Japan

I remember last Thursday watching my college basketball team, Washington State, play a first round Pac-10 game against our bitter rivals, Washington. We lost a hard-fought game and ended our tournament hopes. I was devastated.

Shortly after my friends and I retired to a bar and I noticed the “Breaking News” tag on CNN and saw that a massive earthquake had rocked Japan. Immediately my thoughts of WSU evaporated and I realized that I had no idea what “devastated” really meant. It put everything into perspective and I realized that there are more important things than my own passions and personal heartbreaks and that I am just 1 person out of billions that have to make it through this life. But to survive as a race we have to come together when we face the worse.

Right now there are millions of people in Japan who are “lucky” if they are only without water and power. And I was worried about a basketball game. There’s nothing wrong with having those passions, but its always important to keep it in perspective so we remember why we’re here because I can’t think of a part of the world that can’t be devastated by natural disaster including our own backyards.

This was a well written piece John and I thank you for going off-topic today.

for this post. Among other things, it serves as a reminder that, altho we are avid baseball fans, there are things in the world much more important than baseball.

I, too, just happenned to be watching CNN when the news broke (about 11:50 PM Central time). I was absolutely mesmerized by the aerial footage of the advancing, debris-filled tsunami. It was heart-wrenching to see people travelling in vehicles on a road, completely oblivious to what was happenning, then suddenly seeing the coming tsunami and trying futilely to evade it before getting swept away a few seconds later, likely to their doom. I have never seen anything like it.

There is a Japanese major-league baseball team in one of the hardest hit cities, Sendai (Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles). I have not heard anything about how close the damage was to their stadium, and I wonder how this will affect their season.

I have been to Japan twice and I found it a very good country for Americans to visit. I found the people to be friendly and helpful. Altho most of them dont speak much English, they will go out of their way to help you. My heart-felt sympathy and prayers go out to the Japanese people.

I haven’t been reading too much on the crisis, but as a mechanical engineering grad student, the topic has been brought up in both of my classes. In both, everyone expressed serious concern that nuclear power would be set back by 30+ years by the reaction to the disaster, which is unfortunate because nuclear might be the best bet to take over some of the major energy conversion from fossil fuels.

In my vibrations class, someone said that the reactor itself withstood the vibrations of the earthquake, but that the tsunami flooded the generators, which led to the failure. If that’s the case, I don’t think the recoil should be as bad as it likely will be. I haven’t looked into if this is actually the case, though.

In the other class, the professor noted how it’s great that we can simulate what we perceive to be the worst case scenario, but if we can’t test it, we simply don’t know. This idea seems to parallel well with yours about how nature will sometimes show how it reigns supreme over our best engineering.

It’s a terrible tragedy that simply couldn’t have been avoided. I hope engineering can continue to progress to offer more ways to minimize damage from such catastrophes.