Pennywise, pound foolish. That’s the current budget view

by Official U.S. Navy Imagery

Guess what else the GOP wants to cut? Tsunami monitoring!
[Via Gristmill]

by Jess Zimmerman.

If we had any evidence that Republican House members were capable of feeling shame, we’d expect them to be so red right now. Mother Jones reports that one of the items on the GOP’s budgetary chopping block is … tsunami monitoring. Last month, they voted to hack out nearly a third of the funding for the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which (go figure) warns about tsunamis in the Pacific:

In February, the union representing the National Weather Service warned that the Republican cuts could place the residents of Hawaii in mortal danger. “People could die… It could be serious,” Barry Hirshorn, Pacific region chairman of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, told Hawaii’s Star Advertiser. The House budget includes a 28 percent cut to the National Weather Service that would result in staffing cutbacks to Hawaii’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which monitors potential tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.

Because there’s no way a tsunami could hit the U.S. OH WAIT

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This is all part of the continuing resolution BS. Saving a couple of million here. Would they still be able to  warn us about something that just cost California at least $50 million, that cost Hawaii more than $3 million, and cost $25-30 million in Oregon?

I wonder how much damage or human life might have been lost if there was not any Pacific Tsunami Warning Center? But that is all part of the discretionary budget that is about to get axed.

Makes about as much sense as standing on the beach waiting for the tsunami on the horizon to before warning people. Because that is apparently what we are heading for.

iPad – zooms. Motorola – not so much

iPad 2 benchmarks destroy Motorola Xoom
[Via MacDailyNews]

iPad 2′s GPU is Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX 543MP2. “Architecturally the 543MP2 has more than twice the compute horsepower of the SGX 535 used in Apple’s A4,” Anand Lal Shimpi reports for AnandTech. As always we turn to GLBenchmark 2.0, a benchmark crafted by a bunch of developers who either have or had experience doing development work for some of the big dev houses in the industry.

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The iPad2 has 4-7 times faster graphics. Since we interact with the tablet graphically, tis can be very important when looking at actual use.

OMG – More before and after pictures of Japan

ABC news in Australia has put together some pictures from Google Earth that are just jaw dropping.

They have overlain the photos in a way that is very interactive and quite mesmerizing. You will be amazed at the destruction.

Japanese coast – before and after

by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Amazing picture from NASA. The top one was taken on March 12 while the bottom was taken February 26. You can see large sections in the middle that are still under water, apparently because the water can not return to the sea,

And look at the region around the red dot. That coast is very different today and any towns located there would be devastated. The light blue is supposed to be snow, which seems much more prevalent in the North part than before. Not good.

The original picture has some added details such as cities, etc.

First mention I’ve seen of boron in Japan nuclear plant

by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Sea water injected into troubled Fukushima power plant – The Mainichi Daily News
[Via Mainichi Daily News]

Japanese authorities scrambled Sunday to control overheating reactors at the troubled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, injecting sea water into them and reducing the pressure inside, top government spokesman Yukio Edano said.

While acknowledging that the core of the No. 3 reactor at the plant may have been deformed due to overheating, the chief Cabinet secretary denied it has led to a “meltdown,” a critical situation where fuel rods have melted.

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As I mentioned earlier, some people with more expertise are saying that Hillary’s comment about coolant had to do with a boron coolant, which while better at containing a nuclear reaction would ruin the pipes at the plant.

Well, this article states:

Tokyo Electric Power has begun new cooling operations to fill the reactor with sea water and pour in boric acid to prevent an occurrence of criticality. Edano said in a news conference Sunday morning that there had been no major changes in the results of radioactivity monitoring near the No. 1 reactor.

This would seem to confirm the earlier report. Hope it works. I htink nuclear energy has been set back pretty far with this. As happens so many times, the very, very slim possibilities of natural disaster often overwhelm all our modeling and statistics.

Here is a nice interactive feature about the site.