Synthesizing thunder using JavaScript

Synthesizing thunder using JavaScript(blog.kaistale.com)

60 points by kabla 11 years ago | 11 comments

reidrac 11 years ago |

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.

anigbrowl 11 years ago | |

It killed Chrome and made my laptop irresponsible

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.

reidrac 11 years ago | | |

Well, that would be amusing. English is my third language and sometimes I trust too much in the spell checker suggestions.

My graphologies ;)

joshuacc 11 years ago | |

"irresponsible" -> "unresponsive"

artjumble 11 years ago | | |

We don't know that was the intention. Perhaps the laptop decided to connect to the internet without a firewall.

Fragment 11 years ago | |

Well, in some places it's not a great idea to use your computer in an electrical storm if it's connected to a mains outlet.

Sounds like you were lucky.

jacobparker 11 years ago |

Andrew Glassner has written about this a lot http://www.glassner.com/computer-graphics/graphics-research/...

(See his references section)

kabla 11 years ago | |

Great, thanks for this, I'll have to check those out when I'm at a computer with access.

voidpointer 11 years ago |

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...

anigbrowl 11 years ago | |

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.

al2o3cr 11 years ago | |

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.