A haiku poem by Hiryoshi Tagawa (1914-1999) goes:
"The green man at the emergency exit/ Always fleeing."
The familiar pictogram of a running figure was created in Japan and became an international symbol for emergency exits.http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/vox/AJ201203240034
http://www.kyoshin.bosai.go.jp/kyoshin/topics/html20110311144626/main_20110311144626.html
Here are some seismic records, in case you want to use the recording on a large turntable-like device to re-play earthquakes.
One thing I still find amazing yet absolutely accurate is that 5 minutes after the start of the earthquake it is still rocking at an intensity of Shindo 3 over a wide area.
https://bubbl.us/
For the Mac, there is MyMind, a mind-mapping (diagramming) app which converts to and from an outline. Linux has Freemind, VYM(ViewYourMind), Labyrinth, and Semantik, which don't seem to be as good as MyMind. Commercially, there's Inspiration for Windows. Somehow I missed the web-based option of bubbl.us until recently. You can export to png or jpg without creating an account, and control the colors and font sizes easily.
http://www.slideshare.net/energy/radiation-monitoring-data-from-fukushima-area-05062011
US-DOE, NNSA, report from May 6 including MEXT data.
http://www.japanquakemap.com/
Relive the quakes from a different perspektiv visually and spatially.
yet another radiation monitoring site
http://rdtn.org/
JT
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/radiation-levels.html
During the inspiring Egyptian uprising to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, I thought the best solution would be to offer Hosni a seat on the last space shuttle flight. The last minute training would surely draw him away from his duties as the president of Egypt as well as appeal to his ego. As far as I know, this is what happened. We don't really know what they told him, come this way sir, the palace is on fire, we must evacuate. How is your dinner this evening, sir. Are you feeling drowsy? I doubt that he actually resigned, based on what we know of his personality, but when Suleiman announced that the president had resigned, everyone seemed to take it as fact except me.
Away from home and can't find the right characters on your keyboard? Typeit let's you type Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, the Intenational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols needed for English, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Symbols, Turkish, Welsh, and international currency symbols on any computer. According to the website,
Recommended IPA fonts available on various platforms:To those we can also add Charis, DejaVu Sans, Doulos SIL, Gentium, Linux Libertine, Monotype, and Tahoma, among others. IPA input methods differ by platform, but for Linux you can just copy useful characters into your Character Palette for a click-and-paste method of typing. If you have it installed and added to the panel, just right-click it to edit it.
- Windows XP: Lucida Sans Unicode
- Windows Vista: Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial, Times New Roman
- Windows 7: Calibri, Cambria, Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial, Times New Roman
- Mac OS: Lucida Grande
If you are interested in Japan and numerate (numerically literate?), you may want to read the newest statistical digest. This book may also be available at the government printing office bookstore in Otemachi (if it's still there) or in bookstores, 
but you can view it online or download each chapter separately (in English) in pdf form from the website:
http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/index.htm
It really isn't so hard to balance the US budget and eliminate the deficit. That was my go at it. You don't need to go back to the policies of the Eisenhower administration or even the Clinton administration. I think the hard part comes in when you have to convince 100 Senators and 438 Congresspeople to vote for your plan. Perhaps it's also a problem that there is no single person to come up with a budget and push it through (as far as I know, it's a committee thing).
Give it a try, if you haven't done so already.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html
Results as tabulated in late November. The comments people made in the related article "16 Ways to Cut the Deficit" also reveal a lot more common sense than you usually hear from politicians and the illiterate man-in-the-street.
...is like a day without Linux -- and vice versa. I just spent an entire day and two nights locked in the s/cr/AAPL Cupertino BSD operating system, also known as MacOSX, after my Linux install got ill all of a sudden. That's about the longest time I have spent inside the Mac OS in 2010. The OS X icon previews are nice. I always liked the right-click-on-finder-window-titlebar-to-view-folder-hierarchy-and-go-up-a-level feature that appeared around 8.5 or 9.1 or something and which lives on, although there are better ways of navigating in Nautilus or Dolphin. Everything else is about the same as Linux. The Mac OS is a little like being locked into a corporate headquarters overnight, I figure. It's a successful company, and looks nice, but it doesn't feel like home, more like being in a corporate cubicle. Linux is more like being in your own home of your own design, made from a variety of prefab elements. In this analogy, Windows is a FEMA trailer, full of toxic formaldehyde and requiring powerful fans and ventilation to prevent a nosebleed, and possible death.
I don't know what was wrong in Ubuntu, but there was some glitchy window behavior, and instead of logging out and back in, I chose to restart. I think there was a kernel update or something that cued me to restart, and this may have followed the glitchiness, meaning something was not installed correctly. EFI, or rather, rEFIt, was OK, GRUB was OK, but then some text scrolled by complaining of a flaky scsi drive and dropping me into a Busybox shell, where I initially had no idea what to do. After returning from the Mac side (and running Disk Utility over there), things were basically the same, but I got a few seconds farther to an Ubuntu Studio splash screen before being asked to Repair, Continue, do something else, or More information, before that crashed and dropped me back into the shell again. This time I chose to "fsck" which did a number of repairs to inodes and whatever and allowed me to 
reboot into a repaired Ubuntu Lucid. I ran Update Manager immediately, and noticed one update called dmsetup addressing some bad code which the update offers to "take out back and shoot it in the head." That sounded good, so I did that. I may never know, but that could have had something to do with my system suddenly flaking. The take-away, if there is one, is to go ahead and fsck the system, if you think that might help.
I don't actually recommend getting a Mac if you want to run Linux, but that's what I have. Not only because I had the legacy PowerPC architecture, which Apple barely supports anymore--although Debian and other Linux distros do, but because I wanted the small, light, cheap, quiet, Intel-powered, MacOSX-(as a fallback)-capable Mac Mini. That turns out to have been a mistake, as I virtually never boot MacOSX and the "SuperDrive" super-failed. It is quiet, however, unlike the PowerPC and its ever-roaring fan that kept us awake on the next floor unless you manually selected Sleep. For those of us who have taken this path, here is my rendition of Made on a Mac in Ubuntu, with GIMP logo optional, 216x216 and smaller. For people who want to run Linux, at the moment I'd recommend ASUS (reliability reports) and Ubuntu (userbase size, package selection, polish, and commitment to language support) as my first choices.
What happened to the Drop Shadow I added to the Ubuntu logo, I don't know... either it disappeared when I saved it as a png instead of a jpg, or I forgot to save that particular change. So be it.
BP-irates of the Caribbean: "Dead Man's Deepwater Horizon" -- coming soon to a coastline near you!
Update: Perfectionism kicked in; I wasn't happy with kwik'n'dirty version and edited it.
