Slashdot Mirror
Send Morse Code Over Stockholm By Laser
bigmac writes "KTH, Royal Institute of technology is celebrating 175 year anniv by making a very spectacular laser show. A green laser sent from the bottom of an old reactor building 30 meters below ground. The beam is then reflected over the city from the schools clock tower.
And yes, you can send your own laser-morse messages through their homepage!" Here's an image to chew on.
That looks real.
Can google enterpret Morse code?
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
'All your base are belong to us.'
It is for calling The Green Hornet and Kato!
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Pretty impressive. I'm green with envy! PS: What's a lameness filter and why won't it let me list morse code?
If I don't understand swedish, I won't understand swedish morse code. Does any translator know swedish?
I wonder if echelon will be monitoring these transmissions... because we all know this is what the terrorists of the future will be using..
Can we call Batman with it?
Hey, I code java applets in morse code, so BACK OFF, mang!
Ouch, my freaking eyes
... that was up on slashdot a while ago. It allowed you to send messages that scrolled by on a 18x8 screen made of lamps in office rooms and play Pong on your GSM (see http://www.blinkenlights.de/).
It's not even that original, considering the fact that (at least here in NL) a lot of clip stations are continuously scrolling by SMS messages from random people. Everyone his 5 seconds of fame. Hmm.
The laser would be a fun way to ask a geeky other half to marry though.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
Remind me not peer out the window next time I fly into Stickholm.
Anyone notice on the site that the university is giving a doctorat (honoris causa) to Bill Gates?
Nice one, Stockholm!
Click on "Ljus Telegraph" to send your own message. Ditt meddelande = Your message. Avsändare = Message sender. That's it. Quite simple.
You can get an English translation here. Sorry, Babelfish doesn't have Swedish yet ;)
After learning morsecode in the Navy, four of my friends and I had a lesson in how to behave in front of women. Beer had caused an unusually deep load displacement, and we sat in a train compartment and morsed whatever dirty words or sentences we could come up with.
.... ..- -. -.. . -.
Five drunken sailors and a young attractive(at least she seamed so, at that time) girl, gave us five hours of fun morsetraining. At her stop I found it appropriate to excuse for our childish behaviour - She replied that she had enjoyed our show, and as an old girl scout she had brushed up her morse code.
Sending morsecode in trains have never been the same after that:)
Shouldn't this be from the "no-life-geeks-with-way-too-much-free-time" dept.?
during my daily surf, two month ago, i found this to make my own morse code. have fun! =)
irma trattino
eat.me at http://irmetta.free.fr
There's nothing to convince me that the picture's a fake.
I've seen green laser that were intense enough to been seen by the naked eye.. If you look at it from the correct angle with respect to the polarization, of course
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Looks like the MCP from Tron drank some green beer. :-)
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I think I will send this in hopes aliens from a distant planet just happen to pick up the laser.
:( You mean to tell me slashcode can't recognize morse code???
"All your base are belong to us"
Well I did go to the trouble of typing my mesage out in morse code, but I have too many 'junk' characters to submit the post
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
What about this?
I bet you could really excercise your cat with that one, and do it over the internet, too!
"Stockholm by night"
In a symbolic meeting between academia and the rest of the world, Stockholm's night sky will be adorned by a beam of light. A beam that has its origins in history, is part of our time and endeavours towards the future. A beam reflecting the advancements of technology and enterprise. A curious beam.
From a point 30 meters below the face of the earth, where once Sweden's first nuclear reactor was, a laser beam is produces and is reflected by the tower where pioneers once sent the first TV signals across Sweden. From here, the light is further projected over the city before reaching its goal: the City Hall.
Warning: Do not look directly at laser with remaining good eye.
Some joyriding alien passing by Sol is going to pick up "All your base are belong to us" sent by some trite geek and thus begins the first interstellar war.
Jesus saves....And takes 1/2 damage.
Just sent it...
After looking at that pic, I just KNEW someone would be thinking what I was thinking: "Cool I/O Tower!"
...beaming over the city from the Hilton (not the Flamingo Hilton on the strip)I think. Then one day a pilot was momentarily blinded by the light and the show was soon over.
That image is... striking.
This isn't for morse code, this is for playing Missle Command writ large!
Looks like obi-wan left his lightsaber on again. :)
My message would be the source code to DeCSS, compressed, and alpha-encoded.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Thanks for the instruction. Now how may I send a huge bat to the sky with this? We got some problem here in Gothem...
Actually it doesn't have to have sufficient power to ionize the surrounding air. Lasers are (if they're powerful enough) able to cause dipole radiation, without ionizing any molecules.
the dipole oscillations are oriented with respect to the polarization of the light, so this light is most intense if you see it from an angle perpendicular to the polarization.
It's true that weak lasers has to reflect of particles, but I'm sure that this laser is powerful enough to cause dipole radiation... (maybe the reason why the didn't just move the laser from the basement it's placed in)
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Here I am, a friendly alien called Zonub12, on my way to a vacation on peaceful rytttbl in the andromeda system. Suddenly a laser blast penetrates my ISO certified force shield. It's time you humans grow up.
Might better than those dim WTC lights they had, why didnt they just get the same amount of powered laser instead of 5% flood lights.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Just for the sake of completeness... star wars is still wrong, in empty space lasers beams are invisible
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Oh sure, remind me of the things I've forgotten about, why don't you? Ugh, I deffinately need to revisit my physics book.
Although I imagine the "transmission" would be visible from your home too :)
Could this be considered Green wireless networking ?
Check out all the other photos from the event here.
This was very neat, although the concept is by no means new. An artist named Rockne Krebs has been using lasers since the late 1960s to execute new forms of art. Perhaps his most famous art piece was "Green Hypotenuse" (1983) : a massive laser show which beamed an argon laser from the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Pasadena to the wall of the Beckmann Auditorium on the Caltech campus over 7 miles away.
:
The photograph on a webpage describing the art looks remarkably like the Swedish project. From the webpage
Rockne Krebs was born in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1961 he received a B.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Kansas. Though not a painter, his fascination with ideas of color, along with his passion for sculpture, spawned a desire to create a sculptural work entirely made of light and color. Eventually this led to his development of "laser sculpture." In 1967 Krebs obtained his first simple HeNe (helium-neon) laser and created the piece Sculpture Minus Object. In 1969 he was sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to work with Hewlett-Packard. They collaborated on a design for a piece that Krebs presented in the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. This piece featured the first ever laser beam switching system and the prototype of the first laser light show. In 1983, Krebs connected the over 5,000-foot Mt. Wilson to the wall of Caltech's Beckman Auditorium over 7 miles away using light from a single argon laser. He allowed the laser beam to spread so by the time it reached the white exterior of the auditorium it was a constantly changing "painting" of green light. For The Universe: Contemporary Art and the Cosmos Krebs is creating a new piece using lasers and mirrors to connect the Armory building with the park across the street. He is also represented by two drawings, a medium he has explored in depth since the early 1970s.
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
how many Star Wars fanatics woke up and headed for the hills thinking the empire had installed a turbo laser turret.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
The distance from source to target is around three miles, give or take. The beam is horizontal, some 50+ meters above ground.
Morse code has been sent using pulses of light already. Why is it suddenly a new idea when we use lasers?
Tell me, is that green laser mounted on the head of a shark in a shark cage???????
To the Batmobile!!
After looking at that picture I started wondering if the moon will have "CHA" on it tonight.
...so I can be sure that my message gets through?
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
And BTW I did read the article, but the streaming server is /.ed, therefore I need the webcam!
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
"Do not hump the laser."
Why bother.
I see your Schwartz is as big as mine ... let's see how you use it!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"If you can read this, you're a licensed HAM radio operator."?
I did...I sent "First Post".
Urgent -- Need Help [stop]
Send Sweedish Bikini Team [stop]
When can I get a laser pointer with that kind of power?
nahh... just kiddin' :)
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
off topic??! WTF??!! if you didn't find the joke funny, you are free to ignore it. you are NOT free to mod it down.
what's your problem? asshole.
Great, another thing for us to /.
They'll be running the laser for years trying to get through all the geek messages.
... by the same group who did the show in the article
I don't understand Knåkkebrøtish, but it looks kuhl.
Check here
Privacy is terrorism.
Just heard about someone in the project team testing the laser, by lighting a cigarette on it.
:-)
Oh and the proper message to send is "FIRST POST" of course
All opinions are my own - until criticized
I've got to get to that IO tower and communicate with my user.
I SO want that laser in my town, although, you've got to wonder how that would affect pilots!
-What have you contributed lately?
"Free Kevin"
KTH is a great school. I was an exchange student there for a year from the University of Washington. Go ahead. Mod me down offtopic.
Try http://www.tranexp.com:2000/ :)
:)
That page does Swedish translation. Not very neat, but you can get semi-understandable texts at least.
Btw, I was just down in the reactor to switch the laser of for the night. Looks pretty cool down there, there are now pictures of me holding my hand in the beam. Maby I post them later.
They are actually faking it a bit. The laser is not mirrored, but there are actually 3 different lasers. The laser in the reactor outputs 5 Watts and is very green
Supposedly the Swedes have received a reply in blue laser last night. 'We like talking to you better, those SETI guys are too serious.'
radsoft.net
The laser is shot from an old reactor-room (radioactive) in the school area. It is then mirrored twise until in finally hits the City Hall about 5 kilometers away from the shool clock-tower.
the homepage:
http://www.r1.kth.se/bilder.php
Chapter 1
The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot
of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams?
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