Flutterby™! : Jeff Warren on CNN 2010-05-06 13:34:29.137124+00

Jeff Warren on CNN

2010-05-06 13:34:29.137124+00 by ebradway 6 comments

Jeff Warren, whom Dan and I met at WhereCamp, is featured in a CNN piece about citizen mapping of the Gulf Coast oil spill. I really need to give that guy my balloon...

TC, helium costs about $40 a balloon fill, and doesn't explode when you're done with the balloon, so the entertainment value is lower (huh, I'll have to try the "how does it sound when you breathe it?" experiment)... I should get a power supply of the sort of capacity that'll generate hydrogen fairly quickly, but a bit of dryer hose and a bucket or two seems totally reasonable in conjunction with the drain cleaner. Besides, if I'm preparing for disaster mapping, I can make lye with some wood and a flame, coming up with electricity after the apocalypse is harder...

(Come to think of it, coming up with aluminum from ore without electricity is even harder than that, but there's so much of it lying around...).

Oh, and on the georectification issue, one of the problems with the Cartagen Knitter that we had when we were playing around with it at WhereCamp is that without taking into account fairly high resolution elevation data, the sides of buildings got splayed out in ways that didn't make a whole lot of sense. But I guess we have to wait for 3d <canvas> elements for that.

Dan: Drop an electrode & anode in some water and make H the way the rest of us do it. Come to think of it, I'm rather lazy and just purchased a tank at the welding shop last time or be safer and just buy some He

Yeah, as anyone who's tried to do texture mapping can tell you, that pesky 1/z transform is expensive...

On H creating H₂O: Yeah, exactly! Actually, as long as there's not a lot of static around (it's outside, there shouldn't be much) the only place I'm really worried about it being a safety problem is that the reactions which create it in usable-for-lifting-a-camera quantities are also pretty highly exothermic. Which is why you need to take the steam out somehow, and be careful about how quickly the aluminum is introduced into the sodium hydroxide. The YouTube videos of such things happening in larger quantities are pretty fun.

I am a little concerned. He told CNN he was flying at 1000 feet. That can create a problem. I also need to teach him about georectification. Turning images into maps isn't always a first-degree polynomial (pivot, tilt, stretch). But I guess as long as he's getting the results he wants ;)

Cool! And, still on my list of "quick things to do on a weekend" is build a still for taking the steam out of lye and aluminum generated hydrogen.