tagryn's musings

This is the Mint 4200 series robot cleaner, which retails for $200 at Amazon. We use this for cleaning our house's hardwood and kitchen floors. You place either a "dry" or "damp" cloth shammy on to the front of the robot; both come with the product, or you can use Swiffer sheets also. It navigates by exchanging information with a base unit which projects an invisible beam up on to the ceiling of whatever room is being cleaned. The robot builds a "map" of the room by moving around until it bumps into something, which it then stores and knows not to try moving into that space again. This actually works better than it sounds, and the system is fairly efficient at this. Normally every time we run the Mint on our floors, it finishes after about an hour with a lot of dirt and pet hair collected. The shammies can be cleaned in with the normal laundry, though I recommend brushing off the major dirt before putting it in with the rest of the wash. As with the Neato, a good function is that it gets under furniture and into spaces which we normally wouldn't remember to clean regularly.

In all, we're quite happy with both. There's a learning curve to each, but they've both saved a lot of time and have cut down on the amount of weekly housekeeping we have to do. In both cases I can now set up each robot, push "start", and simply let it run mostly without assistance, and after about an hour the cleaning is done. That's about all one could ask for from a robotic assistant. Oh, and they're fairly neat to watch as they roll around cleaning and going around anything that gets in their way. There's also robots available for lawn mowing, but the price (over $1,500) is prohibitive right now. The makers of the Roomba also have models for floor cleaning, pool cleaning, and gutter cleaning. As with anything, caveat emptor: read the reviews on Amazon,com and elsewhere before purchasing.

"(Somalia) was a watershed," said one State Department official, "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she’ll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All the things you’d expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she’ll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first.' People in these countries - Bosnia is a more recent example - don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it." (pg 334-335)

• 0:10: Pause here, since this is only shown for a few seconds. Focus not on the breaking wave in the foreground, but the one behind it. I note that according to Sendai coast bathymetric studies the area we're looking at here is in fairly deep water still, so a wave should NOT be able to touch the bottom and start to build up. Its an indication of the sheer power of the tsunami that we're seeing a wave face rearing up here.
  
• 0:35: The helicopter passes over one tsunami surge. This is about as close as one can get to a killer tsunami and survive, I think.
  
• 2:15: We see the classic exposed sea bed which is the precursor to tsunami.
  
• 4:25: Its difficult to gauge size and height from the perspective so far, but here the camera zooms in as the wave crashes over the exposed reef. We also see the treeline in the beginning and end of the shot.