I’ve been working with the CrisisCommons gang to help put together and catalogue information in response to the quake and tsunami.

What i’ve been realizing is that there is very little public written record with regard to how this is being done, or where it’s being recorded (save for the wiki), so i thought i’d start dropping links in a place that i could link others to.

So here it goes! And more will come as i find more links.

Crisis Commons links

• http://crisiscommons.org
• http://wiki.crisiscommons.org (where most of the action is at)

Nuclear related information

• http://mitnse.com/
• http://twitter.com/#!/tep_co (Tepco’s twitter feed)

Maps

• http://gis.ats.ucla.edu/japan/ (Data regarding disaster response on the ground, free phone locations, shelters and more)
• Blog post about ushahidi for japan, and tweet cataloguing

(via AGU Blogosphere | The Landslide Blog | Liquefaction from the Sendai earthquake - a remarkable video)

I can never remember where the BSD plaintext dictionary is (at least, on OSX). It is in /usr/share/dict in a file called “words”. This dictionary is incredibly useful, as you can do all the wonderful things you’d want via text processing tools available on Unix like systems. Want all words that contain “taco”? egrep 'taco' words Or perhaps all words ending with “ca”: egrep 'ca$' words

Just for completeness’s sake here’s the README in full:

#       $NetBSD: README,v 1.2 1997/03/26 07:14:32 mikel Exp $
#       @(#)README      8.1 (Berkeley) 6/5/93

WEB ---- (introduction provided by jaw@riacs) -------------------------

Welcome to web2 (Webster's Second International) all 234,936 words worth.
The 1934 copyright has elapsed, according to the supplier.  The
supplemental 'web2a' list contains hyphenated terms as well as assorted
noun and adverbial phrases.  The wordlist makes a dandy 'grep' victim.

     -- James A. Woods    {ihnp4,hplabs}!ames!jaw    (or jaw@riacs)

I’ve dreamt of structures like this since i was a kid. When i’d think of worlds i’d like to draw, these are the sorts of scenarios that would pervade my thoughts. I’m amazed to find that they are real on earth too. (thanks for the link to @heisenthought)

Vietnam’s Mammoth Cavern - Interactive Graphic - National Geographic Magazine

My father-in-law has several bird feeders, and daily sets out peanuts for bluejays. The feeders draw all sorts of smaller birds; cardinals, juncos, house and yellow finches. The peanuts on the other hand draw not just bluejays but some very large crows, and what has been dubbed by my father-in-law, the fat ass squirrel.

The Fatass Squirrel

The Fatass Squirrel cluelessly searching for where things may be buried

The awesome dudes at Confreaks have posted the video for our Rubyconf talk was posted. I set Carolyn up with a Github account and i’ve created a repository for recipes. We posted the Chicken Scallion Quinoa recipe we discussed in our talk. Check it out!

@crupar and i created some some gingerbread creations for Google’s Nexus S contests. Here are the picts.

Hyperbole and a Half: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything