part 3 of Japan Update

Part1 original post
Part2 follow up 1
Part3 (this post) follow up 2
I am going to keep updating  my blog with general information for people that want to keep up. The best way to keep up do date on my posts about Fukushima is via this link.
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First I want to thank people for the warm response to my email, and also for the kindness people showed in passing it along to others. This is heartwarming, and I can only reply with my own love and appreciation, and the traditional buddhist prayer that "all beings be blessed by this selfless action".

After sending the email, though, I did have some further thoughts, and I started to compose a followup without a serious intention to send it, and in fact, in the end I didn't, but posted it to my blog-that-no-one-reads-but-me. But after that, radiation levels started spiking, and I got worried, then calm, and I wanted to let people know that I was still alright, but concerned. I then realized there were even more things I wanted to say, especially about how to keep informed about what is happening, so I wrote another blog post/email.

Thus I am sending a long these links. They are not terribly well composed, just a set of notes to myself, but I think they complement and complete my original thoughts.

Again, thanks of the response, and I will limit myself to individual replies from now on...

david

These are some very quickly drawn up follow up thoughts to cover some things I didn't mention the first time:

Right now the major concern is that radioactivity levels are rising, and yes, I am worried about them too. In this case, I think the western press is being more accurate than the japanese press. This is rapidly changing, but I feel certain that there will be some long lasting effects, though whether it will be confined to an area near Fukushima, or will spread is difficult to tell. Tokyo water is now not child-safe.

Part of the problem is that it is easy to lose the forest for the trees every time a new reading is reported. To get an overall picture, I have been looking at realtime radiation data (via a twitter search http://search.twitter.com/search?q=japan+realtime+data)

1. easiest to read, for me: (speedi data) http://www.targetmap.com/viewer.aspx?reportId=4870

2. (speedi) http://www.bousai.ne.jp/eng/ to add to the previous link

3: (combined source, seems to be more up to date???) http://www.rdtn.org/

Also: http://scienceblogs.com/deanscorner/assets_c/2011/03/Japan_Crowd_Sourcing-62939.php

The most worrying thing is that has started to affect the food chain. At the time of writing this, the only banned so far are spinach, kakina, and milk, but that will undoubtedly change as Kyodo is reporting that 11 vegetable are showing over-the-limit levels of radiation. Their list of 11 seems incomplete, unless they are including milk (no word on ketchup... J )

(Malte, if you are reading this, this is for you:)

The ones they mention are : "Spinach"  "kakina" ''komatsuna'' 'kukitachina'' (cesium 164 times the limit 82kbeq iodine 7 times 15kbeq)

"shinobufuyuna'' ''santona'' ''chijirena'' "Turnips"

''kosaitai'' and ''aburana'' rape. Yes therse are real vegetables, mostly leafy greens. But the weird ones on the list are local vegetables that even Yukie or my students have never heard of till now.

Why not other vegetables? One explanation is that for leafy vegetables, the edible part is more exposed, unlike cabbage which is rolled, or carrots which are roots, for example.

Many news outlets, such as the BBC have stopped live feeds. But, notably, and luckily, the best news source of the lot all along for up to date, accurate updates, analysis and commentary

reuters live blog

lives on. I hope they win a Pulitzer for keeping it going, because it is awesome.  The feed changes quickly and following the threads requires attentiveness, but is worth it. Top notch. If you read nothing else, read this.

I am not really a social network/facebook junkie, but I did come across this page of interest: Translation of japanese tweets about experience of the earthquake

I really wish I had more of this kind of stuff...about people's lives and how it affects them. The fear of nuclear fallout is drowning out the really important message.

Tonight my students told me me that local governments are extremely angry at the national government for being totally clueless and out of touch. I asked them what the best way to help was, and they said donate money. Goods and other things are there, but need logistics and financial support to get them delivered.

If you find what I am doing interesting, then I suggest looking at the following, where it is done more thoroughly, succinctly, and better:

Japanese born Columbia University Professor's facebook page of useful information

For a laugh:

Japanese Prime Minister's Office English Feed

On the japanese side, the best is Kyodo News. But you can also follow NHK and a twitter feed from us sources here

The bbc was good, but I saw some pretty silly reporting by them too. (Reporter: [longwinded leading intro] blah blah blah and so you must have seen business go down after the quake? Japanese fishstall owner: well not really. Lol )

But for those of you who like a little do it yourself quirkiness, check out http://yokosonews.com/live/

Or the conspiracy theorists among you might like:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/fukushima-smoking-gun-emerges-founding-engineer-says-reactor-4-has-always-been-time-bomb-exp

TEPCO (all together: b00000) has a live webcam from VERY far away. As I write, there is steam coming out of a reactor.

There has been a lot of confusion around the micro and mili thing. This is here for my reference:

1 Mega = 1,000,000 $10^{6}$

1 Kilo = 1,000 $10^{3}$

1 = unity 10

1 mili = 0.001 $10^{-3}$

1 micro = 0.000001 $10^{-6}$

Of course I am also quite interested in the physics of it all, but I shant bother anyone else with it, since it would only make your eyes roll.