Odd isn't, how provincial our reactions truly are. I have a friend who is in India over her winter break for her first time outside the US. It is mind blowing to me to think what she must be going through as her first time as a foreigner in India under the circumstances.

She is in Bombay, so I'm not worried about her. But it will be fascinating to hear her stories of all this when she returns.

Crazy ole world. Why don't people understand the huge numbers of casualties has nothing to do with the third world thing, but with the fact that these were heavily populated coastal tourist areas at the height of the season, with the waves hitting at a time when many people, children and fishermen and tourist industry workers especially, were just beginning their day? If a 9.0 earthquake hit just off the southern California/Mexican coast during the height of the tourist season, with tsunamis equivalent to this one, the number of deaths would be incredibly high--likely in the tens of thousands too. The reason why the Alaska earthquake doesn't compare isn't because of the ferocity of the quake, but because of the thin population in the area, which is true of most earthquakes and tsunami.

I do hope this disaster results in an early warning system for the area. It is true that in certain areas, like the Banda Aceh area of Sumatra, or the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, that there never would have been much time for warning, as it all happened so fast, and there was no place for most of the victims to go. I read that on one of the islands, when authorities finally arrived they found only a third of the island's population had survived. That is just an unimaginable scale of death.

I was online early on the 26th, as the story came in, and I watched and read in horror as the stories come in from the gitgo, while the death toll rise by the thousands each hour. Now there is talk of 60,000, and a likely doubling of that number due to water borne diseases, lack of water, food, medical supplies, and shelter and shade (lest we forget, these are tropical regions, but due to development, very little natural shade from the sun.

But I note that the German chancellor and his party were promptly airlifted out.