As you all are aware of the tragic disaster which struck in South East Asia and the death - toll has already exceeded 116,000 people. Let us make an effort of helping the poor victims by donating for their welfare.

Click on this link to go to list of organizations which are collecting aid online.
http://www.cnn.com/....aidsites/index.html
cheers,
Priyanka
http://www.m6.net
M6.Net - Multi-sites hosting account on Windows 2003

An interesting related article:

Earthquake: Coincidence or a corporate oil tragedy?

By Andrew Limburg
Online Journal Guest Writer
http://onlinejournal.com/Commentary/123104Limburg/123104limburg.html

Unoffical DBMan FAQ

http://creativecomputingweb.com/dbman/index.shtml/

I was seismic crews for about 8 years of my life. Oil rigs for another 4.

The clown that wrote that article has his head stuck right up his kyber pass and the article is full of blatant ignorance and stupidity. The seismic cable is about 10 metres below the surface, not the guns. The cable - as a single cable, not considering a 3D array, is composed of 48 x 50 metre sections. Thats 2.4 kilometres there, add in the lead in and tail sections and it is usually about a total of 3 kilometres from the boat to the tailbuoy. The air gun arrays can be anything from about 8 guns to about 50. These usually are about 2 metres below the surface and trail behind the boat from about 10 to 20 metres.

This journalistic yo-yo seems to think that these guns do some damage and are capable of sending shockwaves to massive depths. In his article he gets one thing right, the guns go off about every 10 seconds. Now for the maths, if reflections were capable of being received from those depths in subteranian terra firma, sound travelling at approx 1500 metres per second, there would be a 60 second (about) round trip for the reflections to reach the seismic cable. In short, every time a shot was fired, you would get the reflections 6 shots later at a rate of a shot every 10 seconds. This is in fact quite a feasible way of shooting seismic, the recording instruments can be set with any recording delay. This was done in the mariana trench and a few other places. The reality is that the shot signature (sound waves) die out inside about 10 kms, else there would be a major distortion and mixing up of data from different shots.

Bob Brown -the Australian head up his backside greenie, and others seem to allude to the fact that all this seismic activity somehow did something. Consider the logic of it all. Here is a seismic boat merrily banging away. All this shockwave problems to be considered. No boat I have ever been on has EVER had any structural damage from the guns. No hull plates has ever had to be welded on again because of that kind of damage. The propellor and shafts cause the damage, nothing else. I can assure you we all sleep through all this. It is at times quite normal to test fire the guns on the back deck at times - and nothing more than normal ear muffs were worn.

The fish? They may get a few headaches but really nothing more than that. In fact iit was not all that uncommon to have dolphins and whales alongside the boat. They certainly were not real worried.

Where did I shoot seismic? From the Gulf of Hormuz (Middle East), to the Sea of Oshtock (Russia) down to the Java Sea.

Really, it is all total bull these people are peddling. Not a damned one of them has ever set foot on a seismic boat. Oh and yeah, I did spend about two years of that 8 on land crews, we used high frequency shakers and dynamite.

The tsunami disaster is terrible. I have worked and lived in most of these affected places. My heart does go out to these wonderful people affected.