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Just watched Ice Cube in a video cruising through South Central LA where he grew up. There were no trees along any of the streets. He said the city cut them all
by CodeWriter23 3y ago
Just watched Ice Cube in a video cruising through South Central LA where he grew up. There were no trees along any of the streets. He said the city cut them all down because the Police Helicopters couldn't see through them. I guess FLIR doesn't penetrate trees.
- vladvasiliu 3y agoLast year I visited LA over a couple days. I remember walking from downtown to Hollywood, I barely saw any trees. Just concrete with the occasional lawn in front of a house. I don't know if that's supposed to be a "rough area"; I didn't feel particularly unsafe.
- slater 3y ago[flagged]
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoI tried searching but I couldn’t find any evidence to support this.
- myself248 3y agoNo evidence to support the cutting-down, but I can personally confirm that FLIR doesn't see through foliage. Each pixel takes the temperature of the nearest surface, which is a leaf, instead of whatever's behind it. In war footage sometimes you see FLIR imagers being used to find tanks hidden under brush and stuff, but this is because the tank has been there long enough for its engine residual warmth to heat up the cover material. And sometimes you can track a moving target through _very thin_ brush because there are gaps between the leaves, in this case it's like visually tracking someone wearing a bright color -- as soon as the cover is thick enough to not have gaps anymore, you lose them. So, I can't prove a chain of reasoning, but I can say that part of it at least fits with physical reality.
- voisin 3y agoRather than FLIR can’t they use LiDAR to see through the gaps in the foliage in the manner that ruins are being discovered in thick rainforests?
- myself248 3y agoThe way that technique is currently used, it takes bazillions of sample points from carefully-orchestrated survey flights, and it's looking for megastructures, walls and roads and things many orders of magnitude larger than the individual trees. It's not going to help you find a single vehicle since that could be a single fallen tree, etc, there's a lot of noise in the signal.
- voisin 3y agoWhat a wildly asinine reason to cut down trees. I sincerely hope this is apocryphal.
- uoaei 3y agoAnecdotes I've heard from community members in Black neighborhoods confirms this, they've talked about how cops want better sightlines for following/shooting at running suspects (from the street or from the sky).
- LRCivil 3y agoI might call and ask the city engineer before going to Ice Cube as an information source.