water, water everywhere

New video shown this week on the impact of the tsunami, half an hour after the earthquake. (Alternative link with video is here) Yikes. It also seems that water levels in a geologically sensitive well rose significantly during the time of the earthquake. The oddity: the well is situated in Virginia, US, halfway across the planet. I was pointed to a possible explanation here. And finally, how do you wash a tsunami ?. Ask CNN.

In other news, I just noticed that Google has published a paper on their distributed filesystem, GFS. Some very interesting performance benchmarks at the end of the paper, particularly a breakdown of operations and master requests (which give an idea of how indices are used by the Google search engine).