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<p>non-paywall article:<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ionosphere-smartphones.html"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ionosphere-smartphones.html</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>HAM operators have been engaged in activities of this sort for a
century, but this scale of deployment and automatic integration
qualifies as a global-scale sensorimotor "tissue" for the emergent
"superorganism"?</p>
<p>Early Redfish/SFx project (2011): <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.boston.gov/transportation/street-bump"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.boston.gov/transportation/street-bump</a>
in this citizen-science-facilitated-by-smartphone-at-scale
domain. SimTable's contemporary work in RealtimeEarth promises to
contribute to the domain in pretty broad/general ways IMO.</p>
<p><hyperbolic tangent unto hyperbolic singularities><br>
</p>
<p>I recently refired my parents' vintage "portable" Zenith
Transoceanic radio from the early 50s. I spent many a long
winter's night with it's orange tube-glow and blue-dial-lights and
various hums and statics next to my bed as I searched the dial for
an unlikely ionospheric bounce... sometimes catching foreign
language broadcasts... often British Language accented...
occasionally "amateur" voices. KOMA (OKC) and KOB (DEN) were at
best faint signals in the mountain valleys of western NM but to
pick up a ionospheric bounce from halfway around the world was
just plain magic. I was also known to fire it up during
thunderstorms and try to use the wave-magnet antenna-coil as a
direction finder. We lived up on a hill where I had about 270
degree views with a distance of over 20 miles... <br>
</p>
<p>I've been reading my (paternal) grandfather's diaries starting
mostly during his time (WWI) in the Army first stateside in
training then in France as a medical tech just behind the front
lines, going in to carry out (litter and ambulance cart) the
wounded and dead. This was his first experience of radio
technology, complementing the more ubiquitous but vulnerable wired
(telephone and telegraph) battlefield style comms... Naval comms
being a more obvious early adopter of wireless.<br>
</p>
<p>By the time he was settled back in the hills of KY, commercial
radio was ramping up. I (also) have what might have been his
first radio which was a "three dial" Crosley radio
tuning/regeneration/volume of the design type of the early 20s (5
tubes). This was pre-heterodyne tech... so the
human-in-the-loop (twiddling dials, orienting antennae) was
charged with adjusting for the various drifts that come with
transmitter variations, atmospheric conditions, drift in the tubes
and other components. <br>
</p>
<p>I haven't carefully inspected for electrical problems (shorts)
given that a mouse had raised at least one litter of babies in the
cabinet since it got packed away in a shed. There is a
transformer coil which I presume lowers the voltage from line
(110) but haven't probed it for operating voltage. The
insulation (100+ years) on the wiring is pretty fragile and the
tubes (as they do) all show lots of heat-discoloration but I
wouldn't be surprised if it worked. The main frequency tuning
device is a variable capacitor (lots of parallel plates on the
back of the dial). <br>
</p>
<p>When I worked as a DJ in the 70s at a 500w AM station we were
still driving that signal with a WWII era Xmitter which was prone
to power and frequency drift. My job included keeping an eye on
those dials and tweaking it back into spec. I would occasionally
get calls from "fans" who noticed our signal had drifted... at one
point I started carrying a transistor radio in my pocket with a
earphone which allowed me to turn down the monitor signals in the
station (worked alone most of the time) and listen to the
transmitted signal rather than the source signal and could notice
the drift myself (as well as other infrequent reasons for
transmitter interruption.) <br>
</p>
<p>What 120 years and 3 generations has wrought?! The singularity
is, in spite of it's title has some "width" to it. I was
surprised to find that von Neumann is credited with first
introducing the idea of a technological singularity in private
conversations with Stan Ulam in the early 50s (but never writing
about it) and that IJ Good might have been the first to <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="Good, I.J. Speculations Concerning
the First Ultraintelligent Machine. Advances in Computers,
1965.">write about </a>it in his "speculations about the first
ultra-intelligent machines" in 1965. <br>
</p>
<p>Ray Kurzweil (Age of intelligent machines 1987)</p>
<p>Verner Vinge <em>The Coming Technological Singularity: How to
Survive in the Post-Human Era.</em> NASA Vision-21 Symposium,
1993</p>
<p>Damien Broderick (australian - <i>The Spike</i> 1997)</p>
<p>Bruce Sterling (<em>The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole</em>
- 2002) <br>
</p>
<p>As a "bookend" I find Sterling and Gibson's 1990s "Steampunk"
novel The Difference Engine (set in 1855) a great alt-hist
speculation about how said "singularity profile" might have been
ramped up earlier based on steam-era tech.</p>
<p>Is the singularity exponential, hyperbolic or logistic? I
suppose only hyperbolic qualifies as a literal (vertical
asymptote) singularity? And my own techno-dys/utopian fantasies
are all more logistic even if they start out exponential and veer
toward hyperbolic, reality (in the form of physical limits and
conservation laws) intrudes and damps things out to a horizontal
asymptote, only to be overtaken by another logistic curve driven
by a different process?<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/19/24 9:14 AM, glen wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:fe5bdc72-2a0b-47a9-befc-a5f273577275@gmail.com">
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://mastodon.social/@bruces/113510394317558182">https://mastodon.social/@bruces/113510394317558182</a>
<br>
<br>
For those who don't care about Mastodon or Bruce Sterling, Bruce
links to a Nature article:
<br>
<br>
Space weather mapped by millions of smartphones
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03545-5">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03545-5</a>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Phone users around the world are enabling
the creation of a space-weather monitor that will deepen our
understanding of the physics governing Earth’s ionized upper
atmosphere and improve the accuracy of satellite positioning. </blockquote>
<br>
</blockquote>
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