Odd and Mostly Random

Wordpress is the most drooled about blog platform. At present anyway. But for those like me who cannot afford a paid wordpress site editing the scripts is not an option. So how do I add say a hit counter to my blog? Something like sitemeter.(Ok I can add sitemeter).  Maybe not a big deal, when you think about it. After all most hit counter now allow you to chose your starting number, say a quadrllion, and also your increments. Still for those of us honest Johns out here it is a pleasure to see that somebody is taking a peek at your blog.

On 26th December,2004, at 00:58:53 UTC, an earthquake of magnitude 9 in the Richter scale equivalent to about 23,000 Hiroshima sized bombs)struck near the Sunda trench, 150 miles off the northern coast of Sumatra. In what is called a subduction zone the Indian ocean plate slid under the Burma plate by about 65 feet in four minutes. . Normally the movement is about 2.5 feet per year. The tear was about 90 miles wide and about 750 feet long running from the Sumatra to the Andaman and Nicobar islands, that is more than 50,000 square miles of sea bed shifted in four minutes. This created a 15 foot wave at the surface of the ocean. At the eastern edge the sea surface dropped 6 feet, mirroring the change in the sea bed. This is called an N wave, a crest and an trough.
The giant wave raced across the Indian ocean with the speed of an airliner and hit as far away as the east African coast 3000 miles away in 7 hours. The wave was about 15-30 feet near the epicentre and reached heights of about 56 feet at the coastline near Sumatra and Thailand.

Those 7 hours changed the very earth itself. More than 200,000 people are believed tohave perished, most of them instantly as the giant wall of wtaer roared almost 4 miles inland. The quake was so powerful it shook the axis of the earth and shortened the length of the day. Some islands southewest of Sumatra moved away by as much as 30 feet.

The 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake was the fourth largest in since 1900. In terms of human lives lost the Bunda Aceh quake ranks as one of history’s worst natural diasasters.
In an earth becoming more and more violent, with gigantic quakes and hurricanes of unbelevable fury, the frial life forms, human and others, is sudenly projected as at once precious and precarious.

Right before our eyes a new kind of organism has been born, and evolved so rapidly most people have actually missed it. The internet is the closest I can imagine to a new kind of life form. (I am not forgetting viruses). Think about this. The net is born basically as a kind of backup system. Soon it outgrows that and develops and differetiates into various “organs”, emails, ftps, IMs, websites, blogs. You name it. Behind all this is a kind of self driven urge to growth. The net can be called the first international truly global milieu, and netizens are the true citizens of a different world. The net ignores national boundaries, cultural differences, and has probably done more to bring the diverisyt of mankind onto a common platform of development.

No one has quite realized this yet. But the net is alive. Its growth, I would call this its differentiation same as in a growing multicellular organism, is actually driven by itself.

The net is also the only entity on the planet that comes closest to the human brain, in terms of reality and potential.

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I have been to a nuclear medicine conference. Exciting stuff. If it becomes possible to map the genome in vivo. The intrinsic limit on resoultion of the radioisotope technique will of course prevent that. But the ability to image gene by-productas is an amazing achivement. The NIS-GLUT model may be the simplest paradigm of the shape of things to come.

Obesity. Leptins, ghrelins. Adipocytes. What do you know. It all adds up to a big fat body. Try losing that fat ! I did. And lost big time. No I tell myself it isn’t my fault really. It is all those silly hormones, working against me.

What is odd about odd. The fact is most of it is odd anyway. So what is new. This is not really about odd stuff for odd people. It is just my odd blog. Hey, now I am confusing myself !