Russian Dashcams and Meteor Explosion

[Grzrd]

Video from some Russian dashcams of the meteor explosion has led to an NPR examination of why so many Russians have dashcams.

[agentsteel53]

in other news: holy shit, meteor

[formulanone]

in other news: holy shit, meteor

Yeah, that. As if the week hasn't been chock full of fucked up news, a meteor causes some major damage.

[thenetwork]

Video from some Russian dashcams of the meteor explosion has led to an NPR examination of why so many Russians have dashcams.

Not just Russia, but all of Eurasia as well.  I've seen a lot of "Spectacular Accidents" on YouTube, and most come from some sort of civilian dash-cam from somewhere in Europe or Asia.

[Desert Man]

Be fortunate the asteroid expected to fly-by tonight missed us and only a tiny meteorite struck a small part of the world. I say it's something you don't see everyday, as the (bright!) meteorite track caught the locals by surprise. I read in news reports of 800-some people had minor injuries from the meteorite's force when it landed on the ground.

Further reading the news, it turns out pieces of the meteorite fell on the earth...one of them plunged into an icy lake outside the city of Chelybansk (sp?). I watched the video footage on YT, and find it "funteresting" in awe of what meteorites can do.

[djsinco]

I heard on some news show today that the dash cams are very popular in that part of Russia due to heavy amounts of police corruption, and the cameras help keep them away...

[xcellntbuy]

I had read somewhere that Russian litigants still do not trust the court system because it still remains stacked with old Communist-era Soviet appointees.  The evidence for an individual to win in a Russian court has to be absolutely overwhelming.

I have watched hours of these videos.  I thought moving to south Florida was bad.

[JREwing78]

The dashcams also keep hucksters from claiming people hit them and collecting insurance payouts.

The other thing I observe from dashcam footage: Russian drivers are utterly insane!

[hm insulators]

I was at my mother's house yesterday as all the excitement over the meteorite was settling down and we discussed the fact that in today's frantic, high-tech go-go-go world, we forget that we truly are connected to space. So many ancient peoples, the Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians, Mayans, and especially the Pacific Islanders (who learned long ago to steer by the stars across the ocean to settle places such as Tahiti, Samoa and Hawaii) understood that we are connected to a vast universe, even if they didn't know exactly how the stars shine or that five unusually bright stars that slowly and methodically moved with a purpose among the "fixed" stars were in fact the planets now named Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn that are fascinating worlds in and of themselves.

[english si]

in today's frantic, high-tech go-go-go world, we forget that we truly are connected to space. So many ancient peoples

Modern people look up at night and see tiny little spots of light in infinite nothingness. Medieval people looked up at night and saw the earth's shadow: finite, temporary (for the sun will return from under the earth) and still full of light.

Much nicer and less bleak and hostile!

A medievalist like Lewis, despite having most of modern astronomical knowledge, could write of someone's interplanetary journey like this:

"He could not cease to wonder at the noon which always awaited you however early you were to seek it. There, totally immersed in a bath of pure etheral colour and of unrelenting though unwounding brightness far above the reach of night. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. The very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens - the 'happy climes that ly/where day never shuts his eye/up in the broad fields of the sky.'" (C.S.Lewis Out of the Silent Planet snippets p34-5, ending with a quote from Milton)

Whereas we imagine a trip out of our orbit to somewhere else involving millions of miles drifting through dark nothingness*.

*unless raised on Button Moon, where Blanket Sky, while always black and starry, was full of all sorts of weird things that were merely passed. Like pinwheels, bubbles and washing up bowls!