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How to Film a Tornado
goneaway writes: "An interesting examination of the competitive world of filming tornadoes or "torn porn" as they call it over at the Atlantic. A fair amount of attention is given to the mechanics of filming and the inventions created to "safely" film while all hell is breaking loose."
This sounds pretty dangerous- I will stick to filming fruit and other serene objects!
graspee
amazing how they manage to write an article about a stunningly visual phenomenon, and yet don't include a single image.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
It may be escapism, avoidance of personal life problems, or one of any number of distractions. however, most technical innovations in film and many other mechanical disciplines come about this way.
Stop motion film and animation, for instance, are very laborious ways of accomplishing tasks of communication that can be easily accomplished in other ways. However, the drive of fanatical individuals has resulted in some great art in those cases.
Anything that increases safety and stability while filming a tornado would also increase these characteristics in other chaotic situations, such as a war zone or the scene of a terrorist attack.
Goat sex free since 2001
There's a problem with this. A hurricane and a tornado are two entirely different animals. You're not going to be able to make a plane that will handle that kind of abuse. Especially not a small RC model.
Hurricanes may be large and deadly, but their force is spread out, and the winds are relatively straight-line and slow (average what, 100MPH?).
A tornado is an extremely chaotic beast, with a small vortex and much higher wind velocities (some approaching 300+MPH).
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
Wouldn't it be a little easier to mount a remote control airplane from radio shack or better quality, with an epoxy encased digital video camera with solid media?
Have one inner relay remote controlled to let go and start recording till the battery ran out. Fly this sucker into the tornado after making as many close passes as possible.
Then when the tornado is letting up track it with a simple directional locater picked up for under 100 bucks at the spy shops online?
Find the camera and crack open the solid media which sould survive anything short of getting broken in half against a house or something.
This is an idea that could be done under 500 bucks total. If I had the money these guys throw around I'd be making these planes in bulk and having my friends come out and help fly them into the tornados!
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I won't abuse the article by copying the links here. When you see those photos and videos, seems crazy how anything so beautiful can be so destructive - or vice versa.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Step 1... Set up where the tornados are likely to be. Any trailor park will be a good place to start because as everyone knows tornados are naturally attracted to mullet hair cuts
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In other words a magazine that never presumed it's audience was stupid or uneducated, but had a curiosity about the world, and a certain level of education.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've heard about perversions, but this literaly blew me away...
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
As someone who has seen the movie 'Twister' no less than a dozen times, I believe the answer to capturing the ultimate 'Torn Porn' is painfully obvious. Simply do the following:
:-)
:-)
(1) Purchase a gross of small, clear plastic balls (this can be substituted by a large number of the clear plastic eggs that silly putty comes in...)
(2) For a solid week, every time you see one of those highly-annoying X-10, wireless camera ads while cruising the net actually purchase one - if my calculations are correct that should give the average browser approximately 538 wireless cams within a seven day period...
(3) Insert a single X-10 wireless cam (with newly hacked, longer lasting self contained power source) in each of the clear plastic balls/eggs.
(4) Next...as they learned in 'Twister' , you need to attach twisty-twirly-thingy-mabobs ® made from old pop cans to the balls to help them enter the tornado's vortex safely.
(5) And finally, create a large tin can with a half-moon Plexiglas top that looks like a cross between R2D2 and the first Lunar Lander to house all of these video-balls.
Now that we have created the device, it is time for deployment. Once again, I will take a page from the movie 'Twister' and suggest that you strap the launcher into the back of a very large (not to mention, expensive) 4x4 truck. Then, simply find a big-ass tornado, put on the cruise, drive straight at it and jump out at the last minute!!!
Oh well...just a thought!!!
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
Good idea in theory, but it probably would not work well in practice.
First of all, there's debris. LOTS of debris. It would smash the plane to bits long before it got into the vortex of a large tornado.
Second, there's often hail in the general area of a tornado.
Third, it was tried with a helicoptor, but it was realized what the hail around the tornado would do to the blades (namely they wouldn't exist anymore)
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
IANAM (I am not a meteorologist), but...
Civilians film a lot of the tornado footage with their home video cameras. I would suppose that it is more dramatic, considering the majority of these people don't have any training, are terrified, and escape unscathed by chance. Their emotions are in strong contrast to tornado enthusiasts, who, from most peoples' observations, usually appear intrigued, not frightened.
Of course, to capture a tornado, a number of variables must be correct and you must meet several objectives first.
Obviously, there must be light (or you must have nightvision). A great number of tornadoes occur during the night hours and probably aren't captured on film due to this reason.
You must actually locate the area of a storm that is most likely to produce a tornado. The advent of Doppler [sic, it's named after a person] radar has made this task much less difficult. Meteorologists will usually search for the classic "hook and coil" signature that is indicative of a tornado.
Finally, you must arrive at the target location before the tornado activity disippates. They usually last less than 20 minutes.
Do you like German cars?
The guy who wanted to drive a fortified SUV INTO a tornado shouldn't be allowed to breed. We will be hearing more about him in the Darwin awards, rest assured.
Look, I live in Tornado alley, and up to a few months ago lived in "pre-fabricated housing", a.k.a. a trailer home (a.k.a. "tornado bait"). I'm a part-time storm spotter, and I've seen the damage a "little" F-1 gustnado can cause, let alone an F-5 monster. An F-5 will quite literally suck the asphalt off a highway.
If I were out tooling around in, say, an M1A1 Abrahms Tank, and I saw a tornado coming, I would turn tail and run (at right angles to the path of the tornado) as fast as that tank's treads would take me. Wind speeds in the vortex of a tornado have been measured at OVER 300 miles per hour with Doppler radar. Even a tank will be blown over.
This fool, in his SUV, will be waking up wondering what all these midgets are doing around him. Either that, or wondering where all the harp music is coming from.
I just dodged around a storm last night trying to get home. By local standards it wasn't anything much, but it left the roads covered in hail, dropped over an inch of rain in thirty minutes, and had 60 MPH sustained winds. I was driving, listening to the two local storm spotter nets on 2 meters, and trying to spot the rain and hail shafts in the lightning. It wasn't fun.
I've seen the shows about tourists coming to the US to see a tornado - they spend 2 weeks driving from Texas to South Dakota to see a storm, covering over 3000 miles! Word of advice folks: just come over in the spring, and plan a normal vacation. See the
sights and enjoy yourselves. The tornados will find you. Trust me.
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It is a gateway, leading men to watch more violent things like police chases, boxing matches, and hurricanes.
It changes values and attitudes such as desensitization and "tolerance" which leads to more depraved tornography.
There are reports in many urban areas of increased trailor parks around tornography outlets.
Anyone familiar with the magazine will know that they do many pieces without pictures. And yes they also do occasional photo essays. But the written word is their forte.
Obviously, to answer your critique this should have appeared in National Geographic This is a matter of Taste.
The written word is preffered for many things.
For example, I doubt that you would want to see the linux kernel published as a picture book. You would need too many crayons.
The basic concept is that this is a magazine that specializes in the written word. Do not complain when the when there is a lack of pictures, because this is not the main audience they cater to.
The ability to read books and magazines without pictures is a rare and valuable commodity these days. Which shouldn't stop anyone from enjoying pretty pictures as well. Just know what you are looking at.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
As far as knocking over a tank, I could believe it (despite what the retired military men might say). Look at photos of the damage done by a storm, a 65-ton tank is just more grist for the mill.
These storm chasers are not just endangering their own lives. They are forcing local police and rescue to overextend themselves at an already busy time. They are also in the way of the real storm chasers, the ones from NSSL and CAPS, driving trucks (with doppler radar dishes on the back). (Check these trucks out. They are really cool.) I have heard that people tend to stop in the middle of the road to get some footage, making it difficult for researchers and rescue crew to pass.
I have a message to all would-be storm chasers: If you want a thrill, do something safe, like sky diving. At least there you have a backup plan (the reserve chute). What are you going to do when a piece of wood comes flying at you at speeds in excess of 300 miles per hour?
A plane would be a problem for the reasons already mentioned.
Instead, maybe you'd want to try a wheeled vehicle, either remote-controlled or (once the technology gets there) autonomous with obstacle-avoidance, road-following and tornado-seeking behaviors. Give it all-terrain drive, lots of kevlar, and a goodamn resilient camera. It would help to test a prototype by shooting it with a .308 a few times to see whether the different assemblies take damage. This vehicle should be literally bulletproof. Use a wheeled vehicle to take advantage of local roads that the tornado may cross. Using this you should be able to drive the vehicle (or it should be able to drive itself) either near or into the tornado's path. Just lay it down on a closed highway and go.
Of course, this vehicle may also be useful for military reconaissance work, given some modifications to its software.
(My eventual ambition is to work with robots)
Hope this helps.
Finding God in a Dog
Lots of tornados don't have much a debris field. In fact, a lot of them have no visible funnel or very little funnel (hence no debris or water condensation) for much of their length - see this page for an example.
I think the hard part would be the wind shear near the wall of the vortex. It could be very extreme. And of course, if you flew in too low you could hit debris.
I've considered doing such a thing, but it would take a lot of time, have low probability of getting good stuff, and the odds of finding the plane intact are low (even though I would put an ELT-like device on it - I have found LOTS of those by RDF).
The only good weather is bad weather.
When I lived in Missouri, I remember having to run from our neighboors house to ours (about 50 yards) as one of those supercells was going over.
:) I remember another afternoon watching funnel clouds drop out of a cell to the north of us, but that was nothing compared to the green skies.
At 7pm, the skies where an honest-to-god GREEN. It was the erriest thing I've ever seen (and I am on USENet
If I ever get back out there, as cool as I think nature can be, I'll be buring my ass deep into the ground.
Other than that, I'd suggest Troy's bear suit and magic materials for the fashion-impaired tornographers. :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
I think that, perhaps, a better idea than a (flimsy) airplane would be a rocket. Mount it at a likely site, and then, when a nice tornado comes overhead, remote launch it straight into the storm... A couple of solid rocket engines and a casing with a GPS tranmitter in it to help locate it afterwards.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.