Typhoon Haiyan Continues To Scourge Southeast Asia 114
jones_supa writes "ABC Australia is reporting extensively about the progress of the Typhoon Haiyan, which has reached the status of being one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded. Over the weekend it has caused severe destruction and misery passing through Philippines with maximum sustained winds of 315 km/h, where the authorities are now struggling to bring relief to areas worst affected, there being 10,000 people dead. The storm is now heading towards Vietnam, where already over 600,000 people have been evacuated. Meanwhile, China announced its highest alert for Typhoon Haiyan as six crew members of a cargo boat were reported missing. Vietnam is likely to be spared the storm's initial ferocity as it has weakened over the South China Sea and is now expected to hit as a category 1 storm, with wind speeds of about 74 km/h, meteorologists say."
A synonym of "scourge" is "flagellate" (Score:2)
I, for one, would have picked another adjective.
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I, for one, would have picked another adjective.
Scourge has always had a verb form. That that is what was used, not its adjective form.
Its unusual in the modern era to see the verb form, but its actually older than you think.
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Its unusual
And, yes, Muphry's law [wikipedia.org] was proven once again.
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Meteorology is a science too, and science is very much a geek/nerd interest.
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in b4 some1 says "woosh"
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No, he's intentionally invoking "Muphry's Law." From his link:
Muphry's law is an adage that states that "If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy's law.
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in b4 some1 says "woosh"
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I Have Been Whooshed.
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Indeed. Attila the Hun was called "The Scourge of God".
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If you have actually seen the sort of winds that Haiyan made, it would make a scourging/flagellation seem mild by comparison. I saw the winds snap a full grown coconut palm at the base from footage taken at Tacloban in the Philippines. Was extremely lucky that it missed Manila. Had its track been only a few degrees more northerly than it had been, we would likely have experienced similar devastation.
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(Posting anonymously for reasons that will probably become apparent.)
Actually, I do care. My mistress is from an island just off the north of Iloilo and her family are still there. It's lucky for them that the typhoon was't just a little further south or they all be dead now rather than just homeless. Yeah, their house blew away, there's not much food on the island, and phones are totally out. Only the church and a couple of other buildings are still standing, but at least they're alive. They had their
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(Posting anonymously for reasons that will probably become apparent.)
Didn't become apparent.
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He casually discusses his mistress' family, i.e. proclaiming he has a mistress. I'm guessing his wife knows his /. name.
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People like you are why there were so many celebrations after 9/11.
You know, that incredibly important event that had 30% of the deaths of this particular natural disaster.
Re: A synonym of "scourge" is "flagellate" (Score:5, Informative)
I feel flagellated already (Score:2)
Thanks for flagellating me into shape.
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If you don't draw blood, you didn't snap the towel correctly.
Wrong units in summary. (Score:1)
A category 1 storm has sustained winds of 74 mph, or 119 kph, not 74 kpm as stated in the summary.
Citation provided: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_hurricane_wind_scale
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At least summary managed to write "km/h" properly, not "kph" (the unit is not "k") or the even more nonsensical "kpm". What's that even supposed to be? Kelvin per mile? Rate it gets colder as you drive north?
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Donation link (Score:5, Informative)
Figured I should post the Red Cross donation link in case anyone is interested:
https://www.redcross.org/donate/index.jsp?donateStep=2&itemId=prod4650031 [redcross.org]
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what peers? that's like 4X the pay of the Finnish president.
Re: Donation link (Score:1)
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what utter nonsense, there are people managing organizations with much more complexity for 1/4th the wages.
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In fact, avoid the religious organizations like the plague that they are. They generally have the highest overhead and highest-paid administrators of any relief organizations, and take the opportunity to force religion down the throats of people who are just trying to save the lives of their families.
openstreetmap humanitarian project (Score:2)
and you can also help by mapping the region with the openstreetmap humanitarian team :
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Typhoon_Haiyan_(2013) [openstreetmap.org]
this should help rescue teams and relief workers
And the Conservative media in the US isn't... (Score:2, Informative)
covering it at all. I have two Filipino coworkers that didn't even know there was a typhoon until one got a call at work from a family member saying they were safe. As usual, the media only covers things they're paid to cover. The top story today in the Seattle Times was about drug makers. Yesterday it was about Boeing.
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Pick a better news source. It's been the top story on CNN for days and it was on the front page of our local newspaper.
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That's just not true. I wouldn't consider Fox News to be news media, but it's certainly conservative media. And this is on the front page of their web site.
Re:Move along... (Flamebait? Cynical) (Score:2)
Someone marked this comment flamebait, so they missed the obvious cynicism in this comment. Or if this was actually meant for real, then it goes to show the exact sad thing, that for a lot of people this is actually true.
As someone else in this thread already said, the coverage on this particular Typhoon in the US Media is severely lacking for the most part, which really is sad.
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Someone marked this comment flamebait, so they missed the obvious cynicism in this comment
Correct.
Or if this was actually meant for real
It was not.
What a horrible thing (Score:2)
it's a girl! (Score:1)
Robonaut's legs are designed for walking around the space station in microgravity, so they would be useless in gravity
BUT, the same people working on robonaut are building a female humanoid robot for the DARPA robotics challenge, which could very well walk on the moon
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That's only 195 mph.
An opportune time (Score:1)
To ask ourselves, if 2 or more simultaneous disasters struck the US could FEMA/Anyone respond to both? Does the Government have enough resources to respond to both? To even one?
How long will it take to rebuild if say Los Angeles is hit with an 8.0 at the same time another Katrina happens?
Just how far are we from walking the streets like zombies looking for food?
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FEMA hands out bags of ice. As we learned from Katrina, the national guard keeps people who would help out of the area with guns, because they are there to preverse the Order (with a captial 'O', in the sense as Hitler used the word) Get a clue pal, if you're looking for The Government to save you, you're fucked.
How long would it take We the People to rebuild, is the question. How prepared are you for a disaster?
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I have little faith in the Government, however it is their job to respond to emergencies in a competent and meaningful way.
That they can't is shameful, so the question stands, not to be answered by posting in response to it but rather by thinking about it.
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oh, where in the Constitution does it say that the Federal government is to respond to disasters (other than attack by enemies) at all? Most of its history, it had no means to do so anyway.
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Why is your focus on arguing an irrelevant detail?
I feel it is a governments responsibility to take care of its citizens, hardly anyone else is in the position to do so.
That you would argue the point is baffling to me, people like you always seem focused on some irrelevant aspect of a persons post.
You amount to little more than noise, in effect you're a liability to the continuity of "useful" thought most others would like to pursue.
DIAF.
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not irrelevant, we're speaking of reality versus the ideals between your ears. the police have no obligation to protect you, already decided in court. the Federal government has no obligation to take care of you in emergency, nor to protect you as individual, nor to reimburse you for lost property. very deep truths there.
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http://www.fema.gov/ [fema.gov]
Has to be (Score:1)
Bush's fault.
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Consider whether, if fifty years, you will be proud of or ashamed of your behavior today.
He's 80 years old, you insensitive clod.
Re:Why the metric measures all of a sudden? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh right, larger numbers are more sensational.
And everyone in Austrailia, the Philippines, and the other countries in the path of the storm use metric units instead of English customary units. But that's a left-wing media conspiracy too.
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Why the metric measures all of a sudden? Oh right, larger numbers are more sensational.
I used them because they are SI units. Although, as has been pointed out, I seem to have botched the summary anyway by using the unit of km/h, but the value of mph. Sorry about that.
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By "all of a sudden" do you mean "slowly and steadily increasing for the last two hundred years"?
Re:Hope the USA stays away (Score:5, Insightful)
Except during Katrina [wikipedia.org]. All told the US received pledges of over a billion dollars in aid from countries all around the world. Pakistan and Bengladesh each sent a million dollars to private US relief agencies, and Bengladesh offered it's flood disaster response expertise. Kuwait ponied up half a billion dollars and the Saudis $250 million, but I'm more impressed with Bengladesh's generosity, considering that's a country with per capita income of only $2000.
Oh, and after Hurricane Sandy the US government got offers of aid from France and Iran, which we declined. Can't blame them if we turned them down. During the BP oil spilll, the US did not request aid for four weeks, but in that time thirteen unsolicited offers of aid came in from the international community. Ultimately 30 countries offered aid, including Mexico, Norway, Japan, the Netherlands and Croatia.
The international community *does* step up when the US is in need, but (a) most of them are not as rich as us, (b) few of them have the capacity (i.e., military air and sealift) to deliver large amounts of material aid quickly and (c) we just don't like to accept aid, even when it the less fortunate of us could use it.
Now if you're asking how much help the Philippines has sent to us in past hurricanes, probably not much. It's a poor country with a per capita income about 1/20th of the US, and it is not a superpower, not even a regional one. Do you think it's reasonable to hold it against them that they can't send us disaster aid?
*We* on the other hand *are* a superpower, with national interests in virtually every corner of the globe. Foreign and disaster aid buys us goodwill and cooperation. But even discounting our self-interest, we aren't nearly as generous as we think we our. If you rank our foreign aid as a percentage of GDP, we're 19th in the world, sending 1/5th the percentage of our GDP that Luxembourg or Sweden do. Luxembourg, for pity's sake! It's not like they need countries to give their ships access or bombers fly-over permission.
No, we're not nearly so generous as we like to think we are. But when it comes to *whining* about helping other people, we're world champs.
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Except that's wrong.
Yes, our official aid is small, but I know for the calculations for the Indonesian tsunami that I watched in detail, +none+ of the reported aid-tallies included the scores of millions of $ spent by the US on providing an entire carrier group for months, plus dozens of other in-kind services; most of them likewise disregarded or underreported private and church-based aid which is often multiples of the "official" dollar amounts, and completely dwarfs such aid from all other countries com
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Yes of course it has. All those same studies indicate that aid in terms of GDP is actually quite low for the USA. For the most part you as a nation are actually quite selfish. But a lot of loose change adds up.
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Yeah, crazy how that ends up making the US "....World Giving Index: US Ranked Most Charitable Country On Earth"
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Charity != Foreign Aid. Giving to charitable organisation in your own country is irrelevant.
Do a search for Foreign Aid by GDP. The USA is somewhere between 18th and 25th depending on the study.
Nice try though.
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Yeah, that carrier group wouldn't have been deployed and wasting money anywhere else after all. If they weren't sent to Indonesia it wouldn't have cost us a penny. The military is such a great investment.
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You mean those people who - because they are largely churchgoers - represent the largest outpouring of donated money and goods in the country?
Yeah, horrible bunch, them.
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The largest outpouring of money and goods is through taxation and government spending. Whether the money is "donated" doesn't matter; a dollar is a dollar to a person in need.
Good for those churchgoing folks, they open their wallets, but they don't open them as wide as those big-government high-tax-loving secular liberals.
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Re:Time to start talking about climate change (Score:5, Informative)
in the context of these Cat 5 hurricanes and typhoons that are striking all over in increasing frequency.
Um, not exactly.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/11/us-hurricane-intensity-1900-2012.html
Re:Time to start talking about climate change (Score:5, Interesting)
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simply because nobody except me knew they existed
FTFY
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You make a good point in general, but not for this particular chart: "The figure above comes courtesy Chris Landsea of the US National Hurricane Center. It shows the annual intensity of US landfalling hurricanes from 1900 to 2012." To me it sounds as if storms which are not hurricane-level upon landfall would be excluded from this dataset.
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Um, not exactly.
I'm not sure where exact comes into the picture when you use US data to talk about increasing typhoon activity (or the lack thereof) in Asia or globally. Irrelevant comes to mind.
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Um, not exactly.
I'm not sure where exact comes into the picture when you use US data to talk about increasing typhoon activity (or the lack thereof) in Asia or globally. Irrelevant comes to mind.
So in your mind Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes have no correlation. OK. Go here:
http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php
Global data. Western Pacific ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) is still slightly below average for the year, and worldwide ACE is only about 75% of normal. Does that help?
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So in your mind Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes have no correlation.
To my mind using a restricted data set not directly pertinent to the region under question seems inappropriate where there would be regional and/or global data available.
Global data. Western Pacific ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) is still slightly below average for the year, and worldwide ACE is only about 75% of normal. Does that help?
Yes that seems far more pertinent.
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There seems to be another every few days [wikipedia.org].
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No please don't mention climate change when extreme weather events like this occur, it upsets the children. And when it happens in the Phillipines it upsets the diplomats. [theguardian.com]
Whatever you do don't start talking about climate change!