The Atlantic’s In Focus (edited by Alan Taylor, formerly of The Big Picture) has two features on the wreck of the Costa Concordia. The first is of the wreck itself, as it happened and shortly afterward. There are some spectacular (and spectacularly horrifying) images in this series.

The second, which I found even more gripping, is of the aftermath and the Italian rescue divers’ efforts to find survivors. Looking at the conditions these divers are working in makes it abundantly obvious that they are risking their lives with every dive. Pushing through floating furniture, going down underwater corridors and around corners and through broken windows…the number of opportunities for something to go wrong are too numerous to think about. And as if that weren’t enough, the ship is shifting, gradually moving back toward a dropoff into much deeper water. It’s a diving nightmare, yet they were going back again and again, desperately hoping to find one more living person.

Their courage stands in stark contrast to the absolute cowardice of Captain Schettino, the man responsible for the wreck who then fled the ship shortly afterwards. The recorded phone call between him and Gregorio de Falco, the local harbor authority, has now become legend in Italy. While the captain stood on shore, watching his passengers trying to flee (he later claimed that he slipped and fell into a lifeboat while overseeing the rescue effort), de Falco called him and said:

Listen, there are people going down from the prow using the rope ladder; you take that rope ladder on the opposite side, you go aboard and you tell me the number of people and what they have on board. Is that clear? You tell me whether there are children, women or people needing assistance. And you tell me the number of each of these categories. Is that clear? Schettino, maybe you saved yourself from the sea, but I’ll make you pay for sure. Go aboard, damn it.

Schettino did not go. So far the death toll stands at 16.

De Falco became a national hero, much to his dismay, because he was just doing his job. If only Captain Schettino had done the same.

Spiegel has a good three-part article on how the wreck occurred, why it was an accident waiting to happen, and why the aftermath was so much worse than it had to be. Suffice to say that if you’re on a cruise ship and you have reason to believe something has gone seriously wrong, don’t wait for an announcement and don’t wait for any of the crew to help you. In today’s “bigger is better” cruise ship industry, experienced and well-trained crews are not the norm.

The Costa Concordia wrecked at 9:45 at night. The emergency alert to passengers did not sound until 10:58.

I saw a Jesus fish decal on the bumper of a car this morning. It caught my eye because that was the second Jesus fish I have seen in five years of living here.

In the US, these decals are ubiquitous. They’re found in rear windows and on back bumpers of cars all over, along with bumper stickers proclaiming Christian religious statements. It’s not uncommon to see religious billboards on roads and highways. Many Americans feel the need to advertise their religiosity. Meanwhile, at the government level, Article VI of the US Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Yet a couple of intelligent debaters could spend hours on the question of which candidate is less likely to be elected President: a Muslim, or an atheist.

In Portugal, you can’t walk 500 meters without falling over a church. Their bells ring out the hours every day, and the masses every weekend. The calendar is packed full of saints’ holidays, which are observed nationwide, and the main south entrance to Lisboa features a huge statue of Jesus. Religion is impossible to avoid in Portuguese daily life.

But nobody ever puts a Jesus fish on their car. There are no religious bumper stickers or billboards. The Portuguese do not advertise their personal beliefs because they don’t think it’s anyone else’s business. And religion makes no appearance in public office — there are no prayers opening legislative sessions, as there are in the US. Candidates for high office do not proclaim their religious observance, and speeches aren’t ended with “God bless Portugal.”

It’s such an interesting dichotomy. In the US, a supposedly secular nation, religion is very public. And in Portugal, perceived as a Catholic nation, religion is very private.

SOPA means garbage in Swedish. I think that’s appropriate.

So do I.

Today I learned a Portuguese proverb:

Laranja de manhã é ouro, à tarde prata, e à noite mata.

Which translates to: “Orange in the morning is gold; in the afternoon, silver; and at night it kills.”

The Portuguese love their orange juice in the mornings. Most cafés have an industrial juicer right next to the espresso machine, and a giant bin of oranges somewhere nearby. It’s not so common to have it in the afternoon, and nobody orders it at night. Apparently, someone figured out long ago that the acidity of the juice does no favors to the digestion process while sleeping, and can lead to acid reflux or heartburn.

Interestingly enough, I never crave fresh orange juice at night. I do in the mornings, and sometimes in the afternoon. Is this my body’s intuition speaking, or my cultural training?

At any rate, I am now happily sucking down a fresh glass of orange juice and committing this proverb to memory. The best part is that it solves a long-standing problem I’ve had with remembering the difference between prata and prato. One means silver, the other means a plate or dish, and I am forever confusing the two. Now I can just remember that prata rhymes with mata.

The Algarve has been a little too sunny lately, and I’m starting to crave a good rainstorm and the resulting temporary streams and waterfalls. As a substitute, here’s a lush scene from Mpumalanga, South Africa: Mac-Mac Falls, dropping the Mac-Mac River 65 meters (213 feet) in a big hurry.

(Click the image to cascadize.)

Tech bloggers and columnists are having a freakout over Apple’s newly introduced iBooks Author, a program that allows authors to format e-books using interactive images, music, videos, and spoken recordings. It was designed largely for the textbook industry, and offers potential that no existing e-book format comes close to at the moment.

It is also free.

So why the freakout? Because the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) stipulates that the format is proprietary, and that if a user wants to profit from that format, said user must profit through Apple’s e-book store and nowhere else.

Apple is not asserting ownership of content, it’s asserting ownership of a proprietary format. Writers will not write in iBooks Author. They will write in Scrivener, Pages, Word, whatever, and then import that text into iBooks Author in order to format it for publishing in Apple’s store. The text will always belong to the author. The presentation of that text, as produced with this program, will have a restriction: either sell it in Apple’s store, or give it away for free.

In essence, Apple is saying, “Here is a program that will enable you to create interactive layouts using media forms in ways that no other program currently allows. We are giving you that program for free. Anything you format with this free program, you can give away for free in turn. But if you want to profit off something you format with our free program, then we want a share of those profits.”

This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. It apparently does to a lot of other folks. A typical example of the pundit backlash can be found at ZDNet, where the headline “Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement” tells you right away what you’re in for.

The author starts out by quoting another pundit, who writes:

It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty.

This is a false equivalence. Word and Photoshop are not free programs. They are not being distributed worldwide, free of charge, for anyone to use who wants to.

The ZDNet author goes on to claim that if an author writes “a work of staggering literary genius,” formats it in iBooks Author, and has it rejected by Apple, that author is then “out of luck” because this work can’t be sold elsewhere. No, that author can then lay out that same work of staggering literary genius in .mobi, .epub, .pdf and any other format they want, using any number of other formatting programs, and sell it wherever they want. (Note: the author updated his post to walk this back a bit, while complaining about the difficulty of maintaining multiple layouts for multiple formats. You mean like e-book authors do right now when they output their text in multiple formats for Kindles, iPads and Nooks?)

The only way this EULA would be as “mind-bogglingly greedy and evil” as this pundit claims is if it were the only formatting program available in the entire e-publishing industry and all authors were forced to use it.

What is it about Apple that sends so many tech writers over the edge, frothing at the mouth and spouting easily disproven untruths? I’ve never quite understood it.

Here’s a little something to brighten up your monitor…an HD time lapse in Yosemite National Park. The glimpses of fall colors are marvelous.

(via Bad Astronomy)

Fortunately, there is an alternative to the remaining field of Republican candidates: Canada.

It’s officially spring in the Algarve: the almond trees burst into bloom last weekend. And I do mean burst. This paragraph from the romantic myth of the Algarve almond trees actually rings true now:

The sultan did as she suggested, planting almond trees not only in his valley, but throughout the entire Al-Gharb. Months went by, but as the trees strengthened and grew, Gilda worsened. And then, one early spring morning, the sultan looked out his window and gasped in surprise.

My experience is slightly less romantic, as our windows do not look onto almond orchards. However, last weekend my wife and I were carrying our recyclables out to the collection site (which sits just across the street from our apartment buildings and right on the edge of an orchard), and we really did gasp in surprise. Two days before, that orchard had been bare. Then it rained. And literally overnight, the almond trees blossomed.

I love this time of year. Almond blossoms and fresh, sweet oranges all at the same time — it’s paradise.

I had lunch today in one of my favorite cafés, which is very Portuguese in its food, clientele, and prices: five euros paid for a plate full of curried chicken and vegetables, including a side of carrots in garlic, cilantro and olive oil (I love those carrots.)

After lunch, I pulled into a gas station and filled up our tank. As with everything else in Portugal, gas prices have been going up and up — between this fill and the last one, the price has jumped 13 cents per liter. (American readers: there are about 4 liters to a US gallon.) As the numbers in the pump’s counter rolled past five euros, I thought, “There’s one lunch.” And then I began counting. Two, three, four, five, six…

The pump stopped at 72.50 euros — or, fourteen and one half restaurant lunches.

That puts things in perspective!

So, just out of curiosity: how many lunches is a tank of gas elsewhere? Using your own local lunch prices, of course.