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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."
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.