posted
So, I was just sitting in my dorm freaking out about class registration, and then I read that article, and it put it all in perspective. Thanks for posting it.
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quote:Originally posted by Tara: So, I was just sitting in my dorm freaking out about class registration, and then I read that article, and it put it all in perspective. Thanks for posting it.
So basically, this Earthquake was good for you?
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quote:Originally posted by Tara: So, I was just sitting in my dorm freaking out about class registration, and then I read that article, and it put it all in perspective. Thanks for posting it.
So basically, this Earthquake was good for you?
Praiseworthy is she who can learn and grow from tragedy.
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Death toll up to 140, with enough people still reported as missing to probably take the total above 200. Over 2000 injured treated so far.
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quote:Originally posted by Tara: So, I was just sitting in my dorm freaking out about class registration, and then I read that article, and it put it all in perspective. Thanks for posting it.
So basically, this Earthquake was good for you?
Praiseworthy is she who can learn and grow from tragedy.
Yeah, see actually experiencing a tragedy, maybe. But just hearing about one and feeling better about one's self as a result? I never bought the "perspective" thing when it comes to hearing about someone's suffering.
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posted
Not about oneself, but rather putting the nonsense one experiences in day-to-day living into perspective.
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posted
Realizing that some of our personal mountains are actually molehills can be a good thing. And it doesn't in any way diminish other people's mountains.
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posted
Indeed, it takes a greater degree of sensitivity to change one's perspective by empathizing with the tragedy of others as opposed to changing your perspective only after personal tragedy. It's admirable.
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quote:Originally posted by Tara: So, I was just sitting in my dorm freaking out about class registration, and then I read that article, and it put it all in perspective. Thanks for posting it.
quote:Originally posted by Armoth: Indeed, it takes a greater degree of sensitivity to change one's perspective by empathizing with the tragedy of others as opposed to changing your perspective only after personal tragedy. It's admirable.
I don't think people are able to do this. I know people *claim* to be able to do this, but there's really no way of proving whether it is actually possible to have any kind of "perspective," nor to prove whether that kind of thing would actually help anyone. Isn't there a reason people are programmed to remember positive experience and forget negative ones?
Edit: And I mean this seriously- it's something I have thought about on occasion. Your seeing a news story about an earthquake in Italy changes very little about your personal life experience. You are familiar with what an earthquake is, with the concept of death and loss, and the story acts to remind you of those images you already have. Perhaps it reminds you of memories you have that were far worse than the experiences you are currently having. That's perspective isn't it? The story just reminds you of your own experience- it doesn't actually provide a lot of insight into anyone else's. Then of course there are deeply effecting stories and books and reports that might bridge that gap between your experience and another persons, and really give you their perspective on something, and then *that* would give you perspective. Still, I think just hearing this story doesn't give you anything you don't already have, and I always feel a slight discomfort when people talk about "the bad things in the world," as these monolithic evils that help them appreciate their own lives- how can we actually know any degree of suffering greater than we have experienced ourselves?
I don't want to say I wouldn't feel sympathy if I actually saw this earthquake or talked to someone who had been there, but as it is it's just a story I'm not a part of, and I can't connect in a meaningful way to that. I think if I did, I would never be able to sleep at night, which is hard enough as it is.
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posted
Pfft, yea, you said it Orincoro, it is so not possible to reevaluate our thinking on something when we compare it against another thing. Anybody who *claims* that they can do this is lying just so that they can cover up the fact that they are taking joy in someone else's misery.
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posted
Oh shut up. I've had enough hatrack pity parties for no one in particular to last me a lifetime. Yet we've all posted about things that actually hurt us, personally, and have been told kindly to choke on it.
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posted
Orincoro- Can you elaborate on why you think we can't relate to other peoples' experiences, even if we haven't experienced anything like it? Isn't empathy part our genetics? In order to get along with other people (which, in a primitive sense, is crucial to our survival) we must be able to predict what other people are feeling. That's basically what I'm doing when I read such a news article -- I'm thinking "Well, my life might be difficult and complicated at the moment, but at least the building is not coming down around my head." It reminds you of what is important and what is not -- what is worth getting upset over and what is not. Yes, in a VERY VERY technical sense, the earthquake is "good" for me. But only because it helps me center my life around what is important, rather than what is trivial. I learned something from having the experience of reading the news article, and learning is always good. Hopefully, it will inspire me to live my life in a more productive, healthy way, which is good for others as well as for myself. That is one of the reasons we read news, isn't it? To stay connected to the issues of the outside world and not get trapped in our own little bubbles. You raise interesting questions, I'm just not sure what you're trying to prove exactly.
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posted
I don't exactly know what I would want to prove. Nothing really, except that I remember my mother making comments, as so many mothers do, about how children in India were starving, and we should therefore eat our zucchini. Why she never cooked anything else instead was never clear, even though it was obvious none of us liked it in particular.
Anyway, she ended up going to India for three weeks on business, going to tech and call centers around Mumbai, and she never said anything like that again. She was shaken by the experience to the core. What kind of perspective was she affording us by telling us that Indian children didn't get zucchini? I honestly don't know. I know it had absolutely no meaning to me. I relate everything I read to the most immediate experiences I have. What can be accomplished in a vivid piece of music or a poem or a book, is achieved every day in passing moments- we want very much to capture the best things, or the most affecting things, but I think all this other stuff just washes over us. I don't think knowing the fact that your building *isn't* falling down helps you to align your personal priorities in a way that makes any more sense than if you didn't think about it.
In fact, for some people like my aunt, on the whole it would be better for her if she didn't know that mold is capable of killing, or that wheat and whey allergies are possible. She's swamped in the knowledge and awareness of the greater world, and so she doesn't even realize that she feels the way she does, not because of the food that she eats, or the content of the air, but because she's obsessive compulsive.
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quote:Weeks before the disaster, an Italian scientist had predicted a major quake around L'Aquila, based on concentrations of radon gas around seismically active areas.
Seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani was reported to police for "spreading alarm" and was forced to remove his findings from the Internet.
I wish I knew more about seismology - on the surface this is quite shocking and makes me wonder what the point of studying ways to predict earthquakes is if the government is going to prevent anyone from acting on the information.
How awful - not just the deaths, but the people who are trapped and helpless, the homeless, orphaned. It seems shallow to be sad about the loss of architecture too, but seeing something grand that has lasted hundreds of years brought to rubble really does have a sobering effect. And I suppose lashing out at the government is the easy thing to do in the face of something so senseless, but I still feel like someone needs to explain why people were not evacuated.
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posted
Older buildings of this nature are made of low strength, highly brittle materials. The typical way for a building to survive a typical earthquake is that when the forces induced in the structure by the earthquake exceed the "linear" range and move into the "plastic" range (where deformations have lasting effects, instead of returning with no change to the material or the geometry) a lot of energy is absorbed. This is no as hysteretic damping, and complements the natural damping that's naturally part of any structure. Modern design codes require that anything built in seismic zones are properly detailed to allow for this kind of deformation and energy absorption. These old building not only aren't constructed to deal with those radical deflections, but the materials are brittle enough that just a short ways into their plastic phase and they fail.
Some strengthening is done to the more historically important buildings but most are left as is, and now we see the results. A warning, I suppose, to anyone living in an older building in a seismic zone. In the states of course there's not much that old, but anything before the 80s, and to some extent, the early 90s probably is quite properly detailed for seismic loads. Unreinforced masonry buildings (typical cinder-block, or brick buildings) are incredibly dangerous, even if they were built as late as the last half of the 20th century.
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