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Listen to the Sky
disposable60 writes "Sky Ear will be a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky."
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Right, but if you'd read the site, you would realize that the whole structure is enclosed in a net which, presumably, they plan on hauling back to earth when finished.
-Mike-
"The balloons will be enclosed in a carbon fibre and net structure 25m in diameter tethered to the ground by 6 cables and held aloft at a height of 60m where it will remain for several hours."
They are not free floating balloons, so presumably they will rise in the net and come down in the net
most mobiles have autoanswer for handsfree
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
I thought using mobile phones at high altitudes put a strain on the system, because the phone sees so many towers. Or is that an urban legend?
No, that's a true reason why the FCC prohibits the use of cell phones while in an airplane.
Within each providers allocated slot of bandwidth, they subdivide that space into a number of channels, and assign each tower on their network a channel. If you're using your phone while in motion, when the signal from the tower you're actively talking falls below the acceptable line, it moves you over to the channel on which you are getting the strongest signal, because that's most likely coming from the tower you've moved closer too. Of course, for this to work, at no place should you be able to get two towers on the same channel... that'd be real confusing, and could lead to calls being assigned to the wrong tower. In practice, that's no big deal, that signal will just weaken quickly and you'll pick again until you get it right.
However, somebody in a high-altitude plane is in just that ugly situation.... they can see far too many towers from that height with no hills in the way. As proven on 9/11/01, such a call works if done in small numbers... the call will end up bouncing around from tower to tower a lot of times, but since those handoffs are invisible to the user, nothing really bad happens to the call. However, if everybody did that... there'd be far too many transfers for the system to keep up with, and the whole system would bog down. That's one reason why they tell you not to do that.
The FAA also prohibits the use of cell phones due to a possible risk of interference to the airplane navigation systems. However, this is distinct from the FCC's ban. Even if the FAA were to lighten up on this one, the FCC's ban would be unaffected.
It's one of these conceptual art bollocks and just an idiot at the helm.
One think I wondered about is how did they get these baloons which change colour according to the magnetic radiation. The gas is filled with helium so that's inert. I haven't heard of any material which changes colour with radiation.