* Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics presents free online videos of lectures on hot topics in modern physics by experts in the field.  Interesting talks include Frank Wilczek’s The Origin of Mass and the Feebleness of Gravity, Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole Wars and Neil Turok’s What Banged?

* Since we can all use an Aaaw Cute moment in our hectic lives, I give you a picture of a baby ginger monkey.  Resist his big eyes, little paws and overall cuteness.  Just try to avert your eyes like Colbert couldn’t resist the little Thai bear.  “I want to take him home and name him Nappy.”

FUNNY (Thanks, Slate!):

This contained a video of a younger Bill O’Reilly (with a full head of hair) having a hissy fit during a break on World News Tonight.  As on YouTube, the administrators of Break must have been asked to take down the footage.  Someone should pare the video down to 30 seconds of crucial parts and repost.

[As of May 9th,] over 220,000 people have received some form of aid from government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), other organizations and the general public. Over 80,000 of them have been served by Myanmar Red Cross … “Food, hygiene kits, water purification tablets, mosquito nets, sanitary supplies and most importantly shelter materials. Shelter material is an absolute priority now, although we are keeping a very close eye on the health situation. With a lot of stagnant water around we are already hearing reports of isolated outbreaks of intestinal and mosquito-borne diseases.”

* This Unosat map has a lot of information including the cyclone’s path and extent of flooding over an existing political map. It appears that Cyclone Nargis made landfall as a Category 2 on our Saffir-Simpson scale.

* From NASA Earth Observatory:

* The Dartmouth Flood Observatory has a simulation of Nargis’s storm surge as a Google Earth layer and a “flyover” movie.

* The extent of flooding in the Burmese capital city of Rangoon/Yangon is discussed here.

* News footage from the morning shows members of the Burmese military posing for photo ops while handing out relief packages to a handful of cyclone victims. I suspect that these folks are not being told that the aid came from UN drops, but instead from the government itself (Update: my suspicions are confirmed). However, as the Australian PM says, the blame game can wait.

Cyclone Nargis, which unfortunately shares its name with one of India’s most lovely old-school actresses, recently claimed about 22,000 lives with another 40,000 still missing.  They are, as D put it, “a large, poor, mostly brown population who couldn’t evacuate and got hammered.”  It is so easy to fathom and dismiss natural disasters and large populations dying as a result in underdeveloped nations because, along with political corruption and poor infrastructure, it happens there a lot more often than it does here.  When talking of Katrina and the Flood, we often opine that what we experienced is the sort of thing that happens in the third world.  We are Americans, how could this happen to us?

This is where people like my husband and Varg step in and say that we are so much luckier than those dead, missing and distraught in Myanmar right now.  From Myanmar: “It Ain’t Me, It Ain’t Me”:

Hurricane Katrina swept through a heavily populated delta region the same as Cyclone Nargis swept through the Irrawaddy Delta. Is there a Weather Channel there? Contraflow? Mandatory Evacuations? Comfort Inns? Fema? Army Corps of Engineers?

All the recessions, crooked politicians, dead fetuses, foreclosures, high gas prices and crime rates here in the West pale in comparison to Myanmar. Aid in New Orleans came late at the expense of lives but it did indeed come.

That last paragraph made me weep.  It makes me want to go to Burma over my next vacation and help some folks rebuild just like those who came here to get us back on our feet.  It’s a thought, a seed, not impossible.  Until then, I am going to give what money I can and urge you to do the same.  Southern Louisianans, I know times are hard and many are strapped for cash during our own rebuilding, but … you know.

Another way to help is by not turning into a people like the shackled citizens of Myanmar.  I’m not going to get all Rah Rah America Hell Yeah on you, but the unacceptable proposition of living and dying at the mercy of a dictatorship is why I always wanted to be an American and moved here.  It was the promise of freedom and infrastructure, not either or none.  We still have it in spades, but unless we fight for it everyday, it will slip away.  Let’s keep America whole, for ourselves and for those who may one day need solace from tyranny and its results.

In solidarity with the victims of Cyclone Nargis and the citizens of Myanmar.

* International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
* A whole host of links at Network For Good

… Nonetheless, more than half the students who took the test in those grades did not pass, and 60 percent of high school students got an unsatisfactory ranking in standardized English and math tests, a figure three to four times higher than the percentage throughout Louisiana.

* George W. Bush, March 29, 2001

This model of record sales is brilliant - it offers so much more freedom and control to the artist and consumer - and deserves to be supported by more and more of us ‘netheads.

I’ve been wondering what effects the Myanmar Cyclone disaster will have on its government as it headed into voting on a draft constitution that shifts a lot of power to the military.  Will accepting aid from foreign countries, especially democracies, force the government to rethink its stance?  At considerable risk of not getting this aid to suffering people on time, it’s not unthinkable for foreign governments to hold such aid hostage until such time the current military government steps aside with a quickness. 

But, the United States should send that message through someone other than Laura Bush, especially after her own husband’s and his administration’s “inept” response to a similar disaster within the Bushes’ own country.  It’s hard to take seriously one’s assessment of the “false legitimacy” of another government, however illegitimate it truly is, when one is married to a doofus who’s out playing guitar and helping John McCain blow out his birthday candles as his people suffered and died.

UPDATE: Athenae points us to Network For Good’s list of how to donate to the cyclone victims.  Please give what you can like those who gave to us.