Meros orgullosos

Listening to the various representatives of the Chilean government speaking in the aftermath of Sunday's earthquake, you'd think it was their primary concern was to ensure that it occurs to nobody in the wider world to compare them with Haiti.

It's like watching a cyclist come of his bike in the park and land face first on the concrete. He stands up with an obviously bloodied face and when you go over and offer to help he says something like "No, I'm fine really...it's just a scratch, I've been practicing my emergency face forward dismounts. It wasn't as bad as it looked at all....not at all like that poor black guy who crashed into a tree a while ago....did you see him? Boy did he look messed up..."

Meanwhile it's only a matter of time before some desperate mother searching for nappies for her kids in Concepción gets blown away by one of those gun-toting householders local news crews have become fascinated with.

NASA has reported that the monster quake threw the Earth's rotation out by 8cm, which means that Sunday was a slightly shorter day than it had planned on being. Does this mean they'll have to reset that atomic clock in Greenwich?

The image below shows how the quake's tsunami energy dissipated across the Pacific, giving one a clear idea how both Japan and Australasia 'dodged the bullet' last weekend.