You say Aba, I say Ngaba

A friend in Boulder alerted me to this story.

The mainstream media (MSM) has yet to pick up that the epicenter of the recent 7.9 quake is actually in Tibet. Read SFT's Statement on the May 12th Earthquake in China and Tibet. (Students for a Free Tibet)

Many people do not realize that the epicenter of the earthquake was in an area of eastern Tibet now administered under China's Sichuan province. This place is called "Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture" by the Chinese government, but "Aba" is actually "Ngaba" which is part of Amdo, the northeastern province of historical Tibet. The epicenter itself was in the Tibetan county of "Lungu" which the Chinese call "Wenchuan" and where, according to China's 2005 census information, at least 18.6% of the population is Tibetan.

It is throughout this eastern Tibetan region – Amdo and Kham – that a majority of the Tibetan protests have occurred over the past two months
...snip...
And while we have very little information about the impact of the earthquake on Tibetans because the areas around the epicenter remain cut off from the outside world, many fear the worst for thousands of Tibetans who remain detained or missing as a result of the crackdown. For instance, SFT has received unconfirmed but deeply distressing reports that many hundreds of Tibetans may have died when a large prison near Wenchuan collapsed. Official Chinese media has confirmed damage to a number of prisons in the area, but no detailed information has been released.
...snip...
The international community has rightly condemned the heinous efforts by the Burmese junta to block aid and relief to minority and dissident populations affected by the cyclone in Burma and must seek to prevent similar practices by Chinese authorities in Tibet.

Of course, we are not seeing images of the damage in Tibet because journalists (the entire outside world) are banned in the region.

In Boulder, I shared an apartment for a year with a graduate student studying the differences in disaster response and disaster reporting in the USA and USSR. You learn a great deal about the people and nations when they are confronted by a crisis. The USSR broke up while she was writing about it, but that didn't faze her. She loved visiting the former soviet republics. She was so excited by the spirit of glasnost (openness) in the early days.

Let's demand glasnost all around.

Links:
I previously wrote about this quake here. Click on the Environmental Hazards tag for more posts about earthquakes, other environmental hazards and disaster preparedness.

Wild Weather and Wild Fire in CA

The jet stream almost exactly traced the coastline today, not a typical pattern for us.

The Santa Cruz mountains wildfire injected a plume of smoke into the middle of the jet stream.

My sister says that there was no way I could have been feeling the effects of the smoke from the Santa Cruz fire by 8:30 AM when we IM'd. Jet stream speeds of 120-150 knots could travel between Santa Cruz and LA in 3 hours or so. The fire started around 5:30 AM. She's right. But what could it be?

Perhaps I was experiencing respiratory effects from the Santa Clarita fire closer to home? Santa Clarita is NE of me; the smoke from that fire is unlikely to travel this far west. It was such a small fire compared to the Santa Cruz one.

After discussion with my sister, I realized that the unusual wind pattern put me downwind of the Chevron refinery 5 miles NE of home.

It rained between 6 and 7 PM today and it sounds like the rain has started up again. Rain in late May in a non-El Nino year is rare. Could the soot from the fire have nucleated raindrops?

Links:

• CRWS Jet Stream Analysis (CA Regional Weather Server)
• MODIS Fresno (central CA) Subsets Moderate resolution imagery from NASA's Terra and Aqua Satellites
• Tornadoes, hail and snow in Southern California today
  

Free Range Kids 2

If you explore the FreeRangeKids link from my last post, you might have seen How children lost the right to roam in 4 generations.

When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.

It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.

Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas's eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.

He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.

This graphic is especially telling.

Free Range Kids

Remember the mom that let her 9 year old take the NYC subway alone? Lenore Skenazy started a movement and a blog. Go visit the FreeRangeKids blog.

Today is the second let her walk to school by herself Tuesday. Last Tuesday, I was running behind and let her walk to school while I finished the dishes. I was going to catch up with her, but discovered she was doing just fine. I hung back to give her the satisfaction of making the whole 3 blocks to school on her own.

Today, I ate a bit slowly so I could use the same excuse. I caught up with her in front of her classroom. She was positively nonchalant about it today.

I watched with smug satisfaction as a neighbor struggled to strap 2 of her 3 kids up in her minivan, both older than Iris, to drive them to the same neighborhood school. We live on a one-way street, pointed away from the school. She lives a block closer to school, only 2 blocks to our 3. Yet, because of the one-way street, she has to drive farther to get the kids to school. I offered to walk her kids to school with me, but she declined.

One boy used to be driven every day by his mother while she was rushing off to work. It was silly because we departed and arrived at the school at the same time. We offered to walk him with us each day, but he declined. His mother said it was because he was too cool to be seen walking with such a little kid (Iris). I noticed that, now that he is in the 5th grade, he is allowed to ride his bike or scooter to school each day on his own.

Another boy on our block also gets driven every day, even though the father says he would be happy to walk his son to school. His said that his wife wouldn't allow them to walk for some reason. We leave at the same time, but we arrive before them. Again, they live closer but drive further because of the one way street.

We used to walk with another mother and child, but the mother had to stop due to health reasons. Hopefully, she will be walking again after her illness.

Now guess which family is Black, Chinese, Hispanic and Jewish.

Homework détente 3

A follow up to the thread, Homework plagiarism, Homework détente, Homework détente 2 and Open House.

Iris finished the satellite model and the first draft of the report last weekend with us riding herd, but not doing the project for her. At first, she wanted to make a satellite that would save our planet from global warming, a giant umbrella of some sort.

I could have just let her turn in her umbrella and world globe and let her be done with it, but I talked her out of it. As commentator Eric C. mentioned, it would have been better to ask Socratic questions. But she doesn't have any clue about the complexity and energy expenditure to put a giant umbrella in space. I told her that it had been suggested before and rejected as impractical.

Fortunately, she had seen Spy Kids 1-3 the weekend before that. (Don't ask why we let her watch so much TV that weekend.) The satellite section of the library was cleaned out, but the spy section contained 2 books (1 a gem) about spy satellites. She was hooked.

She started with a shoe box, but abandoned that for an IKEA desk organizer box with a lid. She found a little plastic snack box and some cardboard in the craft room and constructed a "camera". She covered it in foil while I covered the bigger box with foil. The foil represents solar photovotaic cells. I showed her how to create a hinge with clear package tape. She made the rest of the hinges.

With the globe, I showed her how the satellite has to store energy to operate in earth's shadow. She remembered the batteries in the clock she took apart last month and quickly ran downstairs for 2 AA batteries from our e-waste box. She taped them inside her spacecraft, with the battery ends touching a foil-covered part of the camera. (She was very proud that she observed and remembered that batteries need a metal contact.) She had both positive ends touching the camera and I showed her how batteries are usually alternated +/-. She made the change.

Mark printed out a 60's style space logo which she cut out and glued to the side. She told me that she could make a model of the plane that catches the film canisters that drop out the trap door of her satellite, but that would be showing off. No, she would not show off. She is done with her project.

Not so fast, she needs to rewrite the final draft in cursive.

Anyway, I periodically browse Trends in Japan; I like to look at the rampant creativity in the Street Style slide shows. Serendipitously, the top link on the main page goes to The Science of Origami. What should I see but a folded satellite antenna?

(Photo courtesy of Dr. Nojima Taketoshi)You pull opposite sides of the piece and the antenna blooms before your eyes, all while maintaining a steady center of gravity! Magical.

An artist's conception of the antenna in space.

Falling out of bed

Some people have noticed the lack of knitting and sewing content lately. It's partly due to an arthritis flare-up. I came down with an infection and my joints swelled up so badly, I gained 2 pounds overnight. Basic activities became so difficult, I cut down on my non-core activities. (But, perhaps, I should reclassify creative pursuits as core activities?) It got so bad that I restarted physical therapy again.

I used to go to a PT 7.5 miles away from work; my home is halfway between the hospital/my network of doctors and workplace. 7.5 miles doesn't sound like much, but it can take 45 minutes during commute hours--and I try to book my appointments before or after my workday which means the traffic is always bad. The old place was fine, but all that running around 2-3x per week was adding to my stress. This time, I decided to try a new place that opened up on my way to work. It is less than 5 minutes from either work or home.

My rheumatologist said that he had another patient who went there and had a very positive experience. I am so glad I made the switch. Today's session was very different from anything I have ever experienced in 20 years of (off and on) PT.

The PT I met today is trained in the Feldenkrais Method. He asked me what kind of things I have problems with. I replied, "Getting out of bed, in and out of chairs, and sitting for long periods of time." He asked me to show him how I get out of bed. I complied.

Did you know there is a right and wrong way to get out of bed? (He never said that I did anything wrong; he asked if I would like to learn an easier way.) I had never given rolling out of bed much thought before. But, after he explained the easier method and the bio-mechanical reasoning behind it, I got it immediately. So, if you asked me why I was late getting to work today, I could honestly say that I was practicing getting in and out of bed.

Excuse me, I have to go practice see-saw breathing, alternating belly breathing with chest breathing. Apparently, most people have difficulty with the former but not the latter. I have no trouble with belly breathing, but have very little range of motion in my rib cage. We think it has something to do with the ribs I cracked in a mountain biking accident, trying to keep up with the Boulder chapter of WOMBATS (Women's Mountain Biking And Tea Society). That's a whole 'nother story.

It is hard to get out of The Most Beautiful Bed in the Whole World, but one must.

Bake Sales Won't Do It

I've been looking at horrific pictures of pancaked school buildings in Sichuan Province and small corpses. The magnitude of the death toll in Sichuan and Burma is hard to fathom. James Fallows does an excellent job, putting people and faces to the numbers. Read Masses, and individuals, in China. The pictures of the kids in their classrooms and dormitories, before the quake, are heartbreaking.

First I felt sad, now I am MAD. Why do schools so often collapse in earthquakes? Why are schools and hospitals deathtraps instead of havens in disasters? Andrew Revkin has been following the story. Read In Smart, Wealthy World, Schools Still Fall. Why?, Citizens Challenge China on Fallen Schools and Earthquake in China Highlights the Vulnerability of Schools in Many Countries. Follow the many fine links.

The middle school where the largest group of kids was killed was a selective academy. Chengdu and the surrounding area had hung their hat on IT (information technology) as a way to pull themselves out of poverty. Computer world estimates that Chengdu is the 10th largest IT center globally. Many schools were built to train the next generation to move up the IT food chain.

Kids competed for the right to leave their families and villages behind to live in crammed dormitories and attend huge classes in order to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Look at the picture of a typical dormitory room on Fallows' blog. The 18 girls that shared that room had fewer possessions between them than what my daughter has in one corner of her room. Those girls had nothing but pluck, brains and willingness to work hard.

What did the officials give them? Death traps. It's not just China according to Andrew Revkin.

Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.

This is even true in western Canada and the United States.

Why do we take care of kids and schools last (after prisons and pensions and medical services for the elderly)? Why is there money to fund shiny computer labs, but not basic safety?

Andrew Revkin points to military spending as a place with plenty of money. Remember the bumper sticker, "Imagine a world where the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold bake sales"?

I once attended a meeting at an Air Force Base which was interrupted at noon by the public address system. The announcements of bake sales benefiting this and that military (social and medical) need droned on for what seemed like 5 minutes. When it was over, I looked over at the colonel running the meeting and asked, "What was that about?" He said it was a daily occurrence.

Great, now we are running bake sales to fund both our schools and our Air Force. There is no way we can ever bake enough.

Homework détente 2

Following up on Homework détente and Homework plagiarism, Iris' year end third grade assignment makes me eat my words.

She brought home multi-page instructions about the assignment. The teacher wants the kids to design and build a spacecraft from common household objects-no kits allowed. Furthermore, the kids need to write a report explaining the purpose of their spacecraft and how function determines form. The handout explained that parent participation is required for this assignment. The projects will be on display during the year end open house.

This assignment just makes me ill, but not because I worry that Iris' project won't measure up. You see, her school is less than a mile from the birthplace of GPS. Our neighborhood had once been working class. But, starting in the 1970s after the first oil shocks, highly educated space industry workers have been moving into urban infill townhouses and condos within walking distance to their workplaces.

The kids in her class go home to everything from section 8 apartments to million dollar townhouses. Their parents are as likely to be a PhD as a high school dropout.

Is it really fair to assign spacecraft design as homework? Some of the parents design spacecraft professionally! How is everyone else going to compete with that?

Additionally, the city library has been cleaned out of spacecraft books. Fortunately, the library at work is so good, historians petition for permission to use it for space race research. Now I understand why so many of my coworkers brought their kids in to the library during lunch.

I'm dreading open house already.

Blooming

When we returned from Hawaii, our garden was abloom. The ignored epiyphyllum in the side yard.

Yup, the blooms really are that large. Read Call it orchid cactus or epiphyllum, it's a plant that hangs around in the LA Times.

Rob named his blog, Are you cereus? after the plant. He also has a website with fantastic photography featuring epiphyllums. Don't miss it.

The LA Times article mentions the difficulty of finding specimens for sale because they are rarely sold commercially. I bought mine at the Huntington Library Annual Plant Sale. Coincidentally, this year's sale is May 17-18, 2008. I am headed over there for members' only day (for the plant sale), May 17. Let me know if you want to come along as a guest. The rarest stuff goes the first day.

The Japanese irises had popped open in our absence, too.

The sea pink aka sea thrift are a bit past their prime.

I love this bed of roses outside the Redondo Beach main library. They have just a hint of shell pink.

These orchids are 2 months past their prime, but still lovely. They look like they might be the same type Wandering Scientist showed in You're So Vein.

Iris choose these orchids at Trader Joe's for mother's day. She made me pay for it, though. No need to adjust your monitor. The pot contains TWO types of orchids, one white and one pink.

Score Yourself

Mark sent me this link and told me to rate myself. With only the first page to work with, there is no way to score higher than 25. I am doomed to be a very poor wife, indeed.

Tiabla posted the rest of the three-page test, along with the companion husbands' test. You can read more about the test in Husbands, rate your wives in the Monitor on Psychology.

Better an average wife than a lame-duck spouse.