blathering from some guy in taiwan
On September 9, 2007, a magnitude 6.6 quake (according to the Central Weather Bureau; 6.5 according to USGS) struck off the east coast of Taiwan. This is video from the security camera in my restaurant in Taipei about 115km/70mi from the epicenter during the time of the quake. You can see our advertisements and globe lights swinging during the quake.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y35QjKwLSMw
OK, so it’s not terribly exciting. *shrug*
Tonight at 1:51am we had a magnitude 6.6 quake off the east coast followed by a magnitude 5.7 aftershock four minutes later. The first one had a shake intensity of 3 in Taipei which is pretty strong. Shake intensity and magnitude are entirely different scales and systems of measurement so you can’t compare them, but it was plenty enough to get doors rattling and cups and dishes banging into each other.
Main quake:
M 6.6 87.3 km ENE of Hualien City 2007-09-07 01:51 #058 (0907015166058)
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5e/seismic/Data/quake/EE0907015166058.gif
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5e/seismic/Data/quake/EE0907015166058.txt
M 6.6 宜è˜å—澳地震站æ±åå—æ–¹ 74.6 公里 2007-09-07 01:51 #058 (0907015166058)
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5/seismic/Data/quake/EC0907015166058.gif
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5/seismic/Data/quake/EC0907015166058.txt
M 6.5, Taiwan region 2007-09-06 17:51:27 UTC Z=62km 24.3336N 122.3239E
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2007gybt.php
Aftershock:
M 5.7 94.5 km ENE of Hualien City 2007-09-07 01:55 #059 (0907015557059)
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5e/seismic/Data/quake/EE0907015557059.gif
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5e/seismic/Data/quake/EE0907015557059.txt
M 5.7 宜è˜è˜‡æ¾³åœ°éœ‡ç«™æ±åå—æ–¹ 81.6 公里 2007-09-07 01:55 #059 (0907015557059)
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5/seismic/Data/quake/EC0907015557059.gif
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5/seismic/Data/quake/EC0907015557059.txt
For those who missed the update to the previous post, iPetitions has responded that they will be changing their system to remove ‘Province of China’ from the Taiwan entry in their country list. They still have not made the change, but I realize that these things can take time. Until then, please keep singing the petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ipetitions-taiwan/
There’s currently 40 signatures on it! That’s pretty impressive.
Separately, I finally got a response from echomusic, the service provider which hosts Kanye West’s official web site. They have opened a ticket in response to my complaint which I assume means that they will at some point change it.
The DPP announced today a last minute addition to their ‘normal country’ draft resolution that ‘Chinese New Year’ will be renamed to ‘Taiwanese New Year’. This change comes on the heels of an amendment to drop the ROC Calendar in favor of the Gregorian Calendar. Party members at first had proposed scrapping the holiday altogether, but they ran into stiff opposition from those who were afraid of losing out on their week-long holiday. President Chen Shui-Bian was quoted as praising the move by saying, “Once we have a holiday named after Taiwan, A-Bian thinks it will be inevitable that other countries will recognize us as a normal country.”
I was looking for a site that could host a petition asking Kanye West to stop referring to Taiwan as a ‘Province of China’ when I came across iPetitions which looks like it would be a good place to post a petitions… except that it too calls Taiwan a ‘Province of China’.
So instead, I started a petition asking iPetitions to stop calling Taiwan a ‘Province of China’:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ipetitions-taiwan/
Please click through and sign the petition. (And yes, if you’re in Taiwan you’ll have to select ‘Taiwan, Province of China’ as the country. Oh the irony.)
EDIT (2007-08-29 17:43): iPetitions has responded that they will be changing the listing but at this time the change has not been made. I will leave the petition up until the change is made.
Occasionally I will register with or want to order products from a website only to find that they list something called ‘Taiwan, Province of China’ in their country list. Last week I got a newsletter from the Mises Institute about their new Bastiat Collection, a two volume set of the complete English translations of Frederic Bastiat’s writings. I was eager to order a set, as his writings have long been on my wish list but were a bit inconvenient to get previously. I was surprised to find that the Mises Institute also listed ‘Taiwan, Province of China’ in their online store. I sent a complaint to them and got back a very positive response a few days later, and quite emphatically at that:
Thank-you for bringing this matter to our attention. We have finally isolated the file and changed the Taiwan entry in our new e-commerce software’s database. We at the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics do not support the government of People’s Republic of China, or their policies, either directly or indirectly. Having Taiwan listed as “Taiwan Province of China” was nothing more than an oversight on our behalf as we continue to fix and customize our new software to our specific needs.
I couldn’t help but to support such a response by immediately ordering the Bastiat Collection as well as Freedom Under Siege by Ron Paul.
The Kanye West web site also lists ‘Taiwan, Province of China’ in their registration system but they have not responded to or corrected this after two weeks.
Things have pretty much quieted down here. On the way home from checking in at my Qingcheng Restaurant I saw a small tree (really more like a sapling) in front of Nanjing E. Rd. MRT station knocked over, and there were at least two big trees down in Rongxing Park on the Minquan-Jianguo corner, one of which was covering the sidewalk. I also saw a branch down in front of the hospital at the corner of Minquan-Jilin. So looks like we did get some decent gusts earlier this morning even in the city. But it looks like those on the southside of Taipei in Xindian City, Muzha and Yangmei had a lot more excitement than we did, just from being a couple dozen km closer to the storm center.
Not too much to report in Taipei. It’s been gloomy most of the day but only occasional gusts and moderately heavy rainfall. The central part of the east coast got considerably more rain and wind. The current top rainfall for Taiwan is for an area in Hualian County which got 870mm (2′ 10 1/4″) of rain. No, that’s no an annual figure, that’s for this one storm.
Fairly tame in Taipei. Probably won’t get any worse.
As of right now, every city and county government has announced that businesses and schools will be closed tomorrow. I closed my restaurants early tonight at 8pm and we will decide tomorrow when to re-open for business. It is too early to tell when it will be safe for our staff and customers to open.
Meanwhile I’ve managed to get almost complete translations up on my English version of official business and school closures. The exceptions are notes 3 and 4 at the bottom which are atrocious run-on sentences I can’t quite wrap my head around in understanding. They don’t seem to be terribly important though from what I can understand of them. 3 is about who is affected by the closure notices and 4 seems to be about whether or not the time off is paid or will require make-up work. My translator fetches a copy of the official page every ten minutes and rewrites it and posts it on my web server. Pretty neat for a quick hack.
The current forecast has the typhoon cutting across the center of Taiwan but the storm is big enough that it will probably affect all of Taiwan. The eye should cross over the east coast tomorrow morning at 8am and exit on the west coast around 5pm. So there’s a good chance that we’ll be stuck at home all of tomorrow unless the storm weakens after making landfall. Right now things are very quiet in Taipei. “The calm before the storm.”
