogosphere:

Scott Hanselman proposes that Google allow bloggers that use AdSense to donate ad proceeds to tsunami relief. Link (Thanks, Peter Provost).

Andy Carvin at Digital Divide Network says, “In response to this week’s devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Digital Divide Network has created an online community workspace on disaster relief and emergency preparedness: Link. The virtual community can be used for posting online resources, documents, news, and articles about tsunami relief efforts. Users also may take advantage of the site’s Web bulletin board and post their own blog entries.”

BoingBoing reader Andrew Falconer proposes that folks who’ve received holiday gift cards convert them into donations to a tsunami relief charity. “I’ve emailed Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Swapagift.com… regarding gift card donations directly to tsunami relief charities. Amazon.com… has already implement

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Xeni Jardin:
Wikinews just launched a Tsunami Help page to collect links to relief effort resources including aid agencies, missing and found people, confirmed deaths, news updates, and helpline numbers. The emergency database was created by contributors to the SEA-EAT (Tsunami Help) blog. (Thanks, Rohit). Link to related BoingBoing posts.
…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

Waxy.org…: Daily Log: Amateur Tsunami Video Footage
In addition to the extensive first-person coverage of the tsunami disaster on blogs, there have been several amateur recordings of the tsunami from camcorders. Unfortunately, the network websites aren’t making them easy to find and view. The videos are usually only available as poor-quality, streaming video like RealPlayer, and buried in popup windows and poor navigation.

Ben pointed me to downloadable versions of three clips. I’m hosting them here. (Unfortunately, I don’t have much information about the source of these videos.)

* phuket.wmv (11MB) – shot from inside a restaurant, waves engulf older couple clinging to railing before flooding entire room
* patong_beach.wmv (10MB) – rooftop view of two huge waves battering buildings along shore, then flooding of city streets
* sri_lanka.wmv (7MB) – upper balcony view of hotel swimming pool area getting flooded as observers run away; woman asks “how high will it go?” before retreating
* koh_lanta_thailand.avi (11MB) – shot on beach level; watch as first wave grows and crashes, before cameraman’s frantic retreat away from shore
* penang_beach.wmv (1MB) – shot from wall above beach, three men are caught in battering waves
* sri_lanka_resort.wmv (6MB) – upper level hotel balcony; restaurant, pools, and deck flooded as people cling to trees; two men narrate what they see

DigitalGlobe | Sample Imagery
Kalutara, Sri Lanka

“After” Image Collected December 26, 2004
Image © 2004 DigitalGlobe

“Before” Image Collected January 1, 2004
Image © 2004 DigitalGlobe

Description:

This is a natural color, 60-centimeter (2-foot) high-resolution QuickBird satellite image featuring the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka. Imagery was collected at 10:20 a.m. local time, slightly less than four hours after the 6:28 a.m. (local Sri Lanka time) earthquake and shortly after the moment of tsunami impact.