(3) Mon Apr 19 2004 19:25 How Dead Will You Be?:
PBS used to have a morbid
web page that would show you the blast radii of various types of
nuclear weapon superimposed over a map of your hometown, provided by the aptly-named
MapBlast. Now it's just a bunch of static HTML with descriptions of
how you really don't want to be anywhere near a nuclear blast. The
sample map image is the only thing thing that proves I wasn't
hallucinating it all.
Kris figured they took down the interactive portion because of
9/11, which makes total sense. Previously, terrorists would only have
had to obtain a nuclear device if they wanted to blow up a city. Now,
they have to obtain a nuclear device and a map and compass! But
what about other methods of horrible destruction, as yet out of human
control? Are there convenient, non-terror-enabling online forms that
show you how dead you will be? I decided to do some searching and find
out.
- Earthquake: You can find out when you
felt the tremors from past earthquakes, but that doesn't do you
much good. However, see Asteroid Strike below. Update!: If you live in the SF Bay Area, Adam Parrish has a deal for you! Maps and everything!.
- Volcano Eruption: All I could find was this distance
calculator to volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest. If you don't
mind doing a little web browsing, you can locate volcanoes in your
area at this Smithsonian site
or this USGS site, which
is less comprehensive but has maps and other volcano freebies.
- Tsunami: Nothing I could find.
- Asteroid Strike: Here's what I'm
talking about. Takes projectile characteristics and calculates all
types of damage: crater ejecta, shock wave, thermal radiation, etc.
Plus, since an asteroid strike causes an earthquake, you can work
out a rough correspondence of impact criteria to Richter
scale magnitude and simulate any kind of earthquake that way.
My only complaint: With the right asteroid you can create an impact
crater bigger than the earth. Indeed, you can specify an asteroid much
bigger than the earth and it doesn't, as it should, treat the
collision as a minor inconvenience to the asteroid.
- Tornado: Well, if you know the windspeed of a particular
tornado, you can plug it
in here and it will give you an index on the
meaningless-except-to-tornado-geeks "Fujita Scale". But it will also
give you wiseacre Midwestern comments, a decent proxy for "How dead
will you be?" (Eg. "Too late to head for the cellar!")
- Flood: Well, this is pretty interesting. It's not a calculator per se,
but a tutorial and
script for simulating flooding in a GIS system. The reason I say
it's interesting was I've been wondering how to do the same thing on a
grand scale: see what the world would look like if the sea level were
to rise or fall.
- Godzilla attack: Nothing. Not even a damage table you can roll on.
Well, I think that covers most of the SimCity disasters. Maybe the
raw power of a nuclear explosion or an asteroid strike are what let
you make a calculator that doesn't get hung up on the topography of
the landscape or the size of a particular volcano.
(3) Mon Apr 19 2004 23:02 Where was I on the night of the 19th?:
Way-ul, I was sitting in my chair, working on the new NewsBruiser website. It's got a big tour page that covers most of the major features, and a great new logo and button drawn by Brendan. Both logo and button feature the bruisin' yet friendly NewsBruiser pachycephalosaurus, as yet unnamed. Name him, and win a valueless prize!
If you're interested in the progress of the Brendan/Leonard logo collaboration, check out the Gallery of Rejected NewsBruiser Logos. The dimetrodon was my original idea, and in the face of all evidence I still think we could have gotten it to work out somehow.
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