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Science fiction, and science FACT! (such as ANCIENT ALIENS)
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Not to scare you but, Tuscaloosa County has a fairly active history with tornadoes.
Time sampled
1952-02-13 through 2009-05-06
Number of confirmed tornadoes
61
Number of fatalities
107 people
Number of fatalities from deadliest single tornado
58 people
Injuries
1206 people
Most injuries related to one tornado
518 people
Longest path of single tornado
202 miles
Widest tornado path in sample
2000 feet
2 F5/EF5 tornadoes 2 F4/EF4 tornadoes
The stats above do not account for the tornadoes this year.
With the new warning system (the polygonal warning system) I would start taking tornadoes more seriously. If you want I can do pinpoint warnings for you and let you know if you should seriously be concerned or not in future cases.
PARKER, YOU'RE FIRED! <-- My comic book podcast! Satan look here!
Satans..... hints.....
Satans..... hints.....
Story of my life.
For two, it's about once ever 10 years that a tornado hits and does real significant damage.
Which is what I'm basing my thought processes around.
I don't know if you lived in the South very often, but given how often we get Tornado warnings around here, losing a lot of sleep or productivity over once every 10 years is bad math.
EDIT: It's ok Blake, all is forgiven. Really it's just a surreal thing because I didn't have any time to prepare for it or be worried. It was over, I crawled out of the wreckage and moved forward before I had any time to process what was going on. I was asleep less than ten minutes before the zero hour (and probably would have died but for that ONE text message which woke me up) so my brain wasn't fully awake.
At least I got a story out of it for my memoirs.
Where are you now? I live in Arkansas most of my life so I have been in the southeast for a long time. I also typically am in the south during most major tornado days. The problem with that part of the country is that it is much harder there for a spotter and chaser to help. The terrain is not as flat, the road network is not grided and largely doesn't exist like it does in the plains, and there are way to many trees making it really hard for us to see things well. This results in the local WFOs of the NWS having to rely almost solely on radar products for their warning issuance and thus you get a higher rate of false alarms.
There are still a lot of limitations to what we can do with radars and with how many we can place across the country as well as with what we actually know about tornadoes that prevent us from being able to raise the accuracy of warnings in areas that do not have the spotter network that the plains does.
It's a theme park ride. It's like a ghost train except the people who jump out at you are dressed as SF characters and they really do beat the shit out of you.
It's rather hilly around here and we get sirens all the time.
I've been to there many times. One of the largest commercial retailers of radar systems to TV stations and privet parties is based their. They go their start in response to a powerful F4 that rolled through Huntsville. If I recall properly, Huntsville has been hit by numerous tornadoes in the past coupe of years.
But it sounds like you want him to be terrified?
XBL: Torn Hoodie
@hoodiethirteen
The passion for it is pretty admirable : )
The Weather Channel people are the same way, super excited when a hurricane comes baring down on Louisiana.
You make it sound like I cheer for storms to cause death and destruction which couldn't be further from the truth. I'd much rather for the storm to happen far from a populated area and hit nothing than for it to do damage but if the storm has hit a populated area I do want to learn as much as I can about the event so that I may learn what has happened and how it effected those impacted as well as how they reacted during and after the storm in hopes that knowledge will help others in the future. Futhermore the fact you think I may be trying to overhype the severity of tornadoes in the SE for ratings purposes is also simply not true. I am just trying to point out how serious tornadoes can be and the fact that they are a bit more comon than one may think they are in that part of the country.
In other science news....
CME IMPACT: The coronal mass ejection (CME), that I mentioned in an earlier post, hit Earth's magnetic field at approximately 2145 UT on Nov. 28th. The impact was relatively weak and did not spark a strong geomagnetic storm, so the chance of getting any real abnormal aruora activity or a migration of the aruoras towards the equator is not likely to happen as of now. Better luck next time!
i mean yeah
if this were a movie this is the moment we all die.
but in the real world it will help us develop treatment for it in case it ever does evolve in nature so that it doesn't become a pandemic and and blindside us.
PARKER, YOU'RE FIRED! <-- My comic book podcast! Satan look here!
It's a nice change of pace for reality to be better than fiction!
Steam
Nah, no offense meant, I know that you and TWC folks don't want anything bad to happen but at the same time are excited about interesting weather. It's just odd to see that excitement contrasted with bad weather events.
As someone who lived in southern Louisiana most of my life, I know how important weather science is in warning us of future dangers. I haven't been in a tornado, but I've weathered a bunch of hurricanes if you have any questions.
Depending where you were, Andrew wasn't so bad. Up here in north west Broward, all we got was crazy wind and a day late start to school. Wilma on the other hand pretty much affected all of south Florida with power outages. The sky was amazing that week.
I was in Louisiana it was pretty bad where I was living
Steam
worst song, played on ugliest guitar
Have you seen this?
If I recall the D&D thread about this correctly, the "genetic engineering" was just plain old selective breeding. That means this superflu could have turned up in nature. That's the most interesting and scary part about it.
Also yay science.
There are already countless deadly diseases locked away in biologic laboratories all around the world. It's not going to break free and destroy us all any more than any other preserved plague. People need to stop over-dramatizing and demonizing scientific research just because they don't understand it.
This smacks of "shut down all nuclear power because it's so dangerous".
Nobody read the Hot Zone, apparently.
I disagree that this is being all that overly dramatized.
There are plenty of safeguards at these facilities though so we are good.
He seems like a fine fellow.
I'd say that even with terror and human error, the likelyhood of these diseases getting out of the lab is pretty low.