Last week, my Natural Hazards class was assigned a project about tornadoes. We were given a state and told to go to this website and download an Excel file of all the tornado data for our given state from 1950-2007. We were then told to plot all the F1 and F2 tornadoes on one map, all the F3, F4, and F5 tornadoes on another map, and on yet another map to plot the track of all tornadoes, regardless of magnitude on the Fujita scale, from 1970-2000. This meant plotting two dots for each tornado since we had to have a touch down and lift off location to get the track.
I lucked up because a friend of mine ended up with the same state as me, so we decided we'd work on it together. It didn't seem like it would be that hard until we sat down to start working on it last night and discovered that there were over 800 F1 tornadoes alone. We split the work to make it a little bit faster, but still spent about 4 1/2 hours sitting at his kitchen table last night putting dots on maps, and still didn't finish all of the maps.
This morning, when we got to class, our lovely teacher informed us that he had decided that 57 years gave too much data and that we should just filter it until we got about 100 tornadoes to work with. Why, oh why, could we not have waited one more day to start on it, or why couldn't he have told us one day sooner that he was making it easier? That's 4 1/2 hours of tornado plotting monotony that I will never get back.
3 comments:
teachers not announcing cancelled classes, teachers retracting homework...I think you should change schools.
Or just switch majors because it's all the same class.
There's something about "tornado plotting monotony" that sounds oxymoron-ish.
(I thought I'd gone blind for a minute: The visual verification just said "visual verification" without the cute colored messy collection of letters)
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