Make Some Noise!!!

Well, I have to follow up last weeks blog of football experiences with a new football experience. Unfortunately, we were not so fortunate to obtain tickets this week. Instead we were invited to our Japanese friends house for dinner on Saturday night while the rest of the town gathered in the Stadium or huddled around TV's. PSU's opponent was Ohio State which was ranked #6 at the time compared with PSU's #18 ranking. I was at the lab until dinnertime, which happened to be about the same time as kickoff. When I left the lab I could hear the noise of the crowd at Beaver Stadium (about 1 mile away from my lab), and the game hadn't even started yet (shows how much noise 109,000 folks can make). I had to walk/jog home, and as I was passing through the down town area (about 2 miles away I could still hear the noise). Even as I approached our apartment I could still hear the noise from time to time (about 3 miles away)!!! That night we didn't even need to watch the game at dinner, we could get a good feeling for how the game was going just by listening to the crowd from 3 miles away. Actually, in addition to the crowd at the stadium we could here shouts and the like from neighboring apartments in every direction, and also the synchronized honking of car horns. Yet another interesting experience.

On a more serious note, I was just reading about the earthquake that hit in Pakistan. I couldn't help but notice that the quake was a 7.6, or 0.4 points higher than the quake we experienced two months ago in Japan. While there was little destruction in Japan, and only 1 death as far as I know, the quake in Pakistan has already accounted for over 30,000 deaths and maybe many more. I'm not sure what kind of quake they had, but I know the one in Sendai was 10 seconds of the up and down kind followed by 30 seconds of side to side. The up and down kind is the worst. I guess the point that I am trying to get here (be it ever so pathetically) is that the difference in structure and preparedness was the difference between catastrophe and a one day bother.