Cloudy With a Chance of Typhoon

So an absolutely ENORMOUS typhoon floated over Japan.

As you can see from the following images, the typhoon was roughly the size of a quarter of the planet, which is pretty big.

I love looking at these kinds of pictures; they really hammer home how small the earth is and how little control we have over everything.

I did not take any of these pictures, in case you were wondering.

Also, in case you were wondering, Japanese TV shows people being rescued much in the same way they are in England - boats in knee deep water.  Of course I understand that the infirm will need this kind of assistance, but it still looks like overkill whenever they pull out inflatable dinghies.

In terms of the impact this particular typhoon had; I think it's safe to say it was naff.  The above picture is actually from a different typhoon altogether (I think).  Okinawa is a tiny island hundreds of miles south of Japan (but still Japanese property) that always feels the full force of every storm that makes its way across the sea.  The island is the first stop for seemingly every kind of natural disaster and as such, gets all the camera crews.  I'm fairly sure that any footage you'll have seen of this particular storm was from Okinawa, or from the very south of Japan.  Those areas were somewhat more affected than the huge population centres (rural areas are hit hardest, who would have imagined) and make for much more dramatic television.

Also, to draw a little more light to the ridiculousness of the photographs above, of course half the planet was not engulfed by the storm.  It looks far more impressive if the entire frame is filled up with clouds though, so that's the image most editors use.

I have no idea whether this picture is from this typhoon or not, but it also looks pretty ruddy big so I'm going to use it to illustrate my point.  That circle of clouds is vast by almost all standards, but nowhere near the size the other pictures make it out to be.

You don't need photoshop to lie with a photograph!

In summary, the typhoon was mostly rubbish and very uneventful.  The upshot is that I didn't get any time off, and now that all the clouds are gone it's 33 degrees and 95% humid.  I've never seen the humidity dial cranked that far round.

All this viewing the earth from orbit made me think of this: