

Synthesizing thunder using JavaScript - kabla
http://blog.kaistale.com/?p=1340

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

My graphologies ;)

------
jacobparker
Andrew Glassner has written about this a lot
[http://www.glassner.com/computer-graphics/graphics-
research/...](http://www.glassner.com/computer-graphics/graphics-
research/lightning-and-thunder/)

(See his references section)

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

------
voidpointer
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
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.

