Take a look at the excellent presentation below, which has just won the World Best Presentation Contest. Some of the fascinating examples of the shifts happening around us: it is predicted that by 2049 a $1000 computer will have more computational capabilities than the entire human race (and more than one human by 2013), the New York Times contains more information in one week that the average person living in the 18th century would have encountered in a lifetime, and 1 in 8 marriages last year in the US was between people who met online. Much more in the presentation below.

Here’s the creator’s blog, where he lists some of the sources of the information presented.

(via FT Passport)

So sayeth Albert Einstein.

And apparently a growing number of scientists believe that although the illusion is a rather persistent one people can and do see past it… into the future. Sometimes, maybe.

Full story in This is London.

I believe I’ve had experiences that at least appeared to be premonition as they describe it and know others who have also. And yet I remain skeptical to a degree. The brain is an incredible instrument with an uncanny ability to cherry pick and catalog seonsory data in support of whatever happens to be its current focus of identification. Further to that our memory is notoriously unreliable. And human beings have a hard-wired desire to believe in the extraordinary.

Self-deception is contagious and consensus hallucinations abound. So I’ll wait and see.

And now a word from the skeptics:

Research in this matter is subject to the element of selective recall, whereby individuals tend to remember when a dream or hunch turns out correctly and forget it if it fails. Therefore, anecdotal reports are not of much value.
In 1983, an examination was made of the evidence offered by 127 persons who responded to a U.K. newspaper feature on premonitions. A questionnaire was accompanied by a personality test. Most who answered were female, average age was forty-six years, and 80 percent of them said that they were correct 70 percent of the time. The personality test showed that these persons were significantly more neurotic than average and scored high on a “lie scale.” Some 85 percent of their predictions involved death or other tragedies. The investigator concluded that the ability to have premonitions is important since it warns females and thereby provides a “survival advantage to the species.” No comment.

Hey, maybe neurotic middle-aged women really can foretell the future better than everyone else. If I was persistently yanked into the future by visions and foreboding of impending catastrophes I’d probably be neurotic too.

Seeing as its official disaster day today and you are probably tired of hearing about it by now, here’s another one you may not have heard of – a “mud volcano” in Indonesia:

A WALL of mud that has destroyed the homes of 13,000 Indonesian villagers following a gas-well eruption looks set to cost the Australian joint venture partner involved in the project about $24.3million.

And the bills may continue to mount for oil and gas giant Santos, with some geological experts warning the most severe gas-well “blowout” in history may never be properly plugged.

As some estimates put at $2 billion the total potential cost of the eruption, which in May began burying eight villages on East Java at Sidoarjo, Santos’s joint venture partner Lapindo Brantas has been accused of attempting to avoid liability.

[..] Lapindo has agreed to pay each displaced household an annual rent allowance of $US276 for two years.

The disaster unfolded on May 29 when drilling 3km underground caused a build-up of water pressure that forced mud and silt to the surface.

Between 100 and 140 cubic metres a day has been burying nearby villages in a 400ha radius.

[..] Costs associated with the disaster are estimated at about $US160 million, and rising.

Actually that figure of 100-140 cubic metres, quoted in The Australian, is missing some zeroes. About 3, in fact:

Every day, up to 150,000 cubic metres of mud continues to spurt from a large crater, 200 metres from the Banjar Panji exploratory well, defying all efforts by engineers and geologists to stop it.

Santos have also revised their cost estimate to $A43.7 million.

The amount of mud flowing out daily is enough to cover a football field about 75 feet deep and has extended over an area about the size of Monacco. At first dykes were built to try and contain the flow:

Eleven miles of dykes are being built by 1,500 soldiers and labourers around the clock to contain the growing catastrophe, in which 11,000 people have lost their homes or been forced to evacuate.

However the dykes have already been breached in several places and with the arrival of the wet season this month are not expected to hold. And there dont seem to be many options as to what can be done with the relentless flow:

The government recently gave permission to dump the mud into the sea via a local river. But experts question whether that will get rid of the sludge faster than it gushes from the hole, and environmentalists are opposing the plan as a threat to the marine ecosystem.

The mud, which stands as deep as 16 feet in places, has submerged or washed into houses in four villages. At least 20 factories and many acres of rice fields and prawn farms have been destroyed.

The sludge has repeatedly washed over a major road, closing it for weeks at a time, and now it is threatening a rail line in the industrial area just outside Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city.

[..] After two unsuccessful attempts to stop the flow, Lapindo is digging three shafts alongside the hole, hoping to kill the eruption by pumping in concrete.

Experts are skeptical that will work.

“If they manage to stop it, it will be the first time in the world that it has been done,” said geologist Arif Munsyawar.

This Aussie lot seem rather more hopeful:

Australian company Century Resources has been engaged to drill one of two relief wells at the site, and it is hoped the operation will stop the mudflow “around” the end of the calendar year.

Century Resources have some serious competition however:

They’ve come from far and wide, hundreds of self-proclaimed mystics, psychics and spiritual leaders. But no-one has yet been able to stop the mud.

[..] Hasan, a local businessman and chief of the threatened Kedung Bendo village, is offering a new house worth 50 million rupiah ($A7,200) to anyone who can stop it.

He says the contest – suspended temporarily during the current Islamic holy month of Ramadan – has attracted 300 people who have come to pray, mumble incantations and even cast live goats and chickens into the bubbling expanse of mud.

[..] “I’m going to give a house as a reward to anyone who can stop the mud.

“Plenty of people have come, they did their rituals, gave offerings – goats, a bull’s head, chickens and cows – but the mud didn’t stop.”

I vote this guy gets the free house anyway:

One letter has even come from Essex, England, with advice for the chief.

“I have read about your village and want to help and claim the 50 million rupiah reward when the hole is plugged,” the letter said.

“You, chief, take a stick of your choosing and tie (the enclosed) bandana on the end of it, then stick it in the hole … and leave it there to stop the leak.”

But a sceptical Hasan says the area is too dangerous to get close enough to throw the bandana in, let alone “stick it in”.

Power to the sceptic. I agree, nothing less than a bull’s head will do. Are Century Resources eligible for the house also? I am sure they can organise an offering of some sort to go with their services.

Contrary to what some hippies have been ranting the mud is not actually toxic. In fact it can even be used a water feature in your living room:

“We went to one house where a man took us into his living room. He opened the cupboard beneath the television, and there were seeps erupting,” Mazzini said after a recent trip.

Sweet, when you get bored of watching TV you can watch the volcano underneath it for a while. Making sure your inhale.

So where did all this mud come from? There are five possibilities:

The mudflow is thought to have been caused by one of four possibilities: gas-charged fluids breaching coral mounds on top of the limestone rock; a magmatic reaction generating gas; a new-born mud volcano; or hydrothermal fluids migrating from neighbouring areas.

I know I said five. Here’s our sceptic Hasan with the fifth:

That is why village chief Hasan is prepared to put his faith in a shaman, who under a trance said the mud flow was caused by the ghost of a slain unionist.

Hah, its a Revolutionary Volcano!

Here are some more photos:

The mud flow in Sidoarjo started in May and continues to spread

A villager steps on a bamboo raft at a submerged village due to mud spewing from an exploratory gas drilling accident, in Sidoarjo-East Java 18 October 2006. An Indonesian company will pay more than 100 million USD this year towards cleaning up a mudspill that erupted at one of its gas wells in East Java nearly five months ago.

On the first day of Eid in Sidoarjo, Indonesia, Muslims cross earth dykes used to contain massive flows of steaming mud released from a crack in the ground during gas drilling.

A resident evacuates belongings from her home flooded by mud flow in Porong, East Java, Indonesia

See the Hot Mud Flow blog for more images and maps (Indonesian).

UPDATE: A positive spin?

The government’s Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology has recommended that the mud be deposited in the delta area of the Porong river, which flows near the disaster zone, senior agency official Agus Kristijono said.

[..] Kristijono said the agency had surveyed around 2,600 hectares of the delta and considered it the best area for the mud to be deposited.

“The mud, depending on its compactness, could form around 30 hectares of surface area in a year,” he told AFP.

“We estimate that 45 million cubic metres of mud would take five to 10 years to cover the entire area of 2,600 hectares.

[..] Kristijono said the mud would be confined in pools, which would in time form mudflats where mangroves could grow after the land stabilised.

Check out this live world map, from the National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications, in Hungary.

It shows “Emergency and Disaster” events currently in progress (and being distress signalled, I am guessing) around the world. Earthquakes, forest fires, epidemic and biological hazards, hurricanes, airplane accidents etc. The site also has various tables of recent such events and accidents around the world.

Makes you look out the window and have one of those “perspective” moments.

See if you can find Kazakhstan. Hint: Its currently displaying a 3.6 magnitude earthquake, in progress as I am typing this. I hope Anousheh Ansari is out of there already.

Technorati Tags:
Hungary, disaster, emergency, accident, National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications
Kazakhstan,

“Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.” – William Butler Yeats

This of course has implications for success in many areas of life not just the academic. Like many a great venture, this one starts with an experiment (from the Australian, 14/6/06):

Psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman descended on the eighth grade of a large public school in the northeast of the US. As the autumn leaves fell, each of the 160-odd children took an IQ test, then they (and their parents and teachers) answered questionnaires that probed self-control. Are you good at resisting temptation, they were asked. Can you work effectively towards long-term goals? Or do pleasure and fun sometimes keep you from getting work done?

The children were also given a real-life test of their ability to delay gratification. Each was handed a dollar bill in an envelope. They could choose either to keep it or hand it back and get $2 a week later. Their decision was carefully recorded.

The researchers returned in spring. They took note of each child’s grades and then looked back to see both how clever, and how self-controlled, that student had been in autumn. What, they wanted to know, was the most important factor in school grades?

The psychologists discovered it was self-control, by a long shot. A child’s capacity for self-discipline was about twice as important as his or her IQ when it came to predicting academic success.

[#M_more|less|

A piece of advise for aspiring bloggers:

The science seems to back up the writer Kingsley Amis's well-known advice that "the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of one's trousers to the seat of one's chair". [..] Amis kept to an “unflinching schedule” of 500 words a day, according to The Guardian.

And advise for just about everyone:

So what can we do to strengthen self-discipline, to transform ourselves from impulsive dollar-snatchers to lofty long-term investors in future success?

Help lies in seeing willpower as a muscle, recent research suggests. The “moral muscle”, as it has been called, powers all of the difficult and taxing mental tasks that you set yourself. It is the moral muscle that is flexing and straining as you keep attention focused on a dry academic article, bite back an angry retort to your boss, or decline a helping of your favourite dessert. And herein lies the problem: these acts of restraint all drain the same pool of mental reserves.

Those lofty sciency people have a experiment to prove that also:

Take, for example, a group of hungry volunteers who were left alone in a room containing both a tempting platter of freshly baked chocolate chip biscuits and a plate piled high with radishes. Some of the volunteers were asked to sample only the radishes. These peckish volunteers manfully resisted the temptation of the biscuits and ate the prescribed number of radishes. Other, more fortunate, volunteers were asked to sample the biscuits.

In the next, supposedly unrelated, part of the experiment, the volunteers were asked to try to solve a difficult puzzle. The researchers weren’t interested in whether the volunteers solved it. (In fact, it was insoluble.) Rather, they wanted to know how long the volunteers would persist with it. Their self-control already depleted, volunteers forced to snack on radishes persisted for less than half as long as people who had eaten the biscuits or (in case you should think chocolate biscuits offer inner strength) other volunteers who had skipped the eating part of the experiment.

As this and many similar studies show, if you draw on your reserves to achieve one unappealing goal – going for a jog, say – your moral muscle will be ineffective when you then call on it to help you switch off the television and start essay-writing.

Ready for some moral muscle cross-training?

Evidence is starting to accumulate that the moral muscle, like its physical counterpart, can become taut and bulging from regular exercise. People asked by experimenters to be self-disciplined about their posture for two weeks were afterwards stronger willed when it came to a test of physical endurance, compared with other people allowed to slouch about in their usual comfortable way during the fortnight.

By regularly exercising self-restraint and virtue in all areas of life (moral muscle cross-training, we may call it), we will come to resist temptations with the same casual ease with which a world-class athlete sprints to catch a train. That, at least, is the idea.

_M#]

(hat tip Catallaxy Files)

Tonight is census night, and the hottest question on the paper for Australia as always is going to be the one about religion.

Will Jedi finally be recognised as an official faith (70,000 registered Jedi in 2001)? And who will win the race for the fastest growing religion (last time it was Buddhism with a growth from 200,000 to 360,000 in 5 years)? Danna Vale will no doubt be anxiously awaiting confirmation that “Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years’ time”. As will the Muslims.

Meanwhile, it appears that our younger generation is turning away from organised religion, according to a three-year national study, jointly done by Monash University, the Australian Catholic University and the Christian Research Association:

Researchers conducted the random survey with 1619 people. Of those, 1272 were aged 13 to 24 and the rest were aged 25 to 59.

University of NSW Emeritus Professor of sociology and anthropology Clive Kessler said the results reflected the secular and sceptical nature of Australian society.

A QUESTION OF SPIRIT

• 48 per cent of Generation Y believe in a god.
• 20 per cent do not believe in a god.
• 32 per cent are unsure.
• 19 per cent of Generation Y are actively involved in a church.
• 17 per cent have an eclectic spirituality, believing in two or more “New Age”, esoteric or eastern beliefs, including reincarnation, psychics and astrology.
• 31 per cent can be classified as humanists, rejecting the idea of a god, although a few believe in a “higher being”.

(EDIT: html error was cutting out a paragraph or two here…)

The process is not going fast enough for some people:

Greens call for secular alternative to religion classes

The New South Wales Greens are calling on the State Government to offer students a non-religious alternative to school scripture classes.

Greens education spokesman John Kaye says the deal between the Government and churches to have one hour of religious instruction in public schools needs to be re-examined.

Mr Kaye says it is time that school students were offered a secular alternative to the one-hour scripture class.

“The deal dates back 126 years to 1880 and for all that time the churches have had a monopoly on religious instruction in public schools,” he said.

“This is not appropriate, it doesn’t match the needs of our community.

“It doesn’t match the diversity of world views held by the people in Australia.”

At the other end of the spectrum the Family First party is gaining in popularity and a coalition of Christian MPs is fighting back against the ultra-secularists:

CHRISTIANITY has been under “consistent attack” and should be re-established as the dominant belief system in Australia.

This argument was mounted yesterday by more than a dozen politicians of all hues at a Christian conference in Canberra.

Former Nationals leader John Anderson, president of the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, opened the 300-strong Christian forum at Parliament House last night, saying secularism had gone too far.

“I think we confuse in the public mind very much what we really are, and certainly our government is secular,” he said. “It’s actually a Christian concept that you should separate church and state — it’s one of the great differences between us and Muslim societies.

‘What is a secular value system? I could argue the extreme case, that a secular value system gave us World WarII via Nazism.”

One reason for the decline of Christianity in Australia may be all the bad press its been getting for… well, for as long as anyone can remember really. And one approach for getting bums back onto pews that is currently being tried in the UK is apparently to “take ‘religion’ out of church”:

For those who are curious about Christianity but disillusioned by the institutional Church, there is a novel solution – drop the religion.

The Rev Ian Gregory, a cleric well known to readers of The Daily Telegraph for launching the Campaign for Courtesy in an attempt to improve manners, has embarked on a new project which he calls “Christianity without religion”.

Out goes the “archaic mumbo-jumbo” of church services and the “silly arguments about things that don’t and shouldn’t matter”; in come chats about anything that makes you feel good and the world’s first dedicated “laughter room” because “laughter is as important as prayer”.

..

“People are fed up with religion. The bar-room talk is that it causes too much trouble in the world. But people are intrigued by spirituality and by figures such as Jesus and Buddha.”, [thats the Rev speaking]

..

Not laughing is man of the moment and dedicated Catholic, Mel Gibson, an expert in “anything that makes you feel good”:

In a compelling interview on US television two years ago, Gibson admitted that he has many times thought of ending his suffering. Asked if he had thought of jumping out of a window, he replied: “I really did, yeah. I was looking down thinking, man, this is just easier this way. You have to be mad, you have to be insane to despair in that way. But that is the height of spiritual bankruptcy. There’s nothing left.” For someone punching the time clock for a few shekels a week, it seems rather ridiculous that a man with an estimated wealth of more than $1 billion would feel this way.

“Let’s face it, I’ve been to the pinnacle of what secular utopia has to offer,” Gibson told ABC TV in the US. “It’s just this kind of everything. I’ve got money, fame, this, that and the other, you know, and it’s all been like, whoosh here, here you go, like that. And it’s like, OK. And when I was younger, I got my proboscis out and I dipped it into the font and sucked it up, all right. It didn’t matter, there wasn’t enough, it wasn’t good enough. It’s not good enough. It leaves you empty. The more you eat the emptier you get.

“I think everybody in their life gets to a point where that happens. Where they get to the moment of truth and they go, ‘Well, what is this all about? Am I going to jump? Am I going to go on? I don’t want to do either. I don’t want to live. I don’t want to die.’ You ask yourself all those Hamlet questions.”

Another interesting tidbit I dug up about Australia is that in a recent study some social scientists looking at actual governmental practices in regards to various religious groups gave Australia a government favouritism index of 0 out 10 towards the “official or preferred religion”. Ie, no favouritism at all. Taiwan was the only other country that scored 0. In comparison Afghanistan, Iceland, Belgium, Greece and Spain all somehow scored 7.8, Denmark got 6.7 and Finland 6. The average score for Western nation was in fact higher than the score for Syria.

I shall seek to maintain our glorious null favouritism index and wish all of the above interest groups the best of luck in tonights race. May the force be with you!

UPDATE: Saint at Dogfight In Bankstown alerted me to one lot I missed. The Assemblies of God are also in the running with a campaign to get their own checkbox on the form, instead of just being lumped into the “Other – please specify” basket. Good luck with that one also. Its between you and the Jedi, I reckon.

It was definitely a quantity not quality day when I wrote this post.

The UK Science and Technology Select Committee has put forward a new classification table, ranking drugs in terms of the harm they cause, based on scientific evidence. (New Scientist)

What makes more sense than allocating resources in combatting drugs in proportion to the actual harm the drugs cause in the community?

Here’s the table. The committee’s assessments have been handed over to the UK government.

Two points however. Firstly the table does not differentiate methamphetamine from amphetamine and crack cocaine from cocaine. In both case the drugs should be classified separately. Meth and crack and far more costly to the users and to the community than amphetamine and cocaine. Besides the fact that they are totally different drugs, that is. The second point is that the “scientific evidence” that places GHB next to ecstacy is tragically flawed. Although GHB, when used in safe doses, is possibly the least harmful physically (note: not a derivative like 1,4b or GBL, which are potentially more harmful) and is not addictive, the potential for misuse (eg “date-rape” etc), dose volatility and the potential for overdose should have propelled it much further up the list.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the 20th century’s deadliest earthquake, which struck the city of Tangshan, China in the dead of night, with the power of 400 atomic bombs. The quake claimed the lives of a quarter of the city’s million residents. Some sources estimate the death toll as much as three times higher. The Maoist government had ignored warnings from scientists, who noted the rising seismic activity, choosing to focus on internal disputes and perception shaping instead. They also refused all foreign aid offered to them, although around 165,000 people were recorded as being severely injured, a spokesman for the Red Flag journal declaring: “Any grave natural disaster can be overcome with the guidance of Chairman Mao”.

Rowan Callick reports on the cover-up existing to this day in The Australian:

Coalminer Li Yulin, aged 41, clawed his way out of his collapsed home in his underwear and stumbled towards the nearby Kailuan mine. He flagged down the red mine ambulance that was speeding towards him.
..

They drove into the heart of Beijing, arriving at 8am at Zhongnanhai, the leaders’ compound next to the ancient imperial Forbidden City. Dozens of armed soldiers surrounded them. When they had explained their mission, two policemen led them to a reception room where they met vice-premier Ji Dengkui, whom Li recognised from newspaper photos.

“I cried in excitement and he held me in his arms,” Li said. “I felt like a lost son meeting his mother again. I thought, ‘The people of Tangshan are saved.”‘

Li and driver Cui breathlessly reported what they knew of the disaster, concluding by shouting: “Long live the Communist Party. Long live Chairman Mao.” Li lost 22 family members in the earthquake, including his parents and his eldest son, aged 15.

How did the leaders in Zhongnanhai, mesmerised by their own Cultural Revolution endgame and riven by rivalry, respond to the almost supernatural expectations of Li and Cui? Slowly and inadequately.

Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, one of the Gang of Four, took charge of the rescue efforts, focusing on propaganda rather than practical needs. The next day the story from the official Xinhua newsagency, which still operates today, was headed by a Maoist slogan: “Humans must have the strength to subdue the heavens.” It focused on Mao’s leadership against such disasters.

The People’s Daily newspaper, which also still operates, reported how brave survivors had gathered to criticise Deng Xiaoping’s revisionism. A party member was praised for choosing to rescue the communist branch secretary despite hearing cries from his trapped son and daughter. By the time he returned home, the children were dead.

It took a week for the People’s Liberation Army to bring cranes to the disaster site, by which time almost all the survivors under the rubble had fallen silent, as aftershocks kept hitting the beleaguered city.
..
After Zhang Qingzhou published a novel, on the 20th anniversary, about the earthquake that destroyed his home when he was 16, he was contacted by a reader claiming the disaster had been predicted, as had another earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale 17 months earlier, near the northeastern city of Haicheng, where local officials had been warned and taken precautions, restricting the death toll to 2000.
…
Zhang followed up his reader’s leads, speaking with Yang Youchen who, as head of the China Earthquake Administration’s office in Tangshan, had predicted at a meeting early in 1976 that evidence from more than 40 seismic monitoring posts indicated a severe earthquake was due in July or August within a 50km radius of Tangshan.

Yang was punished for his prediction by being sent to a school for unsound cadres. When he repeated his warning at a China Seismological Bureau meeting in Jinan in May, he was removed.

Zhang says the people who succeeded Yang “died in the earthquake, burying his warnings with them”. The cover-up became public when Zhang’s book was published, after a battle with authorities. It soon sold out and reprints have been officially banned.

In Tangshan Apocalypse Zhang wrote that Geng Qingguo, of Beijing’s earthquake forecast team, had predicted the area around Beijing might suffer an earthquake as strong as 7 on the Richter scale, following the Haicheng event. Her reports were quashed by the national bureau.

Geng wrote to Xinhua newsagency criticising her boss, Mei Shirong, who responded that “Geng recklessly made trouble for me. Beijing is the capital. Words must be used with more caution here.”

The warnings came thick and fast in July, Zhang says: from a seismic monitoring post at Kailuan coalmine on July 6, from Zhao Gexhuang mine post and from Beijing’s earthquake forecast team on July 14, from Hongwei middle school post on July 16, from Tongxian county earthquake station on July24 and from Ma Jiagou mine post just 11 hours before the quake.

Zhang says Wang Chengmin, a national seismological bureau researcher, wanted to report the heightened activity, but, he told Zhang, the bureau’s leaders were too busy “criticising Deng Xiaoping and rightism” to pay attention.

Academic discussion had been replaced by a determination “to cover up the truth and to control public opinion”, Wang said. “Certainly it would have been possible to send a warning to people in Tangshan.”

Bizarrely, the handling of the same earthquake in Qinglong County, just 115 km from Tangshan, is hailed by the UN as a case of “public administration best practice”. In 1996 the UN Global Programme for the Integration of Public Administration and the Science of Disasters (UNGP-IPASD), released a report titled “Integration of Public Administration and Earthquake Science: The Best Practice Case of Qinglong County”:

The magnitude 7.8 Great Tangshan Earthquake (GTE) occurred under the city of Tangshan, China, on July 28, 1976. When the dust settled, a quarter of a million people had died, and only a small handful of buildings were left standing. Emerging from this tragedy is a public administration best practice: public administrators of Qinglong County integrated scientific knowledge and monitoring by lay public, and prepared for the Great Tangshan Earthquake. Although 180,000 buildings in the county were destroyed, not one life was lost in the county due to the devastation (one person had a heart attack) while over 240,000 people died in surrounding areas.

“Surrounding areas” of course primarily refers to the flattened city of Tangshen, possibly the 20th century’s best example of public administration worst practice.

The UN Global Programme for the Integration of Public Administration and the Science of Disasters conducted a detailed study of Qinglong County between 1995-1996. This is Qinglong County’s remarkable story.

Two weeks before the Tangshan earthquake…
Administrator Wang Chunqing attended a conference organized by the State Seismological Bureau (SSB) for the North China-Bohai region. During this conference, on the evening of July 16, 1976, scientist Wang Chengmin of the SSB’s Analysis and Prediction Department spoke at an informal meeting attended by sixty conference participants. Young administrator Wang Chunqing was among the audience. He took detailed notes of the scientist’s presentation, including this entry:

“…There is a strong possibility of a magnitude 5 earthquake from July 22 to August 5, 1976 in the Tangshan region. A magnitude 8 is also likely in the second half of ‘76. Preparations should be made immediately…”

On July 21, 1976, administrator Wang Chunqing returned to Qinglong County. He reported on the Tangshan conference, highlighted the talk given by scientist Wang Chengmin, and included updated information from the county’s 16 lay monitoring stations. Public officials of Qinglong County took the report very seriously and acted upon the information immediately.
School classes were relocated and held outdoors several days before the eventual earthquake. Students also played an important part in the collection of data.
..
An official early warning from the Chinese Communist Party Committee of Qinglong County was issued advising people to prepare for a possible devastating earthquake.

The County government took advantage of a planned agricultural meeting to publicize the earthquake warning. Telephone and public announcement systems were also used to broadcast the alert.

Volunteer earthquake monitoring stations report:

From July 24th, natural spring water had become muddy and undrinkable.

By July 26th, temporary earthquake tents were set up. Led by County Secretary Ran Guangqi, who moved into an earthquake tent himself, over 60% of Qinglong County’s more than 470,000 residents moved out of their homes. Those who did not move were instructed to keep their doors and windows open at all times to avoid being trapped in case of an earthquake.
Businesses also relocated to outdoor locations where they continued their normal activities.
..
In Qinglong County (115 km from Tangshan), more than 180,000 buildings were destroyed by the GTE; over 7,000 of these totally collapsed. However, only one person died, and he died of a heart attack. Meanwhile, in the city of Tangshan and in all its other surrounding counties, more than 240,000 people were crushed to death and 600,000 were seriously injured. Five hours after the earthquake, Qinglong County dispatched the first medical team to the disaster zone, and within a very short time, sent relief teams to Tangshan to help with rescue work and transport of the wounded.
..
In the twenty years since the Great Tangshan Earthquake, the Chinese have strengthened their capacity to mitigate earthquake disasters from the perspectives of both science and public administration. Successes in these areas have resulted in fewer fatalities during earthquakes.
..
On this twentieth anniversary of the Great Tangshan Earthquake, we look forward to the day when communities will be able to reduce loss of lives from natural disasters because of the lessons learned from Qinglong County.

It should be noted that the above presentation was designed for the UNGP-IPASD by members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geology and the State Seismological Bureau, also of China.

The contrast between the stories of these two communities is a most tragic irony.

Forewarning relay and preparation were not the only problems in Tangshan. The BBC reported on this day 30 years ago:

The survivors of the Tangshan quake are living in tents and are expected to be moved to winter shelters, the New China news agency has reported. Aircraft and lorries have been taking large quantities of relief supplies to help the relief effort.

The authorities later hope to move people to simple houses, which can withstand tremors and are warm and rainproof before winter sets in.

Chinese officials have rejected any offers of help from the outside world, saying that survivors have enough to eat and wear and there are sufficient medical supplies and doctors in the city.

Well, perhaps not:

One week [after the quake], Tan [Pengru] walked down Victory Street on crutches. The four-lane street was lined with dead bodies, barely leaving room for a bicycle path. Sometimes, the corpses were stacked into piles, and in between them, survivors were cooking their meals in makeshift stoves, oblivious to the horror and the stench that permeated the air.

There was also a short period of lawlessness when food and clean water were extremely scarce. “We had airdrops of food, but people had to fight for them. There was occasional violence,” he sighed. Fortunately law and order was quickly restored with the help of the army that was pouring into the city and mounting a mammoth rescue effort.

Adding insult to injury, two years ago a “memorial” wall was built in Tangshan out of three granite blocks, with families being charged a cost of 1000 RMB to have a perished loved one’s name displayed on it. Or a generous 800 RMB for a place on the back of the wall. Needless to say, a not uncommon view of the residents of Tangshan is to see this as “using a disaster as a gimmick to make money”.

Tangshan before the quake:

After the quake:

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In recent years, slowly but surely, scientific research has again begun on the possible medical uses of various psychedelic substances. After several decades of almost total absence for mostly political reasons, small, often privately funded, studies have begun springing up around the world. MDMA has been showing very positive results in the treatment of anxiety and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Ibogaine has been haled as nothing short of a magical wonder cure for opiate dependence, at least in comparison to other treatment options currently available. Now recent research has added “magic” mushrooms, used by many cultures all over the world, from the South American Aztecs to the shamanic tribes of Siberia, for thousands of years, to the list of potential treatment options for a variety of psychological disorders.

From “‘Magic’ mushrooms blow many minds: study” on NineMSN:

“Magic mushrooms,” used by Native Americans and hippies to alter consciousness, appear to have similar mystical effects on many people, US researchers report.

More than 60 per cent of volunteers given capsules of psilocybin derived from mushrooms said they had a “full mystical experience.”

“Many of the volunteers in our study reported, in one way or another, a direct, personal experience of the ‘beyond,’” said Roland Griffiths, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry and behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who led the study.

A third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes.

Many likened it to the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.

And the effects lingered.

Two months after getting the drug, 79 per cent of the volunteers said they felt a moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction, according to the report published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

Griffiths said the drug might be used to treat addiction as well as severe pain or depression.

Other teams are also exploring some different posibillities:

Food and Drug Administration, and one team led by Dr Charles Grob at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California is testing the drug on patients with end-stage cancer.

“Our specific aim is to learn whether this psychoactive drug, psilocybin, might be effective in reducing anxiety, depression and physical pain, and therefore improving your quality of life,” the researchers say on their website.

Dr Solomon Snyder, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins who says he has experimented with LSD himself, said the experiment might lead to a way to find the “locus of religion” and the biological basis of consciousness in the brain.

What do you know, for a change the hippies were onto something. Of course too much of a good thing..

I highly recommend supporting MAPS: the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a non-profit organisation that assists research into the medical and spiritual potential of psychedelic substances, by helping scientists and research teams in securing funding, obtaining approval for and designing their studies. You can read about the many research projects currently under way in the US and around the world on their website. Current research includes MDMA, LSD, Ibogaine, psilocybin/mushrooms, mescaline/peyote, DMT, Ketamine, Salvia Divinorum and ajahuasca.