Slashdot Mirror
Listening to Leonids
Bill Kendrick writes: "An interesting article was posted by NASA about reports of people hearing Leonids as they burnt up in the atmosphere. And not 5 minutes later, like you'd expect, but instantly. Apparently this is thanks to very low frequency radio signals given off by the meteors as they burn."
...or Extremely Low Frequency for those that have never heard the term before.
:) I'm not sure if it's still in use today. Usually the government only shows you out-of-service tech on cable networks.
The nava used this to communicate with submarines on the other side of the earth by directing ELF signals directly through the earth's core. Saw it on Discovery once.
Simple materials like aluminum foil, thin wires, pine needles -- even dry or frizzy hair -- can intercept and respond to a VLF field.
I bet Weird Al was having the multimedia show of a lifetime!
Years ago when I was a kid I remember watching the Leonids. While watching them I distinctly remember hearing some of the larger ones doing this exact buzzing. I always figured it was just a bad memory or something. Nice to know I'm not crazy. :)
It did sound like a fizzing sound... Not very loud, but you would definately hear it.
I was playing the stereo so could not hear anything, sigh! On the other hand I saw 10 doubles, one exploder, a number of green and red ones. Not to mention a few mini bursts 3-5 in a couple of seconds. All in all rather nice shower! Although I'm still sleep deprived because of it.
:)
I saw one shoot like an arrow from orions bow
Here are a couple of good links on ELF.
r p/ elf.html
http://server5550.itd.nrl.navy.mil/projects/haa
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/elf.htm
Looks like some pretty nifty, and quite dangerous technology.
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
One /. reader at Nasa close with his computer close to the antennas saw this earlier post and tried out the program.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Are those really annoying LOUD cars that cruise down the street considered to emit ELF ?
Sydney 2001: clouds clouds clouds. I'll check again in 2034!
bash$
To my knowledge, it's not possible to actually HEAR radio signals, regardless of the frequency...
And what does it sound like?
I remember reading about the same type of thing occuring during very intense northern lights. Same sort of thing, where the event and sound occured at the same time, and there couldn't possibly be time for the sound to travel the distance.
IRC, it was the same sort of thing, an ELF interaction directly in the brain.
So my thought is, could we use this for actual communication? Cause voices in someones head?
This strikes me as a very neet discovery. Technoligy modeled after nature could, in time, provide us with some nice toys because of this. 100% wireless, unpowered speakers is one thought that comes to mind, I'm sure there are many more uses. Of course, there would be some major problems involved in using this in everyday life, but history shows that nothing can stand in the way of progress.
on rocketships, or watching meteors just got really expensive.
Plenty of details in there! A quick summary for those afflicted with ADD: VLF (Very Low Frequency) radio waves travel to the ground at light speed, stimulating various unsuspecting materials, like your glasses or frizzy hair, to generate sound waves audible to humans.
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
I didn't get a chance to hear OR see the meteors because all of southest Michigan was covered by fog. Too bad it was a once in a lifetime thing.
Besides meteors and aurora, some people claim to hear sounds from a facility in New Mexico (IIRC).
But the really scary thing, if you're a conspiracy nut, is the HAARP facility in Alaska. Huge power generators designed to manipulate the ionosphere... and do Mind Control on the US population.
I think it's total bullshit. President Bush is a man of outstanding moral standing and would never tolerate anything like that. We should be proud to have him as President, and Ashcroft as Attorney General. They would never do anything remotely questionable.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
they talk about things like auroras, meteors, and nuclear blasts setting off these vlf radio signals... so maybe someone out there with more knowledge of the science of the energy levels required to set off these vlf radio frequencies will smack me down on this... but how friggin' cool would this be for gaming?
;-P
can you imagine playing a fps and getting hit by something that sets off objects in your room crackling and vibrating? maybe a tie-in is possible with this article
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I hear this sort of thing really pisses off whales.
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
This fucking insightful post was brought to you by the letter F, and fucking Tourette's Syndrome.
Love,
Anonymous Fucking Coward
Stephen McGreevy, a professor at some college, IIRC, in California has been listening to Aurora Borealis' for years and has actually made recordings of some of the things he's heard and made CD's for retail sale. He also sells receivers to people so they can listen to the earth as well.
Related links:
His home page for VLF radio
The page he wants people to bookmark , cause his current provider bites.
His second CD
The VLF receiver page
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
hahahaha, I kill me.
Let's all have a turn.
I'm amazed that they posted it. It seems as if most government agencies (NASA included) are using the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to pull information offline.
Please note that NASA has become increasingly unwilling to divulge information about what happens on the space station. Routine information such as the 'ships log' and audio feeds are no longer shared or available.
I apologize for this off-topic message, but more people should understand that this article, while fascinating, is nothing compared to the reams of important data that is being maliciously sequestered by an organization paid for with tax dollars. For every piece on meteor sounds, there are 10 pages of technical data on spaceflight, human research, and more that is being systematically hidden.
I predict that the information will become available through some type of Lexis-Nexus style pay system in the future so that you can have the privilege of paying for the data twice.
Bread and circuses, my friend. Look at the rest of the story, and make NASA give us what we own.
Sorry meant to list the frequency differences. ELF, or Extremely Low Frequency signals are between 30-3000 Hz. VLF, or Very Low Frequency signals are between 3-30 kHz. Imagine the world's biggest subwoofers. Wonder if the Navy even gets tempted to broadcast one of those Dr. Crankenstein Bass CD's on it. ;-)
So, all I need is a monitor and some pine needles and I have my own portable radio system! Woohoo! Think of all the applications!
Uhh.. wait a minute...
Take a look at the Long Wave Club of America, they listen to low RF frequency sounds generated by things like lightning.
Remember Lexington Green!
so...since the Vogons can now have their freaky communications device, and we *already* have babelfish what are we waiting for next?
I guess I'll hold out for the frictionless car.
The best night for viewing in my area was about 80% covered in clouds. But through my little sky window I still saw about 15 or so per minute.
To see the article, you'll need to get a trailist account with their archive. Once you have it, go here, or search for "Sizzling Skies" in the 06 Jan 01 issue.
[and we laughed at those people all this time!!!]
You know the old rumour that if the right frequency of bass is played, it can make you vomit/fart/shit yourself etc...
If this is true, where can you get speakers that will produce such a low frequency? It'd make for a great party trick...
Nice post. I often wondered what people have enough time or energy to try to max out on Karma t Slashdot. Don't you kiddies have video games or something to play with?? Sheesh...
Take care,
Brian
We are giving away free Palm m100's...
Does anyone have information as to what exactly a Leonid is?
Sorry for the ignorance...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I'm printing about 50 copies of this and passing it around at work tomorrow. You see folks, I and my wife heard several of these during the Leonid showers and became a laughingstock when we told the astro-geeks at work. The only meteors that make noise, they claimed, were ferrous stones that penetrated to the lower atmosphere. Since the Leonids contained no meteors of this type, they thought I was just being stupid or lying to impress people.
Those of you who didn't hear this need to understand that it is a very quiet effect. I was watching the show up in the Sierra Nevada mountains south of a little town called Buck Meadows...about 20 minutes from Yosemite National Park. I was like 50 miles from the nearest city (with several mountains in between), 20 miles from the nearest highway, and MILES from ANYTHING louder than a squirrel. Heck, I could hear the hum of the high tension power lines over a mile and a half away and compared "fireball ratings" with a couple other skywatchers more than a thousand feet up the mountain...and didn't even have to raise my voice. It was that quuiieett, and we still barely heard this effect.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Now this isn't as cool as hearing meteors unaided with my ears. But while I was outside watching the Leonids here in Cupertino, I was also watching and listening to NASA's Meteor-radar with a linux program called baudline. There was a lot of activity that night, about a hit a second. Unfortunately I can't correlate the radar hits with the visuals since I live in California and the meteor radar is in other states (NM TX and AL). Still it was cool.
Right now the meteor radar is getting a hit about every 20 seconds. Sweet, I just saw a 70 second streak with a doppler shift of about 183 Hz. That is screaming at about 17X earth rotation! (If I wasn't so lazy I'd calculate that in MPH or m/s)
How did I do it? I just piped the real-time NASA stream into the standard input (stdin) of baudline, then equalized it with about 10 seconds of quietness, and then watched and listened away. I used this command line:
mpg123 -s http://icecast.msfc.nasa.gov:8000/forward-scat | baudline -stdin -channels 1 -overlap 100 -fftsize 2048 -mem 9 -record -samplerate 22050 -session meteor_radar
If the geocities site for baudline craps out, try again later, or try the mirror site. The downloaded md5sum for baudline_0.87_i686.tar.gz should be 72f949826ac81a461a8b4b5c5551f366
I guess I'll hold out for the frictionless car.
That might run very smoothly however, braking and steering might be a little difficult though...
One thing several of my friends and I wondered about is why the meteors didn't all travel in the same direction? The velocity of the Earth during the shower was basically constant. The velocity of all the particles in the cloud of debris that make up the shower should be the same, otherwise the cloud would have dispersed generations ago. If the two velocities are the same, then the path of the meteors should have all been the same. But while most of the meteors clearly traveled from East to West in accordance with the rotation of the Earth, quite a few appeared to come from the North and South! Does anyone know what causes this?
Shit, if you're reasonably intelligent and so inclined, you can easily hit the 50 karma kap with a time investment of less than an hour a day for 3 or 4 days.
Formula: plug important keywords from the story into google. For a quick score: 2 or 3, just list the first 5 links. For a score: 5, just write a paragraph summarizing the first 2 or 3 links, with the links embedded in it.
A script to simply post the links with reasonable heuristics to pick the keywords to put in google will accumlate 50 karma in a under a week. Its a pretty good technique to generate accounts to post +2 bonus'd goatse.cx links...
ELF/VLF listening (Score:5, Offtopic)
[...]
Moderation Totals: Interesting=3, Informative=1, Total=4.
However, about 8PM on the evening of the 25th I was still seeing shooting stars as I drove back up the coast, so there's still a few out there if you're patient and would like to see them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The kitchen stove in the house I lived in in Moscow, Idaho when I was 12 would pick up a local radio station. It sounded very quiet, but if the room was still you could make out the words in the announcer's voice.
Curiously, it only started doing that the last couple months we lived there, and it was only that one station that was received, although there were several in the area.
Later on, I lived around the corner from a CB fanatic that had a quite illegal overpowered station in his home. He had a fifty foot antenna set up in his backyard. If he broadcast while we were listening to the stereo, it would blast the room with his racket.
I found that I could receive him clearly on a cheap 2 inch audio speaker that had one foot of wire soldered to each terminal and stretched out in opposite directions. That's it.
A neighbor took up a petition to ask the FCC to bust him but they never would.
I mentioned both of these phenomena to an electrical engineer once and he thought it shouldn't happen because there was nothing to rectify the signal. I'm not so sure how it could work, maybe impurities or oxidation in the metal forming a natural diode, or nonlinear effects from all the power, or something I don't know.
Someone previously asked if you could receive radio on dental braces. Yes you can, I've never heard it happen but I've heard of it happening to other people.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.
I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.
In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.
I loved America for what it stood for.
I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.
But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government.
I am not proud to be an American today. I understand well why people in many other countries hate America. I love America, but I despise what it is rapidly becoming.
Something must be done about this.
There are many things that move me to write this, but what moved to me write this right now is that a member of a registered political party was singled out for harassment, first by American Airlines and then by the United States National Guard because of the opinions she holds.
Nancy Oden, one of the U.S. Green Party's top officials, was traveling to a Green Party national meeting from her hometown airport in Bangor, Maine. She had published a statement that calls for Universal Health Care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to the bombing of Afghanistan.
When she got to the American Airlines ticket counter she was told that there was a record in AA's computer indicating that she should be searched anytime she tried to fly.
During the search, she tried to help the security agent with a stuck zipper. The agent grabbed her arm and she pulled it away. The National Guard instructed the airline not to let her fly. The airline told all the other airlines not to let her fly. She was unable to attend the Green Party meeting.
So an official of a registered political party in the supposedly democratic United States was prevented from participating in the political process because her name had been recorded in a computer as someone who should be treated with suspicion.
I fear what America has become.
Also upsetting to me is the recent decision of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to allow eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations as well as opening of their mail. Read the ACLU press release opposing this.
From the Washington Post article U.S. Will Monitor Calls to Lawyers:
The right to a vigorous legal defense is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is one of the bulwarks that comes between official repression and those who are repressed, underprivileged, despised, outcast, or working for legitimate political change. You can read about the guarantee of legal representation in our Constitution:
I don't have a URL to link you to ( mail me one), but I read that among the hundreds of "suspects" and "material witnesses" rounded up in the days after September 11, many were held without charge and some were beaten by their jailers. Also some were held without being given access to attorneys or their families. I thought that could not happen here...
The recently signed USA PATRIOT act is an assault on our civil liberties the likes of which have not been seen in decades.
Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Analysis of USA PATRIOT Act, which largely discusses the law's impact on online activities - did you know that the government can now spy on the key words you search for at search engines like Google and AltaVista? Because computer cracking is now considered terrorism, searching for exploitz can result in your lengthy imprisonment.
The truth is the first victim of war.
Shortly after the September 11th attacks, President Bush said something to the effect that the reason the U.S. was attacked was because the terrorists hated our freedom, and that we must fight the terrorists in order to preserve it.
But Osama bin Laden does not care either way about our freedom. He has made it very clear why he hates the U.S., and none of this has been acknowledged by any official statements that I have heard. What bin Laden objects to are the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the holy city of Mecca, U.S. support for Israel's repression of the Palestinians, and the continued U.S. bombing of Iraq. More than anything, he feels that the presence of U.S. troops in the Islamic Holy Land is a sacrilege.
Whatever your position is on bin Laden's objections to the U.S., you must agree that it is wrong for our President to lie to us. Get informed, and work to understand the complexities behind the enmity between the Islamic and Western world. It's not as simple as our government would have us believe.
You might be interested to know what the Pentagon is doing to improve the United States' image in the Islamic world. Well, I'll tell you. It has taken out a $400,000 contract with Madison Avenue public relations firm The Rendon Group in an effort to help it "orient to the challenge of communication to a wide range of groups around the world". In addition, former advertising executive Charlotte Beers has been apointed to the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, a position she qualifies for because of her previous work promoting such products as Head & Shoulders shampoo.
Read about it in Propaganda Wars.
Well, its comforting to know that we'll be winning friends in Central Asia by showing professionally produced TV commercials depicting friendly Americans in between the news reports of mutilated and starving Afghani children.
What You Can DoIf you, like myself, feel that something is wrong with America these days, or with whatever country you find yourself in, speak out about it.
In this troubled times, speaking openly to inform others of injustice or to protest may result in a backlash against you from government officials or others. Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind. Have courage - it is only by having the courage to speak and to work against injustice that we can prevent it from getting a lot worse.
Among the ways you can speak out
Secondly, participate in what we have left of the democratic process. Our government has at least the appearance of having been elected, and the easiest way to make a change is to vote out the ones who have brought this upon us.
Use encryption to protect your privacy. Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.
You can get encryption software for free - you can use either Pretty Good Privacy or The GNU Privacy Guard. Both offer excellent, military strength protection of your data, and the source code to each is freely available so that programmers are able to inspect it for security defects and back doors.
Teach the people you correspond with to use encryption.
Teach people who work for political change to use encryption. If you don't think political candidates and their staff need to use encryption, you're too young to remember Nixon's Plumbers getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel to wiretap the Democratic National Committe.
Join organizations that work to protect civil liberties. Among these are:
One might think, and one certainly hopes, that the ultimate safeguard against these threats to our civil liberties lies with the Supreme Court of the United States. But I am not so certain myself. The Supreme Court has ruled against the dictates of law and the Constitution during other troubled periods in our nation's history.
And we should remember that the current President received a minority of the popular vote and was only declared to have a majority of the Electoral Vote after an obviously politically motivated ruling by the Supreme Court, a decision that has few pretenses of being based on the rule of law. Even had all the ballots been counted, enough Black Florida citizens were prevented from going to the polls that the election would clearly have gone for Gore had they been allowed to exercise their right to vote.
As said in the dissenting opinion by Justices Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer in Bush v. Gore (note - this is an Adobe Acrobat document):
We must work together to restore the rule of law in our country - or we shall surely suffer for it. If you do not agree that Fascism can arise in the United States, take heed of the fact that Adolf Hitler was elected as the leader of his country too.
November 12, 2001
Troll??!?!
I noticed that one post made mention of some ELF towers in Annapolis. Since I live in Annapolis, and had never heard of this, I got rather curious. After a quick Google search, I came up with a few interesting things:
So it looks like the Navy did, in fact, have a rather groundbreaking ELF setup back in the day. Unfortunately those antennae seem to be gone now, but hey, technology marches on. Now that I'm reading some of these articles I know exactly which antennae they're talking about, and I do remember noticing that there seemed to suddenly be fewer of them a couple years ago...
A frictionless car would have problems accelerating too.
mpg123 -s http://icecast.msfc.nasa.gov:8000/forward-scat | synaesthesia pipe 22050
It's good to see that Dr Keay's research has been gained respectability.
I was an undergraduate at the University of Newcastle when he was working on this, and attended a talk he gave on the subject. Perhaps I got it wrong, but I gained the impression that some of his colleagues thought he was wasting his time researching this rather controversial topic.
Respectability is important in the hard sciences, and this must have seemed to some to be more like paranormal psychology than physics. Good on him for sticking to his guns.
You can read more about Geophysical Electrophonics at Colin Keay's home page.
jmp
I remember being out at night on my bicycle, probably 15 years ago or more. I saw a meteor fly overhead from west to east with a bright green glow. I had always placed a sound with that incident! I had never really thought about the time that sound would need to propagate through the atmosphere! I was only 15 or so when it happened. Neat!
:)
This is why I really like Slashdot. Little by little, proving that I'm not completely insane. Now that I think about it, I think my older brother did look at me strange when I told him I heard the meteor.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
According to this old ABCNews article, communications systems that work by bouncing radio signals off momentary streaks of ionized air created by meteorites have been in use for decades. I remember reading about a truck tracking system based on this. Kind of cool actually.
They work on the principle that if you send out a weak, omnidirectional radio signal it will randomly be reflected to the right target every so often by a streak of ionized air from one of the 80,000 or so meteorites that hit the atmosphere every second. If the target radio sends out a return signal quickly enough, it will be reflected back along the same path to the sender. The ionized streak of air lasts about a second, which is long enough to shake hands and send a little data back and forth, like a truck's position or an updated delivery schedule. Radio signals can be reflected several thousand miles this way.
Or, the Taos Hum could just be mass hysteria or attention mongering :-)
Here's a link to a page with some info about it.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I watching a meteor shower in October 1981, maybe the Perseids, and 8 seconds after each one we heard a distinct 'pop' as of a distant gunshot. My father (a physics teacher) wrote to Patrick Moore, who hosts the BBC's The Sky at Night programme, and he replied saying that this was impossible. Maybe we were hearing a reflection of this fizzing sound, but it doesn't seem loud enough to carry over 3 kilometers.
In addition to what has already been posted, not every meteor you saw was neccessarily a Leonid. You can see one or two meteors an hour on any night. If it's dark enough.
Best Slashdot Co
On an overnight flight during a thunderstorm, I heard very low 'booming' noises concurrently with lightning bolts that were some thousands of feet away. It happened repeatedly, and I wondered if it were some EM pulse effect on the aircraft skin. Seems like it was.
Anyone else observe the like?
..
The latest Slashdot meme.
They sounded like "ooooooooh" and "ahhhhhhhhh."
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
All of what we knew about planets and their atmospheres
came from studying only 9 planets and a limited
number of moons. Now I am sure we will soon
have hundreds of planets and their atmospheres
to study. We could learn a great deal about
how atmospheres work -- this could help us save
the one on our planet. It is amazing how much you
can learn about the universe without stepping
foot off our one little planet in the middle of
nowhere
Now you can shut up anyone watching a sci-fi movie who complains that sound doesn't travel through outer space. Clearly the TIE fighters are just emitting ELFs, and probably intentionally too...
ALF could probably hear ELFs and VLFs with all that fur.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
See this link.
and here's a a link with a map.
The ELF system transmits at about 1 bit per second, shifting the center carrier of 76 Hz only 4 HZ up or down to indicate a zero or a one bit. It takes about 5 minutes to send one character.
And you thought YOU had a slow connection.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Heck, I started posting on slashdot before the Karma Kap. My Karma has been slowly working its way down from a peak of over 250 to a current value of 105.
:)
The downside is that my karma can only go down, not up. So sometimes I'll post an article, and get ratings like:
Moderation Totals: Funny=7, Overrated=3, Total=10.
Net result: My comment is moderated up to 5, but I lose 3 points!
Life is so unfair
We're waiting for the intergalactic highway to come through, of course.
We were seriously bummed at the fog in our area, and I should have had a radio ready for us to listen in.
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers