XKCD - disaster movie

Source - link

See, it's funny because scientists aren't the big, buff heroes often portrayed in disaster movies as being the people on the front lines leaping into the burning building, driving their trucks at the edge of the tornadoes, cruising around the island saving people from raptors, leaping lava rivers to save their damsel in distress.

Instead, scientists would be more likely to be looking to update their data about the world as the disaster happens. In fact, as explainxkcd explains (natch)...

The situation described (scrambling to update geographical datasets in the advent of natural disaster) is actually a common occurrence these days. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's Disaster Response unit does almost exactly this: When there is a natural disaster in a location that lacks high quality GIS data (common in much of the developing world), a team of volunteers across the world mobilises to update and improve OpenStreetMap. They use the latest available satellite imagery, usually donated free for the purpose. Disaster response teams then use the GIS data in OpenStreetMap to create maps and plan their response.

Inside the 23-Dimensional World of Your Car's Paint Job

We're continuing this week with a little more on the art theme. It's a very different kind of art from last week's memory metal flower, but there are still pedals involved. (groan)

Wired magazine has a brilliant article detailing the incredible process of color matching the paint on a repaired part of a car to the paint on the rest of the car. At first blush, the process seems awfully simple - pick up a can of the paint used to paint the car originally. Things are a little more complicated than that, however, as no repair shop is going to stock 50,000-60,000 different paints (the number of car colors on the road according to the article), no car in need of repair looks exactly like it did when it first rolled off the production line. and because the original paint job on most cars involves twenty three different dimensions to the color - sparkles, coarseness, red, blue, green, angle, diffuse coarseness, and so on.

The knowledge and skills involved in color matching are absolutely mind-boggling. There's an art to it all.

Aluminum recycling - How it works by Norsk Hydro

We have to recycle more.

There are many countries that are far, far better at recycling than is the US, but we (the US) have to get better.

I hadn't thought about the challenge of not just sorting the majority metals (steel from aluminum from copper from etc) but rather sorting the various similar metal alloys out from each other. The use of x-ray spectroscopy to do that is an application that I would never have considered, and the puff of air used to fire away the unacceptable aluminum alloy chips is amazingly fast.

It's amazing to me how technologically advanced the recycling industry is becoming.