It killed Chrome and made my laptop irresponsible until I managed to close the page. Something in the thunder generation is bringing my system to its knees.
I'm not complaining about the page or anything, but I'm really surprised how unreliable and fragile are web browsers to pages with javascript. It's using a web worker, but other than that I can't see anything special.
I know you meant unresponsive, but this conjured up a delightful image of your laptop jumping around the room snapping its lid at people like a set of autonomous false teeth.
Sounds pretty real to me and the theory behind it is written up very nicely.
I wonder: would this work the other way round? Take a (stereo) recording of thunder and an exact time measurement between the flash and the first sound and plot the flash from that. If that worked, you wouldn't need a huge high speed camera mounted on a truck in order to record how a flash propagates...
Besides issues like temperature, you'd need to to control for interference from geographic features like hills and valleys. It might work in wide open flat spaces like the prairies of the American mid-west.
If you're interested in this, there was a very good program on PBS's science show Nova a month or two back, called 'the edge of space' or something similar, which involved photography of lightning at altitude and later from the space station, resulting in confirmation that lightning interacts with the upper atmosphere as well as the ground.
The biggest gotcha with a time-based measurement of the thunder is the variability of the speed of sound with temperature - about 0.6 m/s per degree Celsius. Given that thunderstorms tend to involve pretty significant temperature shifts, the temperature can vary significantly along the path length.
reidrac|11 years ago
I'm not complaining about the page or anything, but I'm really surprised how unreliable and fragile are web browsers to pages with javascript. It's using a web worker, but other than that I can't see anything special.
anigbrowl|11 years ago
I know you meant unresponsive, but this conjured up a delightful image of your laptop jumping around the room snapping its lid at people like a set of autonomous false teeth.
joshuacc|11 years ago
Fragment|11 years ago
Sounds like you were lucky.
jacobparker|11 years ago
(See his references section)
kabla|11 years ago
voidpointer|11 years ago
anigbrowl|11 years ago
If you're interested in this, there was a very good program on PBS's science show Nova a month or two back, called 'the edge of space' or something similar, which involved photography of lightning at altitude and later from the space station, resulting in confirmation that lightning interacts with the upper atmosphere as well as the ground.
al2o3cr|11 years ago