Odd Lots
- The Sun spat out an X5.8 flare last night, the strongest of this solar cycle so far. I went out in the back yard and looked northeast, and damned if I didn’t catch fleeting glimpses of faint flickering light. Was too faint to discern color, but if it was an aurora, seeing it from Phoenix must be some kind of record.
- If you don’t have a link to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, bookmark it. I suspect that they’re going to have a lot to say during the solar maximum that’s now bearing down on us.
- I’m not expecting a Carrington-class event, but my longwire, by default, is switched to my engineered ground. I’m of two minds about listening to the low bands (or lack of low bands) while this storm is underway. 77 feet of wire is more than enough to develop enough voltage to spark with a strong enough coronal mass ejection. I don’t want to fry the front end of my IC-736.
- From the "That’s a Very Low Bar" Department: AIs can pretend to be stupider than they actually are. Forgive me if I say that they may be able to do it, but they’ll be BAD at it. Still, could AI’s "four-finger problem" be a joke on us? (By that I mean the tendency of AIs not to “know” how many fingers or toes a human being has.)
- Francis Turner’s opinions on LLM-style AI pretty much map to mine, and his Substack essay on the topic is a must read.
- I ran across an intriguing piece of music listening to KBAQ, our local classical station. It’s “Sky Blue After Rain” by Joseph Curiale, and consists of a piano and a Chinese erhu 2-stringed violin alternating with full orchestra. The piece is short (4:48) punchy, melodic, and when the orchestra picks it up, energetic. You can hear it on YouTube. Be sure to listen to the whole thing, even if the erhu grates on you. The orchestral part is worth it.
- Here’s a good short article explaining how cloud levels help regulate Earth’s temperatures.
- The highest observatory on Earth is now open for business, atop Cerro Chajnantor mountain in the Chilean Andes. The observatory was designed to capture infrared images with its boggling 6.5 meter (22 feet) clear aperture telescope.
- I have a robot dog with a 9mm gun in the (for now) dormant version of The Molten Flesh. What I didn’t imagine was a robot dog with a built-in flamethrower and laser targeting.
- While I was writing this entry, I had an idea: What if I unplug my antenna from the Icom and in its place on my antenna switch, put a coax plug with an NE2 neon bulb soldered across the connector. Well, it didn’t take but ten minutes (I’ve got plenty of neon bulbs and PL-259s) and the experiment is in place. Tonight when it gets dark I’m going to spend a little time out there in the garage, watching that NE-2.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
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Glad you saw it! It was a nice show from Oracle, Arizona, just north of Tucson. I posted lots of photos on my web site. http://www.weasner.com/co/Reports/2024/05/11/index.html
After getting my Novice license in about 1962 I kept my 40 meter dipole connected through an NE-2 to ground when not in use until late 1970. I remember seeing it flashing often for thunderstorms too distant to hear the thunder. Don’t remember any Solar induced flashing but I might have just assumed it was a distant thunderstorm.
That’s a fun idea to use the Neon bulb, I’ll have to get some bulbs and set that up in my shack.
There might be more aurora tonight, I found in SLC is could see light but not colors. But when I did a multisecond camera exposure I could see the colors. Would you be able to so a long exposure camera shot? I’m curious how it looks in Phoenix.
Great aurora viewing here in mid-state Minnesota on Friday night. We had clear skies, but some haze from Canadian wild fires. Alas, it also caused some Skylink and GPS outages; a taste of what a real Carrington event might do.
Francis Turner’s essay on LLM AI gets it right. Nonetheless, industry and society is blindly rushing ahead, regardless of the consequences. Just who do you sue if an AI’s hallucinogenic advice kills someone?
Any large ungrounded metal structure will accumulate a “sky charge”. Very high voltage (far more than needed for an NE-2); but very low current. I remember Tullio Proni using the TV antenna on his roof to charge a big bank of capacitors. He could get some pretty good Zaps from it.
Well, that’s certainly what I’d expect in the runup to a solar max in Minnesota. Solar minima, not so much. Carol was in Minnesota 1974-76 at the Mayo Clinic’s physical therapy school, and I was up there a lot in that timeframe. We never saw so much as a flicker.
Very cool idea of charging capacitors from sky charge. I have a milk jug full of high-voltage caps and I could even try it. May have to wait until I finish The Everything Machine, tho.
Clouds in Chicago Friday night and Saturday night, and nothing on Sunday night.
“77 feet of wire is more than enough to develop enough voltage to spark with a strong enough coronal mass ejection.”
It seems amazing that there is a significant amount of energy just floating around in space to be collected. I hark back to Heinlein’s Waldo with its broadcast power – and the unsuspected side effects.