A mass e-mail posing as a plea for aid to help the victims of last month's Asian tsunami disaster is actually a vehicle for spreading a computer virus, Web security firm Sophos said Monday.
The worm appears with the subject line: "Tsunami donation! Please help!" and invites recipients to open an attachment called "tsunami.exe" -- which, if opened, will forward the virus to other Internet users.
Rock singer Kristin Hersh had something else entirely in mind when she named her new band 50 Foot Wave.
Sometimes there's just not much you can do about bad timing.
"It's either on my part or God's, I'm not so sure," Hersh, a heroine of the alternative rock scene with her longtime band Throwing Muses, told The Associated Press in an interview.
The band's first full CD, which is being released in March, was mailed to rock critics about a week before Asia's devastating tsunami, which killed more than 160,000 people.
The tsunami that killed thousands around the Indian Ocean was caught by a series of radar satellites, allowing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists to develop measurements of the wave in mid-ocean.
[...]
... two hours after the undersea quake that launched the tsunami, the wave was about two feet.
An hour and 15 minutes later it was down to about 16 inches. After eight hours the main wave was down to about two to four inches, though a portion in the Bay of Bengal was still at about 10 inches, the NOAA scientists said Monday.
Man, no wonder nobody "saw" it coming. The swell was smaller than your average chop.
Two weeks on, the Earth is still vibrating from the massive undersea earthquake off Indonesia that triggered the tsunami, Australian researchers said on Sunday.
The Australian National University (ANU) said the reverberations were similar in form to the ringing of a bell, though without the sound, and were picked up by gravity monitoring instruments.
[...]
Immediately after the quake the oscillation was probably in the 20 to 30 cm motion range that is typically generated in the earth by the movements of the sun and moon.
[...]
"We can still see a steady signal of the earth vibrating as a result of that earthquake two weeks later. From what it looks like, it appears it will probably continue to oscillate for several more weeks."
[...]
Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass towards the Earth's center during the quake caused the planet to spin three millionths of a second faster and tilt about 2.5 cm on its axis.
2.5 centimeters closer to global climate change would be my guess.
01-17-2005 05:21 PM
2.5 centimeters closer to global climate change would be my guess.
