By John Ballard
Twitter is messing with my information management. I don't read as much as Kat (nobody does) but I cover a lot of territory, mostly skimming but going deep when something catches my imagination. That's why my posts about health care reform are so boring.
But Twitter has put a wrinkle in my system.
Most of what I find is like seaweed and driftwood, endlessly washing in and mostly unremarkable. Blogging is like beach combing. Every day you can find something interesting. You may toss it after you show it to someone, or you may put it where you can find it later. People who live near the ocean have tons of lovely paperweights, what-nots and door stops. When I look back at six years of blogging it's like looking at junk in my shop -- too important to toss but worthless at the moment.
Twitter gives me a little relief. I haven't tweeted much this week, but when I'm "in the flow" I can read and tweet to my heart's content, sending out those little 140-character puffs of smoke like bubbles at a party. If someone finds one that's great. And if they pop unnoticed, that's not my problem. I floated it out for the world to see, and if the missed it, that's not my problem. Tweeting is a kind of mini-blogging.
Somewhere between blogging and tweeting lie different technologies. For the next generation it's texting, Facebook and My Space. But for us old-timers that's not as comfortable as blogging. It was easy to abandon snail mail. (Even when pressure-sensitive stamps replaced those you had to lick the time between posting and reply was so long it didn't matter. Someone could die before they had a chance to reply by mail. And by the time of their funeral, you would already have missed it.) So email became everyman's smoke signals. Spam, trojan viruses, spyware and wholesale misinformation was the price of this new technology and to this day most of America is mired in the quicksand of email-forwarded ignorance.
But I digress, as usual.
Please forgive the vagaries of someone chronologically retrograde.
Two items this morning that are, as the title says, too big to tweet, too small to blog.
And, in my estimation, too important to miss.
First, this item Kat and MSNBC found in the Washington Post.
Under world's greatest cities, deadly plates
Scientists say Port-au-Prince tragedy is sure to be repeated
Megacities are something new on the planet. Earthquakes are something very old. The two are a lethal combination, as seen in the recent tragedy in Port-au-Prince, where more than 200,000 people perished � a catastrophe that scientists say is certain to be repeated somewhere, and probably soon, with death tolls that once again stagger the mind.
In 1800, there was just one city with more than a million people � Beijing. Now there are 381 urban areas with at least 1 million inhabitants. Urbanization crossed a threshold last year when, for the first time, more people lived in city settings than rural ones. About 403 million people live in cities that face significant seismic hazard, according to a recent study by seismologist Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado.
The next Big One could strike Tokyo, Istanbul, Tehran, Mexico City, New Delhi, Kathmandu or the two metropolises near California's San Andreas Fault, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Or it could devastate Dhaka, Jakarta, Karachi, Manila, Cairo, Osaka, Lima or Bogota. The list goes on and on.
That's the lede. the rest is a gripping description of what is in store for the future. Notice I said in store, not perhaps, but certain.
Human nature being what it is, we may be individually smart but humanity continues to prove itself collectively stupid.
Following floods, earthquakes, tropical storms, mudslides and volcanic eruptions we rush to repopulate dangerous places to live with the same energy as moths flying around a streetlight.
And before anyone is tempted to look down their nose at the developing world, remind yourself of places like San Francisco, New Orleans, and thousands of acres along the Mississippi River that are just as vulnerable as those in the shadow of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. (And that's just ignorance in the face of nature. I didn't bother to mention global financial schemes, credit bubbles, organized war in the place of non-violent alternatives, or political ignorance in the form of tyranny, xenophobia, prejudice and an endless list of other self-destructive collective human behaviors.)
Here is how the article ends...
Urbanization is a steady process. In the next half-century, the planet will add about 5 billion people and build about 1 billion housing units, Bilham estimates. The question is whether those people will live in buildings designed for a sometimes shaky world.
Brian Tucker, an earth scientist who leads GeoHazards International, said 10 percent of the money going to help Haiti rebuild should be dedicated to mitigating the destruction in earthquakes. But he also knows from many years of sounding warnings about possible earthquakes that people tend to be complacent about catastrophes that have yet to happen.
"People who advocate diet and exercise are chumps, and heart surgeons are heroes," Tucker said.
Bilham said he would like to see the United Nations develop a building-inspection program akin to its efforts to look for banned nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Zoback, likewise, is impatient for action that could save lives:
"We know where the problems are. We know what to do. We know how to fix it. We just need the political will."
?000?
Second, I missed this Sixty Minutes piece but this also may be too important to miss.
I, for one, am impressed.
And hopeful that this is not gonna be just another Segway.
(Apologies for the commercial messages. Apparently that's the price we pay for information. We get so much for free I don't mind. I just hate that it is for yet another drug we can get cheaper if we imported it.)
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