So it's a good thing for me; but with the huge devastation in Japan I just feel awful about feeling good.
Then I start to feel guilty because I didn't have this much emotion invested in any other recent natural disasters (Indonesia, Haiti). But I don't know anything about those other places and I know a lot about Japan.
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Of course the death toll is rising. The tsunami hit in a matter of minutes after the quake--half an hour at most--and it inundated hundreds of miles of coastline. There are thousands dead--probably tens of thousands--from that alone. It doesn't include people who had crap fall on them, nor does it include other fatalities.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 was told from one person's viewpoint; she only saw a little slice of the devastation. And that was for an earthquake half the power of this one.
...at least, I think so. They don't use the Richter scale any longer, but it was logarithmic: 2.0 on the Richter scale was twice the power of 1.0, and 3.0 was twice the power of 2.0, so 3.0 was four times the power of 1.0. I don't know if the new scale is the same way; but I seem to recall that it is. (9.0 is 256 times as powerful as 1.0. Yeesh.)
(Japan's scale works differently and goes to 7; this one's a 7 on their scale.)
One neat thing I managed was to find the location, on Google Earth, of the most-often-played video of the tsunami hitting the coast of Japan. I had Fox News on the blab slab and went to 3D view on GE, and compared the lay of the land to what I was seeing--and sure enough there it was.
Lat: 38°10'59.94"N
Lon: 140°57'17.84"E
Seems like the main town is Ipponmatsu, and it had about 4,500 people living there. It's all been washed out to sea, of course, by the tsunami. *sigh*
Across the river, to the south, is Natori, which looks like a small city, population 73,000. That may be the city everyone identified as Kurihara. That makes more sense, considering that Kurihara is 25 miles inland.
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That's about all I've got. Things like gas prices and politics seem too trivial right now.
