Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'earthquakes'

Degrees of Fragility

March 11th, 2011 · Comments Off on Degrees of Fragility

I was all set to end the week with a post about a particularly egregious patent-medicine fraud, but it somehow seems wrong in light of the catastrophe in Japan. We often forget how much our species is at the mercy of the planet, and how quickly everything we treasure can be snatched away. For the […]

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A Sonnet for Haiti

January 13th, 2010 · Comments Off on A Sonnet for Haiti

William Wordworth’s “To Toussaint L’ouverture” works beautifully today as a meditation on loss and rebirth: TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy of men! Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough Within thy hearing, or thy head be now Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den; – O miserable Chieftain! where and when Wilt thou find patience? Yet […]

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The Terrible Predictability of It All

January 13th, 2010 · 5 Comments

One of the most ghoulish-yet-wise sayings we’ve ever heard is “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.” (Or, a bit more accurately, “poorly constructed buildings do.”) So as soon as we heard news of Haiti’s latest natural catastrophe yesterday, we knew the death toll would be high. There is little chance that the nation’s relatively weak […]

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Keeping Tabs on Dear Leader’s Nukes

May 26th, 2009 · Comments Off on Keeping Tabs on Dear Leader’s Nukes

In devouring the weekend’s reports regarding North Korea’s latest atomic machinations, we were struck by the technological limits of the global monitoring system. Seismic readings indicate that something went down that Mother Nature didn’t intend, but such tremors can be caused by conventional explosions. (Yeah, that’s a lot of TNT, but it can be done.) […]

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