[FRIAM] space weather

[steve smith]

non-paywall article:

    https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ionosphere-smartphones.html

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"?

Early Redfish/SFx project (2011): 
https://www.boston.gov/transportation/street-bump 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.

<hyperbolic tangent unto hyperbolic singularities>

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...

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.

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.

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).

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.)

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 write about <Good, I.J. Speculations Concerning the First 
Ultraintelligent Machine. Advances in Computers, 1965.>it in his 
"speculations about the first ultra-intelligent machines" in 1965.

Ray Kurzweil (Age of intelligent machines 1987)

Verner Vinge /The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in 
the Post-Human Era./ NASA Vision-21 Symposium, 1993

Damien Broderick (australian - /The Spike/ 1997)

Bruce Sterling (/The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole/ - 2002)

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.

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?




On 11/19/24 9:14 AM, glen wrote:
>
> https://mastodon.social/@bruces/113510394317558182
>
> For those who don't care about Mastodon or Bruce Sterling, Bruce links 
> to a Nature article:
>
> Space weather mapped by millions of smartphones
> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03545-5
>> 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. 
>
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