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Earthquake postscripts

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

Still getting aftershocks in the 4 to 5 range here.   The NZ Army has been called in to help secure access to the central business district (CBD) as the police are stretched so tight.   The building inspectors are working their way through all the buildings in the CBD flagging each as Green (OK), Yellow (Use Caution) and Red (no way!).   Hopefully, in a few days the situation for all buildings will be known.

I’m working at home today which I rather like.  Working for a seriously high-tech company is a pleasure.   We’ve all got VPN access to the systems at work and sitting here at my desk at home is just like sitting there, downtown.

The office was quite a mess though.  Bookshelves tossed, plants toppled and general chaos.   We had two engineers there on US coverage when the quake hit Saturday morning.   I can’t even imagine what that would have been like up on the 10th floor.

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7.1 Earthquake – Christchurch, New Zealand – 04 Sept 2010

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

At 4:35 AM yesterday, I was shaken from my bed by a huge earthquake.    The biggest one here in New Zealand since the quake in 1931 destroyed much of Napier on the North island.

I jumped out of bed and stood in the doorway to the bedroom and just hung on.   The apartment I live in is six floors up so there was no question of running outside.

The first shock was only a precursor to what followed and as I stood in the doorway, it just seemed to get worse.   I remember thinking that if it got bad enough, the building would go down and I’d be almost certainly be killed.   But, there was nothing to do but hang on and see what would happen next.

Eventually, it slowed down.   The building was, as you can imagine, swaying and creaking and making a lot of noise.   And there were the sounds of things falling and breaking everywhere.  The building continued to move and settle for quite awhile afterwards.

While the quake was in progress and I was in the doorway, I had a clear view out the bedroom window to the west and I could see great flashes of light illuminate the sky several times during the quake.   At the time, I assumed they must be electrical transformers exploding.   The lights flickered on and off and I heard my computer turn itself back on in the middle of the quake.

When it finally stopped, the lights were still on which surprised me.

But what surprised me more was when I turned around and walked into the living room.

Just after the quake - my living room.

I don’t know what I expected after an earthquake that big, but I remember being very surprised that both the bookcases and the TV table and TV were all down on the floor and my books were everywhere.

As you might think, I just stumbled about and looked at everything for several minutes and then I remembered that I should probably go outside.   I put on my pants and got my keys, shirt, coat (2C or 35F outside) and shoes and went downstairs to the parking lot where most of the occupants had gathered.

Some of the long-term people were saying that when these buildings were built 10 years ago, they’d really over-engineered them for earthquakes and that tonight that had all paid off.   I couldn’t have agreed more.

I walked around the complex (as did the building manager and several others, I’m sure) and listened for water from broken pipes and checked for cracks, broken windows (none) and fallen masonry (only a small amount).

I’m writing this on Sunday evening nearly 36 hours later and we are still having aftershocks you can clearly feel.

When the sun came up Saturday morning, I went out for a walk in the neighborhood to see the damage.

You can find photos of Christchurch after the quake on-line here.

And here.

I have to say that building codes are wonderful things.   Only three people were injured badly here and no one died.   Contrast that with quakes in the third world such as the recent one in Haiti.

Some areas survived with very little damage and others were badly trashed as you’ll see in the photos.   Rail lines broken, bridges damaged, ground lifted or fallen, roads buckled, water mains broken and electricity off to much of the city.

About the only thing that turned out nice is that Saturday was a beautiful and unseasonably warm day.

It felt a bit like some sort of strange party as everyone was out walking and looking at the damage.   Cafes and coffee shops, if they were open, were jammed.

My place is put back into order.   The rest of the city will take months and many millions of dollars.   The building where I work seems to be intact but I’ve been told that we’ll be working from home for a few days and that should be different and interesting.

The good news?   There probably won’t be another event like this here in my lifetime now that the fault has released some of its energy.

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Take a deep breath – why the world is running out of helium

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

– Not entirely sure if I’ve written on this subject before.   But, if I had money to invest, I can think of three areas where I’d probably focus myself.   Helium, Lithium and the Norwegian Kroner.

– The first two because they are chemical elements and they have unique properties that nothing else can duplicate and they are here in earth in finite amounts and our demand for them is rising.  And looks strongly like it will continue to rise.

– We know where virtually all of the Helium is on Earth is and, as the article documents, we are not conserving it very well while our need for it looks to continue to rise indefinitely.   A good bet, I’d say.

– Lithium is coming into its own because it is an essential ingredient in the zillions of batteries we are soon going to be needing and using for cars; among other things.   Bolivia has a bunch of it and the world’s major corporation are in a lather to get their hands on it.   And Bolivia’s people’s president, is having the audacity to say that the profits and benefits of mining and selling the stuff should accrue to the Bolivian people (can you imagine?).  The CIA took Allende down for far less cheek than this.   Now they are saying that vast amounts of Lithium have been discovered in Afghanistan.  That should prove interesting.

– And then Norwegian Kroners.  Well, the Norwegians are just about the only ones who’ve had vast oil wealth fall on their head that haven’t rushed out to build the world’s tallest building for the country’s ego or a personal ski-jump for each of their citizens.

– Instead, they’ve created one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds and then had the audacity to invest it ethically.  An investment that is beating a lot of countries investing in crap.   If I was looking for a stable currency to hold, my money would be on the Norwegian Kroner.

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It is the second-lightest element in the Universe, has the lowest boiling-point of any gas and is commonly used through the world to inflate party balloons.

But helium is also a non-renewable resource and the world’s reserves of the precious gas are about to run out, a shortage that is likely to have far-reaching repercussions.

Scientists have warned that the world’s most commonly used inert gas is being depleted at an astonishing rate because of a law passed in the United States in 1996 which has effectively made helium too cheap to recycle.

The law stipulates that the US National Helium Reserve, which is kept in a disused underground gas field near Amarillo, Texas – by far the biggest store of helium in the world – must all be sold off by 2015, irrespective of the market price.

The experts warn that the world could run out of helium within 25 to 30 years, potentially spelling disaster for hospitals, whose MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form, and anti-terrorist authorities who rely on helium for their radiation monitors, as well as the millions of children who love to watch their helium-filled balloons float into the sky.

– More… ➡

Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different, General, Politics - The Right Way | 1 Comment »

New Blogroll entries

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

For those of you who might occasionally take a look at the other Blogs and Websites I like and recommend, you should be aware that I’ve added two new ones to my Blogroll today.

The first is The Automatic Earth which is written by Stoneleigh and Ilargi.   They describe their site as, “…a daily overview of Debt, Diesel and Dämmerung“.   Dämmerung being the German word for twilight.   An interesting combination.   This site I added based on how impressed I was with an entry I found on their site that I Blogged about earlier here.  It was excellent piece and I’m thinking that where there is smoke, there’s likely to be fire.

And the second is Canadian Paul Cherfurka’s Blog which he entitle’s “Approaching the Limits to Growth“. I could try here to say a lot of nice things about Paul’s thinking and his approach the what I call The Perfect Storm but there’s no need. If you follow the link to his Blog, he’ll lay it all out for you on the opening page. If you’re not hooked after that, you never will be.

– Research thanks to Kael for connecting me to both of these fine sites.

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No More Science at CNN

Friday, December 5th, 2008

– At a time when we’re just coming out of eight years of the anti-science Bush administration, CNN’s decision is hard to understand – even if it is economically driven. Definitely, in my opinion, it is not the right decision for the times.

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NO MORE SCIENCE….From CJR:

CNN, the Cable News Network, announced yesterday that it will cut its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers. Mediabistro’s TVNewser broke the story.

“We want to integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit,” said CNN spokesperson Barbara Levin. “Now that the bulk of our environmental coverage is being offered through the Planet in Peril franchise, which is produced by the Anderson Cooper 360 program, there is no need for a separate unit.”

I can’t that I’m shocked by this or anything, but it’s unfortunate. Environmental reporting, whether produced by Anderson Cooper or not, could use more reporters, not fewer, and science reporting in general is likely to become more important now that we have a president waiting in the wings who doesn’t think of it as just another obstacle to be overcome on his way to dismantling the regulation of the moment. Disappointing news.

– To the original by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones: ➡

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U.S. power, influence will decline in future, report says

Friday, November 21st, 2008

– Two different friends sent me links to this one within a few hours.  It’s a good read.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A government report released Thursday paints an alarming picture of an unstable future for international relations defined by waning American influence, a fragmentation of political power and intensifying struggles for increasingly scarce natural resources.

The report, “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,” was drafted by the National Intelligence Council to better inform U.S. policymakers — starting with the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama — about the factors most likely to shape major international trends and conflicts through the year 2025.

“Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, the United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained,” says the report, which is the fourth in a series from the Intelligence Council.

The report argues that the “international system — as constructed following the second World War — will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing economy, an historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and the growing influence of nonstate actors.”

More… ➡

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Quote of the day

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

By Boris Johnson, mayor of London:

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

“The legacy of George Bush may take years, if not decades, to determine.

But at present he seems to have pulled off an astonishing double whammy.

However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy.

The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit – in some people’s eyes – the idea of free-market capitalism.

Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.

To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.

To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.”

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

To the original: ➡

– research thanks to PHK

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61 Nobel Laureates favor science and Obama

Friday, October 10th, 2008

– Respect for science under Republican administrations these last decades has, to put it bluntly, gone to hell.

– Here’s an open letter to the American public from 61 Nobel Laureates saying that they favor Barack Obama and why.

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To the letter… ➡

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Soul According to Tom Robbins

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

– Semi-alert readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven’t been posting much of late. My wife’s off in New Zealand so I’ve been covering for her here at our business and I can tell you that Joni Mitchell was right – you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.

– But, today a friend sent me a piece she dug up from somewhere way back in 1993 and, damn, it was good – so I’m just going to have to set aside making a living for a few minutes and Blog it.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

You gotta have soul
By Tom Robbins

Mental Bungee-jumping may not be your sport of choice, but there’s a cerebral ledge that sooner or later each of us has to leap off. One day, ready or not, we glance in a mirror, cuddle an infant, attend a funeral, walk in the woods, partake of a substance Nancy Reagan warned us to eschew, chance a liaison, wake in the night with a napalm lobster in our chest, read a message from the pope or the Dalai Lama, get lost in Verdi or lost in the stars – and wind up thinking about our soul.

Yes, the soul. You know what I mean.

Popular culture to the contrary, the soul is not an overweight nightclub singer having an unhappy love affair in Detroit. Nor, on the other hand, is it some pale vapor wafting off a bucket of metaphysical dry ice. Suffering, low-down and funky, seasons the soul, it’s true, but bliss is the yeast that makes it rise. And yet, because the soul is linked to the earth (as opposed to spirit, which is linked to the sky), it steadfastly contradicts those who imagine it a billow of sacred flatulence or a shimmer of personal swamp gas.

Soul is not even that Cracker Jack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That’s why, when we ponder – as, sooner or later, each of us must – what exactly we ought to be doing about our souls, religion is the wrong, if conventional place to turn.

Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort (the old “give it up in order to save it” routine). Religions lead us to believe the soul is the ultimate family jewel, and, in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

By Tom Robbins Esquire, October, 1993=

– Research thanks big-time to Lisa G.

– I don’t know if the signature at the end indicates that Tom Robbins was a lawyer or that he was writing for Esquire Magazine. I’m not even sure if he’s the same fellow who wrote, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And, I guess I don’t care. It’s just too good a piece not to put out there.

– This, by the way, is post number 1000 on this Blog and that’s got to count for something (now, if I only knew what). 

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Lessons Learned From A Dangerous Year

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

– I’m no one’s idea of a savvy investor. Back when the Dot-Com bust came down, I lost my shorts.

– These days, I’ve got a little money in my IRA to play around with and I try to be cautious with it. All I can say for this last year is I haven’t made much but then I haven’t lost much either and, as dangerous as it’s been out there, I think that’s good.

– I follow several economics and investing blogs (hat tip to Bruce S. for some of these). I’m always looking for small bits of insight and wisdom I can use. This piece by Barry Ritholtz seems to me to be composed of excellent advice and insight and I recommend it.

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

In the beginning of the year, a column I wrote for Real Money discussed some lessons of the past year. It never was moved over to the free site, so here is my belated update.

It is a mix of fundamental, economic, technical and even philosophical lessons that those savvy CEOs, fund managers and individual investors who were paying attention picked up in the recent turmoil.

1) Ignore market rumors: It seemed every time some firm was in trouble, the same gossip was floated that Warren Buffett was about to buy them. Time and again, these tales proved to be unfounded money-losers. This year’s most egregious example was Berkshire’s imminent purchase of Bear Stearns (BSC).

That The New York Times Dealbook got suckered into printing this just shows you how pernicious these rumors are. The stock was as high as $123 the day of the rumor.

Anyone who bought homebuilders or Bear Stearns stock on the basis of either of these rumors — or nearly any other stock that had similar rumors floated throughout the year — lost boatloads of money.

2) Buy sector strength (and avoid sector weakness): It’s a truism of real estate: It’s better to own a lousy house in a great neighborhood than a great house in a lousy one. And the same is true for stock sectors: Buying mediocre companies in great sectors generated positive results, while great companies in poor sectors struggled.

The losers are obvious: The homebuilders, financials, monoline insurers and retailers all struggled this year. The winners? Anything related to agriculture, solar energy, oil servicing, industrials, software, exporters, infrastructure plays — even asset-gatherers thrived.

More… ➡

…Later (17Aug08) here’s another list of ten rules to look over:  ➡

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