I don’t usually post non-reading items on this blog. But when something as beautiful as Terje Sorgierd’s “The Mountain” comes along, I cannot resist not posting it. It’s one of the most astounding time lapse videos I have ever seen. Witness for yourself:
From Terje himself:
The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know, El Teide (the highest mountain in Spain). I have to say this was one of the most exhausting trips I have done. There was a lot of hiking at high altitudes and probably less than 10 hours of sleep in total for the whole week. Having been here 10-11 times before I had a long list of must-see locations I wanted to capture for this movie, but I am still not 100% used to carrying around so much gear required for time-lapse movies.
What is most spectacular, I think, is the way the Milky Way dances with the golden-orange sky, as evidenced at around 0:32 in the video. There was a large Sahara storm as Terje was filming, the winds of which carried the sand particles to the northern hemisphere. The result is mesmerizing.
###
A question for the reader/viewer: If this isn’t the most amazing time lapse video you’ve ever seen, could you please point me to one that is?
I’m not much an oenophile (or not at all). But I loved this story in the May 2011 edition of Vanity Fair, “The Assassin in the Vineyard.” Maximillian Potter does an astounding job of going behind the scenes to explain the history of the fabled vineyard, La Romanée-Conti.
The gist of the story: La Romanée-Conti is a small, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine. But when Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous and sophisticated note, in January 2010, threatening the destruction of his heritage, unless he paid a 1 million euro ransom, he did not treat it seriously at first. Who was the mastermind behind this crime? And did the criminal get caught? All is revealed in the article…
Previously, I had never even heard of La Romanée-Conti. But Potter describes it as a “mecca-Xanadu,” and explains the significance of the wine coming from this vineyard:
Indeed, whatever superlatives can be ascribed to a wine apply to the eponymous wine from the Romanée-Conti vineyard. It ranks among the very top of the most highly coveted, most expensive wines in the world. According to the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s exclusive American distributor, Wilson Daniels, acquiring or purchasing a bottle is as simple as calling your local “fine-wine retailer.” However, because D.R.C. is produced in such limited quantities, and because the high-end wine market is such an intricate and virtually impenetrable web of advance orders—futures—and aftermarket wheeling and dealing, it’s not as simple as the distributor suggests. Wilson Daniels’s own Web site points would-be D.R.C. buyers to wine-searcher.com, which is a worldwide marketplace for wine sales and online auctions. There, the average price for a single bottle from 2007 (excluding tax and the buyers’ premium) is $6,455—and that’s the most recent vintage available.
On the storied history of the vineyard (or how the Conti name came to be):
The Benedictine monks of the medieval Catholic Church were the original obstinate ones who civilized Burgundy’s Côte. They were the défricheurs, or “ground clearers,” who married the fickle Pinot Noir grape to the ostensibly inhospitable terrain. They discovered that a narrow strip of land about halfway down the gently sloping hillside produces the very best wines—the grands crus. “The Slope of Gold,” it was called. While the monks first cultivated the vineyard that would become Romanée-Conti, it was the Prince de Conti, centuries later, who gave the wine its name and infused it with nobility and naughty.
The worthless forest and fallow land that the Duke of Burgundy had deeded to the monks in the 1100s were by the late 1500s profitable climats, and the monarchy wanted in. Taxation compelled the priory to sell a “perpetual lease” on their finest climat, the first incarnation of Romanée-Conti: Cros des Cloux. Between 1584 and 1631, Cros des Cloux had three owners, before it was transferred to the Croonembourg family. Under this owner, Cros des Cloux blossomed in the marketplace. As it did, for reasons historians can’t fully explain, the family changed the name to La Romanée. By 1733 the Croonembourgs’ La Romanée was going for prices as much as six times those of most other reputable growths of the Côte. Still, when the Croonembourg patriarch died, in 1745, the family over the next 15 years slipped into debt and La Romanée was sold to Louis-François de Bourbon—the Prince de Conti.
There’s so much more in the piece, but I leave with this quote, describing the ransom letter. You now know that the mastermind of this devious plan knew much about La Romanée-Conti:
It was not so much a note as it was a package, delivered to his private residence. (A similar package arrived at the home of Henry-Frédéric Roch, who holds the title of co-director of the D.R.C. and represents the Leroy family’s interest in the Domaine.) Inside the cylindrical container, the type an architect might use for blueprints, was a large parchment. Unrolled, the document was a detailed drawing of Romanée-Conti. While the 4.46-acre vineyard is essentially a rectangle, there are nuances to its shape. De Villaine noticed that whoever had sent this letter and sketched the vineyard knew its every contour, and what’s more, the author had noted every single one of its roughly 20,000 vine stocks. In the center of the vineyard sketch this person, or persons, had drawn a circle. There was a note, too, which conveyed that the vineyard would be destroyed unless certain demands were met…
Continue reading the entire thing to find out what happens next. You won’t regret setting aside half an hour for this riveting read.
According to a new book, The Longevity Project, authored by Howard Friedman and and Leslie Martin, the basic premise behind happiness is this: sadness does not make you sick any more than happiness makes you well…
The Longevity Project is based on the results of a longitudinal study started by psychologist Lewis Terman (which became known as the “Terman Study”). The Terman study followed a group of 1,500 Californians over eighty years, beginning in 1921. All of the children selected for this study were judged to be of high IQ (presumably because with high IQ are more predisposed to live longer, happier, and more successful lives). A snippet from The Atlantic provides the findings (I’ve bolded the two most interesting/important points):
All three researchers concluded that one of the biggest factors in both a happy life and a long life was having strong and healthy social connections. Beyond that, the people who tended to have “happy-well” outcomes were conscientious, emotionally healthy individuals who set and actively pursued goals; who incorporated strong social networks, exercise and “healthy” eating/drinking habits organically into their everyday lives; who were optimistic but not to the point of being careless or reckless; social enough to form strong networks, but not so social as to pursue unhealthy habits for peer approval; and who felt engaged and satisfied in their careers, marriages, and friendships.
According to Friedman and Martin, however, there’s one area where unhappiness does seem to play a causal role. It may not directly sicken or shorten the life of the person experiencing the unhappiness. But it [unhappiness] apparently can be toxic for people who have to live with that unhappy person. Unlike the Grant Study, which interviewed only the Harvard men, the Terman study also interviewed the spouses of the people in the study, to gauge their impact on study participants’ lives. And in the Terman study, women married to unhappy men tended to be unhealthier, and live shorter lives, than women married to happy men. Oddly, the reverse was not true. The happiness of the woman had very little effect on the lifespan or happiness of her husband.
I haven’t read The Longevity Project, but it does look quite interesting. The best book I’ve read on the topic of happiness is Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss— it’s about one man’s search for the happiest countries on Earth.
I can’t remember how I stumbled upon Paul Graham’s classic 2004 essay on wealth, but I am glad I re-read it last night. Excerpt below:
Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.
Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.
Highly recommend reading the whole thing. It’s long, but it’s worth it.
A few good reads from this week. I’ll post some longer reads later this week.
1) “The Sleepless Elite” [Wall Street Journal] – why do some people function so well on little sleep? This article explores (albeit marginally) the “sleep elite,” those of us that can survive on two to four hours of sleep per night:
Here’s an interesting tidbit to remember: most of us actually need at least seven hours of sleep per night. Some of us, sadly, think we can get by on less:
Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Also fascinating is determining the biological basis for these “sleep elite.” Ying-Hui Fu at University of California-San Franscisco with the research:
Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.
Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.
Read the rest of the article here. The most fascinating thing to me about sleep (ever since I found out about this fact in ninth grade in high school): despite decades of research, we still don’t have conclusive evidence of why we need to sleep.
2) “The Montessori Mafia” [Wall Street Journal] – interesting blog post briefly profiling Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos:
The Montessori Mafia showed up in an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think. Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products.
A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity…To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).
The inclusion of this line (which is sadly true) makes me wonder how we can change things in our schools to at least make the Montessori method more accessible to others.
We are given very little opportunity, for instance, to perform our own, original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are judged primarily on getting answers right. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own.
4) “Basic Funerals Bets Baby Boomers Will Arrange Cremations Online” [Bloomberg] – proof that there’s a market for (almost) everything online. Kudos for outside-the-box thinking here, even if the thought/idea is, well, morbid.
Last week, the New York Timesannounced its paywall, after many months of deliberation and development:
Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month without paying, a limit that company executives said was intended to draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up the vast majority of the site’s traffic.
Today, the paywall went live. If you’re not familiar with the NYT paywall, take a look at the subscriptions page, and ponder for a minute the split among the three subscription options:
NYTIMES.COM + SMARTPHONE APP — $15 every four weeks
NYTIMES.COM + TABLET APP — $20 every four weeks
ALL DIGITAL ACCESS — $35 every four weeks
My immediate gripe upon seeing that breakdown: why discriminate between an iPhone app and the New York Times iPad app? I don’t have an iPhone, but I do have an iPad; is the experience going to be significantly better on the tablet than it is on the phone? I doubt it.
Secondly, why is there no stand-alone subscription to nytimes.com? This is absolutely baffling. In fact, the whole pricing strategy gets weirder when you do the math. Let A = cost of access to nytimes.com. Let B = cost of access to the smartphone app. Let C equal cost of access to the tablet app. We then have:
A + B = $15 (1)
A + C = $20 (2)
A + B + C = $35 (3)
Plug in equation (1) into equation (3), namely that A+B = $15, so equation (3) becomes $15+C = $35, or that C=$35-$15=$20. Then from equation 2, A + C = $20, and we see that A = $20-$20 = $0!
Does this make sense to you? It doesn’t to me. But from reading across the Web, I think I know why the New York Times devised such a pricing strategy. If you read the subscriptions page, you’ll notice that you get full access to New York Times so long as you subscribe to (paper) home delivery. You can subscribe to the Sunday New York Times for something like $13 per four weeks, which is significantly cheaper than the $35 all-access pass for four weeks. Thus the goal of the Times: to increase paper subscriptions, but more importantly, to ensure that current subscribers renew their subscriptions.
So, today is day 1 of the unveiling of the paywall, and I’m pretty sure I’ll hit my 20-article quote in the next few days. Take a look at the number of article’s I’ve read last month, broken down by section:
This number doesn’t include the articles I’ve read via the New York Times iPad app. Do I think the digital subscription is expensive? I have to agree with Felix Salmon — the digital subscription is expensive:
The NYT has decided not to make the paywall very cheap and porous in the first instance as people get used to it. $15 for four weeks might be cheap compared to the cost of a print subscription, but $195 per year is still enough money to give readers pause and to drive them elsewhere. And similarly, 20 articles per month is lower than I would have expected at launch.
However, I disagree with Felix Salmon on one point here. The paywall won’t drive me elsewhere for the news and in-depth reporting that I consistently rely from the NYT. I believe I will be able to find the articles I want to read via blogs and social media (especially following links via Twitter). If you’ve been paying attention to this blog over the last year or so, you know that I’ve linked to dozens of New York Times articles. The paywall will NOT change my blogging behavior. However, I think the paywall will change my browsing/reading behaving while I am on nytimes.com. How? I typically tend to browse articles by sections, and then click through anything that looks interesting enough to read. So, for instance, in an evening I may read five stories in the Business section, then proceed to the Science section and read a few articles there. With the paywall, I won’t have this ability/luxury, but I know I’ll find a way to access the articles I want to read.
I hope that more of you come visit this blog in the coming months because I’ll still be linking to New York Times frequently, and you’ll be able to access the NYT articles that I link here without having to worry about adding to your monthly 20-article total.
What are your thoughts on the New York Times paywall? Will you pay? If not, why not? How will you access NYT articles if you’re a devout reader but aren’t willing to subscribe to the digital subscription? Do you think the NYT paywall will fail?
###
Resources:
1) The Newsonomics of The New York Times’ Pay Fence [Nieman Lab]
2) New York Times Paywall: Built for the Digital Future? [Guardian]
1) “Silicon Valley Hiring Perks: Meals, iPads and a Cubicle for Spot” [New York Times] – a good piece reflecting the current state of Silicon Valley. I was surprised by how well Google is paying:
Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a few months ago. That is so far above the industry average of $80,000 that start-ups cannot match Google salaries.
Perhaps the most telling line, representing the culture shift in Silicon Valley (how long has it been in the making?):
And there has been a psychological shift; many of the most talented engineers want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg not work for him.
2) “A Better Way to Measure Twitter Influence” [New York Times] – Do you think the most influential Twitter user is Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga? I agree with the premise of this post, that follower counts on Twitter mean less for influence than actual engagement (replies, retweets):
But it turns out that counting followers is a seriously flawed way to measure a person’s impact on Twitter. Even one of Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams, made the point to me recently: someone with millions of followers may no longer post messages frequently, while someone followed by mere tens of thousands may be a prolific poster whose messages are amplified by others.
According to research by Twitalyzer, the most influential Twitter user is Rafinha Bastos from Brazil. Yes, this is a surprise to me too.
3) “Mark Armstrong: What I Read” [The Atlantic] – Mark Armstrong, founder of long reads (one of my favorite sites on the Web), reveals his daily media/reading diet:
Most weekday mornings, the first thing I’m reading is my iPhone. I’ll start with a quick check of the Twitter app, dipping into the real-time stream and checking the latest stories that readers have shared using the #longreads hashtag. (It’s for sharing any outstanding story between 1,500 and 30,000 words.)
Also, Long Reads wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for the community, as Mark attests:
Twitter is also my main source for new stories that get featured on Longreads. The community is incredible when it comes to finding and sharing great stories using the #longreads hashtag: @hriefs, @michellelegro, @jaredbkeller, @sherlyholmes, @legalnomads, @katesilver, @nxthompson, @weegee, @eugenephoto, @petersm_th, all recommend excellent links—from magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic to regional publications doing outstanding journalism like Texas Monthly, 5280 Magazine, Atlanta Magazine, and alt-weeklies like Minneapolis City Pages and The Stranger.
I’ve bookmarked Mark’s post because I need to go through the links he has included in there more than a few times. Related: my most popular post on this blog is from last year, where I rounded up The Top Five Long Reads of 2010.
4) “Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth Crying in Rage” [NPR] – probably the most fascinating story I’ve read all week. If you’ve ever doubted that the space race wasn’t risky, read this story. If you click through the link, there is a disturbing photo at the top of the page. This is an incredible account of Vladimir Komarov, friend of the Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin (the first man to enter space). The background:
In 1967, both men [Komarov and Gagarin] were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn’t back out because he didn’t want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.
But as detailed in the new book Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, Gagarin and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems. Gagarin even wrote a 10-page memo on his findings, gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command (to Brezhnev). So both Komarov and Gagarin knew of the dangers…but what would have happened if Komarov refused to go?
“If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead.” That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn’t do that to his friend. “That’s Yura,” the book quotes him saying, “and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.” Komarov then burst into tears.
Fermat’s Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. This theorem was first conjectured by Pierre de Fermat in 1637, and it remained unsolved for over three hundred years. Andrew Wiles proved the theorem in 1994.
What’s fascinating is how long Andrew Wiles spent working on this theorem (answer: seven years). In a great interview with NOVA, Andrew Wiles explains his obsession:
I used to come up to my study, and start trying to find patterns. I tried doing calculations which explain some little piece of mathematics. I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about. Sometimes that would involve going and looking it up in a book to see how it’s done there. Sometimes it was a question of modifying things a bit, doing a little extra calculation. And sometimes I realized that nothing that had ever been done before was any use at all. Then I just had to find something completely new; it’s a mystery where that comes from. I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction, I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.
Have your ever been consumed by anything on this scale?
Today on Twitter, Alain de Botton sent eight tweets, in reverse chronological order. The topic? A short course in political philosophy. Here are the tweets:
The University of Twitter: a short course in Political Philosophy in 7 parts:
1: Plato: We should be ruled not by leaders chosen by a majority, but by those who are most intelligent.
2. St Augustine: We should not try to build paradise on earth. Aim for tolerable government, true government only possible in the next life.
3. Machiavelli: Politician must choose between serving the interests of country and the interests of Christian morality. Can’t have both.
4. Hobbes: Rulers not appointed by God, but by people and if they can’t guarantee their security, they can be legitimately kicked out.
5. Smith: The market cannot alone create a moral community. Civil society must nudge capitalists to be good through emulation and honours.
6. Karl Marx: The ‘profit’ of a capitalist is in essence theft, the stolen life and labour of the proletariat.
7. J.S. Mill: Governments should not tell people how to live, they should give them the preconditions to make their own choices.
So if you wanted to brush up on your political philosophy but didn’t want to read a textbook (or lengthy Wikipedia entries, for that matter), enjoy the above.
You’ve probably heard by now that a massive 8.9 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck Japan on March 11, 2011. I’ve been digesting a lot of news regarding this event, and wanted to highlight the best resources I’ve found so far. I’ll update this post throughout the week. If you have any suggestions to add, feel free to comment below.
Starter
I didn’t find out about the quake until about twelve hours after it happened. And my first resource to check, as I usually do when major world events occur, was Wikipedia. The article on the 2011 Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami is constantly being revised by the devout Wikipedia editors, and as of this writing, there have been more than 2,300 revisions. The article is quite comprehensive, and even has links to other full-grown articles on the Fukushima nuclear reactor accidents.
Reading
Here are the best reads on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami:
1) “Japan’s Strict Building Codes Saved Lives” [New York Times] – Make no mistake about it: had an earthquake of this magnitude happened anywhere else in the world, the death toll would be in the tens of thousands. While many in the blogosphere deemed this piece polemic, it serves as a crucial reminder:
After the Kobe earthquake [also known as the Great Hanshin Earthquake] in 1995, which killed about 6,000 people and injured 26,000, Japan also put enormous resources into new research on protecting structures, as well as retrofitting the country’s older and more vulnerable structures. Japan has spent billions of dollars developing the most advanced technology against earthquakes and tsunamis.
2) “Nuclear Energy 101” [Boing Boing] – very illuminating post from Maggie Koerth-Baker explaining the basics of nuclear energy, and what can go wrong. Because you don’t want to be the guy who explains that “the extent of my knowledge on nuclear power plants is pretty much limited to what I’ve seen on The Simpsons”. (link via @stevesilberman, @edyong209)
3) “Nuclear Experts Explain Worst-Case Scenario at Fukushima Power Plant” [Scientific American] – a good, if somewhat depressing, read:
The type of accident that is occurring in Japan is known as a station blackout. It means loss of offsite AC power—power lines are down—and then a subsequent failure of emergency power on site—the diesel generators. It is considered to be extremely unlikely, but the station blackout has been one of the great concerns for decades.
4) “Japan Earthquake Factbox” [Vancouver Sun] – a great quick-hits list of trivia of the effects of this earthquake. A few of my favorites:
There were more than 100 aftershocks (rated 5.0+ in magnitude) since the initial quake. You can verify on the USGS site (so many occurrences of “NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN”)
The Earth’s axis has reportedly shifted ten inches as a result of the quake, and Japan’s coast is said to have permanently shifted 2.4 METERS.
The quake was 900 times stronger than the quake that hammered San Francisco in 1989.
5) “The Internet Kept Me Company” [New York Times] – a beautiful personal post from Sandra Barron, who lives in Japan. She reflects how internet (but especially Twitter, where she goes by @sandrajapandra) has kept her company:
Then I turned to Twitter. When there’s a quake, everyone who uses Twitter tends to tweet about it. (The United States Geological Survey has even announced that it will start monitoring these reports as part of its surveillance.) This time I waited until the first round of shaking had died down. Then I wrote: “That rearranged my kitchen.” It had. Drawers were open. Bottles had hit the floor.
6) “Fukushima Nuclear Accident” [Brave New Climate] – hands down, the BEST explanation of the disaster unfolding in Fukushima. If there is one source you read to learn (from the very beginning, in layman’s terms) about the Fukushima nuclear reactors and what has gone wrong so far, make it this. The post was published March 12, but there are continuous updates on the blog (March 14 update is here; March 15 update is here). A must-read source.
Photography
1) The In Focus blog at The Atlantic has two incredible galleries.
2) ABC News (AU) has the best use of Google images I’ve seen relating to this quake. The before/after images are astounding. If there is one link you click through in this post, make it this one.
3) New York Times has a similar gallery, but it’s a bit more awkward to use that slider.
Videos
AP has perhaps the most viewed video over the last few days:
Helicopter footage of giant tsunami waves approaching the Japanese coast:
CCTV footage from Sendai Airport showing the incoming tsunami:
Astounding footage showing the size of the tsunami waves as they devour a ship:
Building swaying during the earthquake:
And finally, amazing amateur video showing the earthquake alert system in Japan:
Japan has spent well more than $1 billion on earthquake prediction systems, including a network of more than 1,000 GPS-based sensors scattered around the country — and the payoff came today when Tokyo’s residents were given up to a minute’s warning that a Big One was on the way.
The early warning system isn’t that useful for those who are close to the epicenter, because the S-waves come quickly behind the P-waves. But because Tokyo is about 230 miles away, that city’s residents could have taken action as much as 80 seconds before the serious shaking began. As noted in this Technology Review report, that amount of time can give people a chance to stop a train, lower a crane, pull a car over to the side of the road, stop performing surgery in a hospital or get off an elevator in an office building.
2) Great infographic in the New York Times showing how the shifting plates off the coast of Japan caused the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Also, don’t miss this interactive map showing the damage across Japan (link via @lexinyt, @palafo)
6) Ushahidi (in Japanese). Includes a live crisis map of Japan.
How to Help
Here are some ways to help victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan:
American Red Cross — U.S. mobile phone users can text REDCROSS to 90999 to add $10 automatically to your phone bill. Or visit http://www.redcross.org or call 1-800-RED-CROSS.
International Medical Corps — Sending relief teams and supplies to the area. Call 1-800-481-4462, or visit http://internationalmedicalcorps.org .
Save the Children — The relief effort providing food, medical care and education to children is accepting donations through mobile phones by texting JAPAN to 20222 to donate $10. People can also call 1-800-728-3843 during business hours or visit www.savethechildren.org/japanquake to donate online.
Global Giving — The non-profit which works through grassroots efforts says Americans can text JAPAN to 50555 to give $10 through their phone bill. Or visit http://www.globalgiving.org .
Interaction — The group is the largest alliance of U.S.-based international nongovernmental organizations and lists many ways to help on its site, http://www.interaction.org .
Network for Good — The aggregator of charities has a list of programs and ways to donate to relief efforts. Visit http://www.networkforgood.org.
Doctors without Borders — this is the organization I personally support (I supported them last year after the Haiti earthquake). Visit the site and donate directly at http://doctorswithoutborders.org .
###
As I mentioned at the top, if you have found excellent resources relating to this earthquake, feel free to comment below. I will update this post several times.
Books I Read 
