The police have a never-ending issue with this when trying to get video from random Temu-quality CCTV recorders at the scene of a crime. I know one defendant who almost got away[1] with a heinous robbery on a mobile phone store because the technician from HQ remoted in to try and get the video off and somehow deleted it instead.

[1] the store clerk later remembered the defendant had been drinking a pop when he entered the store and they found the bottle had been left behind, which had his DNA on it, and his DNA was on file

This assumes that it's available in digital form. Knowing Japan, there is a chance this is an analog CCTV

Are there any denoising algorithms that remove Moiré patterns? It would be a welcome addition to the stock iPhone and Android cameras.

Yeah, similar for interesting events caught on security cameras. I assume these videos tend to come from the operator who only has access to view but not to export. Plus, they'd need to get the export into a phone-native format for upload onto social media, so the uploader may need admin access, familiarity with formats and/or ffmpeg, and a way to transfer to a phone or personal PC.

If its a DVR then one needs permission to download the video. Many DVR's have access policies that can limit certain users/groups to only view or playback disabling download. Then if they do have download access they likely need access to a USB port and have a USB drive handy as they likely have to download the file from a web UI. Then they have to get that video on to a PC or Phone/tablet and upload it.

Or just point the phone at the screen, record, click the share button and select YouTube or whatever.

The more upsetting part to me is that, with even a little bit of effort, recording a screen with a camera produces a perfectly acceptable image, other than some artifacts about framerate not being synced.

This was true back in the CRT and cheap Sony camcorder days, and it is even more true in the wide viewing angle, high quality phone image sensor, and image stabilization days.

But nobody cares to take five extra seconds to get good framing, or reduce glare, or hold their damn phone steady, or match the damn aspect ratio!

It's infuriating how little people seem to care in general

> Guess bombing civilians wasn’t a good idea.

Alas, this has never stopped to be part of warfare. When was the last war where bombing civilians (intentionally or as "collateral damage") was not happening?

> Sorry about that

Right back atcha. Let's learn from this and stay friends!

There are a lot of photos, really bad. You'd think people would have learned but in current events Gaza has had 4x the ordnance dropped on it (in about 1/5 the land area).

Edit: The easiest way I found to see photos and video is in Getty's archive: https://www.gettyimages.com/search/2/image?family=editorial&...

Prague is a really good example of a major European city that was relatively untouched in the war. And it shows. Lots and LOTS of historical buildings and a very "old European" feel through a lot of the city.

It's quite beautiful.

You don’t have to struggle. There are plenty of videos and photos of that time that you can check out. Also if you visit London you can go around and see a bunch of buildings they haven’t rebuilt and just left them in semi destroyed state as monuments

My mum and dad were teenagers during the war and did fire-watching, notoriously avoided if at all possible (they said) so given to anyone biddable or old. It got a bit hair-raising according to my dad, he stood in a doorway near Imperial College watching a plate glass sheet decide if it was going to fall on him or into the building. Walking through labs with bombs dropping was .. intense.

If you had an "anderson shelter" in your garden you were lucky. Many poor working class families got a "morrison shelter" which was basically a steel table you could use in a dining room or kitchen and then hide under. In some ways more convenient I guess? (Anderson shelters got cold and damp)

He was bombed out of a house in Stepney. They lost everything. I can't decide if he missed more the entire collection of the first 50 penguin books, or a lump of melted glass he scavanged from the fire of crystal palace in the 1930s: these are the two things he remembered in the 60s and 70s talking about it.

He was studying electrical engineering and maths at university by the end of the war and so not called up. He said they trained in how to manage live power cables with wooden "tongs" and were part of rescue crews when buildings collapsed. My mum was tracing maps for D-Day, and packing munitions and my Aunt did technical drawing on the "mulberry harbour" concrete caissons floated over to the beaches for D-Day.

A good read on the blitz would be "the people's war" by Angus Calder, which in large part is made up from "mass observation" recruited/organised diaries kept during the period, and donated to the University of Sussex. My mum kept one of them.

A standing joke in Architecture circles is that the greater london council destroyed more Wren churches in London than the Blitz. UCL used to say the basements where compsci was sited were kindly dug by the Germans.

Postwar housing was a mess. My aunt lived in a 5 story block of flats in Paddington she got on a long lease as bomb damaged property, my Uncle bought into commercial premises around Farringdon in a deal which demanded he do structural repairs immediately. There was a huge housing shortage and for years you could still see the pre-fabricated houses around Lambeth Palace which were a godsend of temporary housing but persisted into the 60s. Stepney where my dad grew up was a wreck, anywhere around the docks basically. It was a patchwork.

The pseudo-documentary film "Fires were started" by Humphrey Jennings has some iconic footage of the dock firestorm (not to be compared with Dresden, but it was severe) You would recognise the shots of the fronts of builings collapsing and firemen holding hoses wearing brodie helmets.

Comparisons are evil. Coventry was really badly affected and the modern day cathedral stands next to the wreck of the original gothic one. It's like the Kaiser Wilheim spire in Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a very pale shadow of the reality at the time. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Rotterdam were all significantly worse affected than London in the end, but to anyone in London I doubt it felt like it. The bombing in Japan was on an altogether different scale.

I can't imagine the record keeping to provide the data for this. And of course, they have weasel words at the bottom: "The National Archives give no warranty to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of the information provided"

It'd likely to be more accurate to say that some are left that simply don't explode yet. A good example would be certain cases of cluster munitions that are designed to hit airfields. A most of the explosives will go off and crater the concrete and asphalt, but others will remain unexploded and sensitive to detonation. As runway repair work cannot commence until those unexploded munitions are cleared, the airfield is out of action longer than it would be otherwise.

I understand in these cases and other ones such as scattering mines that a timer can be set so the mine or munition deactivates after a set time (say, a week) by deactivating the fuse.

Not all are designed in this way of course. And apologies, I'm looking for source links, but I can't find them at the moment. Edit: Here's an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GATOR_mine_system

>But I don't think any consideration is given to what happens to duds

On the contrary. Duds causing UXO is the reason the US and most of NATO chooses not to build cluster munitions anymore, preferring instead pre-formed tungsten balls that are fired like a shotgun when the munition is over it's target.

The dud rate was something like 2%, not that much but enough to make the US decide that leaving tens of thousands of UXOs in formerly enemy territory isn't okay.

Russian cluster munitions being used in Ukraine right now have a much much higher dud rate, and that's before any bad storage or handling.

For similar reasons, many NATO countries have given up types of landmines

I wonder if you could put the radar reflector on the end of the shell or bomb. It would only be visible from behind which is only possible when in ground.

The other way would be have fuse that shows reflector after hitting something but not detonating.

That is an excellent quote, thanks for sharing it. But I'm not sure why he told us the exact date of detonation. Wasn't he supposed to be the master of suspense?

There was a great discussion I read here a year ago from a chemist who went into the details on why this occurs. I'll link the comment. Really great read.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34755399

Even if it's inert many explosives decompose into toxic compounds. Other explosives use mercury compounds for detonators, which at the worst can make the soil itself toxic to the touch. There are also gas shells, some of which had arsenic. Areas affected in that way will be poisonous for a very long time.

This. Though I would not call explosives "chemically stable", nor their degrading with time "perverse".

They are capable of energetically exploding because they are not chemically stable.

And "shelf-stable and safe for many decades" is never a priority feature for high-volume wartime production of explosives.

Here's one in Oxfordshire 4 days ago, although I'm a little confused how a First World War bomb got all the way there. Dropped from a Zeppelin? (It's also sadly possible that the news reporter got the wrong war.)

https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2024-09-28/bomb-disposal-t...

> Since 1946, approximately 630 French ordnance disposal workers have died handling unexploded munitions.

Incredible.

Can you imagine the odds? Literally ... any of us could go, at any time. That's what gets me whenever I think about this.

Ça plane pour moi

I think I know the feeling. I had these nightmares as a kid about wolfes or 'cartoon heatseeking missiles' hunting me, like it was the same nightmare/feeling.

>> I have an irrational fear of dying from an airplane crashing into me.

I don't, but sometimes I have dreams like that, whether it's an aeroplane or a helicopter or whatever.

Odds are the airport is on the same land an old Imperial Japanese airfield was on.

Everyone knows about PALs. You have to warm them up in the steel mill and then cool them down in the freezer room.

Nukes are also not very stable long-term Their fissile payload is radioactive after all, and as it decays it becomes harder and harder to achieve prompt criticality.

However, that does not stop adversaries with physical access from dismantling the warhead and extracting the enriched fissile material. In a practical sense, easily obtained nuclear weapons are probably more dangerous than TNT UXO, or at least possess the potential to be used for greater harm.

Also Japanese construction was conveniently, for the US, extremely flammable so you could do way more damage starting a firestorm than you could with the same number of bombers filled with traditional bombs.

There was also the incredible plan to fill a bomb with bats strapped with tiny incendiary charges on timers so they would be dropped, go roost somewhere, and hopefully start even wider spread fires. They spent about 2 million dollars on it before it was cancelled because the atomic bomb was showing much better progress. They also accidentally proved it's effectiveness and burned down part of the testing facility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

That strategy was not because the bombs weren't very destructive, but because they just could not be placed accurately. So they had to drop a lot of bombs and hope a few of them hit the strategically important targets.

Yep. The US did drop around 160,800 tons of conventional bombs on Japan during WWII, thought that's still relatively tame compared to the 623,000 tons they drop on Germany. Though the two nukes more than made up for it, I guess.

Bomb findings during construction is nothing especially rare in these countries.

> It would have done...

Real WWII historians could probably determine the date on which the bomb was dropped, its intended target, etc., etc.

But with the condition that most of Japan was in, later in WWII - I'm thinking that "gone off where & when intended" would probably have had little effect. Most of the country was burned-out rubble.

~270lbs of explosives in a US 500lb bomb.

Article says 500lb.

If the crater is only 1 meter deep then the bomb was likely more shallow than that (although some of the ejected dirt will fall back into the crater). So much of the bomb's energy went into the atmosphere.

Ah, I guess that makes sense. According to a quick search, it seems ground-penetrating radar didn't reach common use until the 70s.

They're just asking on what basis the article is confident that it's a specific bomb from a specific era. Is it based on a forensic analysis of the shrapnel, something like that? If it's just an assumption based on the context, you'd want to say "an explosion, believed to have been caused by an unexploded WWII-era bomb...".

If it wasn't from the war, then the more likely scenario is the bomb feel off a plane after the war than somebody snuck into the airfield. Bombs do fall off planes.

My question was more of, how do they determine this sort of thing or is it just an assumption because it is the most likely scenario?

Somebody could have planted a bomb (if it was actually a WW2 bomb that doesn't seem likely) or it could have fallen off a plane before (not sure if there 500 pound bombs before the war?) or after the war.

Some types of explosives (e.g. detonators) become more unstable with age. See for example: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.231344

A load has been left in the Thames. The risk of accidental detonation causing a tsunami is one factor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

I know of some remote¹ forest in Germany that used to be a training area. It is so bullet- and bomb-riddled that they just decided clearing it wasn't worth it, put a fence around it and declared it off-limits.

¹ in Germany, "remote" means something like "2km from the next settlement".

Once there's any sort of record that there's UXO somewhere it pretty much has to be removed because nobody wants the liability that would be incurred by being the party that dropped the ball. Even if that wasn't the case they generally get found because they're in the way of some construction. You have to remove it for the same reason you have to get every other rock out of the hole you're digging.

That said, I'm sure there's a few farmers who have a pretty strong inkling where one is and are actively not looking to disturb that problem.

I don’t think so. Bombs are usually found during construction so leaving them in place would not work if they block progress on a hole/tunnel etc

For reference the state of NRW (Germany) alone found 2811 bombs in 2018 so it’s much more common than you’d think.

Laws seem to differ by state but afaik new construction must include some kind of bomb assessment, often done via aerial photos to quickly filter out areas that were not bombed at all

And you only hear about the more problematic cases. Hundreds or thousands of WW2 bombs get removed in Germany every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexploded_ordnance

This sunken ship in the Thames estuary is packed full of explosives, and they don't dare mess with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

in every case they have their bomb squad disarm and remove it

They would do that, the pencil detonators the Allies used to disrupt rescue and firefighting efforts after a carpet-bombing run become ever more touchy as time wears on. A bomb that is found is disarmed or exploded, else there will be a repeat of this incident down the line.

Looking at the article, this was a WWII air base converted to a civilian airport. The bomb was not paved over due to laziness; no one knew the bomb was there.

Hindsight being 20/20, maybe they (the Japanese) could have used metal detectors when they were updating the runway? But, given that they didn't find this, I suspect it wasn't practical back then.

Perhaps now there will be an effort to use modern technology to find these?

It was probably buried during WWII where the concern was get this airport working fast so it can be used and deal with the consequences latter. Of course nobody bothered to write down where hidden bombs are (that would take time they didn't have) and so they couldn't deal with it latter.