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…