Earthquake in Japan

[Stephane Dumas]

A big earthquake happened in Japan who also created a tsunami http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Sendai_earthquake_and_tsunami and nuclear power plants was seriously damaged and there might be a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_Nuclear_Power_Plant

The damages had forced the industry to suspend some operations
http://www.calcuttanews.net/story/754743/ht/Major-Japanese-industries-close-to-assess-damage

[berberry]

I just hope we're not already in a "chain reaction" that will result in a full-scale meltdown and leak at those exploding nuke plants.  A breach of the outermost containment structure, which is precisely what happened at Chernobyl (isn't it?), seems to be happening right now.

Poor Japan!  It's hard to express how heartbreaking it is to watch all this unfold.  Let's hope that somehow an even more calamitous disaster is averted, but things look awfully iffy just now.

[agentsteel53]

this has to be the worst picture on Wikipedia, at least out of those being viewed regularly



seriously, can no one find something that doesn't look like a cheap-shit computer generated mockup??

[berberry]

seriously, can no one find something that doesn't look like a cheap-shit computer generated mockup??

They just look like low-res images to me, probably blown-up from some cheap cam.  Although you make a good point, I think in this specific case it isn't entirely unbelievable that nothing better can be found, at least by the wikipedia community.  I haven't seen anything better, although the more distant shots do, naturally, look a bit sharper.

[agentsteel53]

it's not just the low resolution - it is the color quantization, that makes it look like some ray-tracing experiment gone hideously wrong into the dimension of laziness.

[berberry]

it's not just the low resolution - it is the color quantization, that makes it look like some ray-tracing experiment gone hideously wrong into the dimension of laziness.

Hehe, yeah, that's a good way of putting it cuz that's exactly what it looks like.  If I'm right about this being a blow-up, though, then it also makes sense to assume that it might well be tweaked to enhance contrast.  I'm not an expert so I could be wrong, but I think that could account for the color problems.  Perhaps without such tweaking it would be more difficult to see the damage.

[berberry]

I've been watching the coverage of the situation at the nuke plants, steel, and I now think we were both wrong.  Since we posted, much better images of those buildings have become available, and it's now obvious that they were painted that way.