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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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Just out of interest, who is putting up the money for this? They sound like they are spending other people's money with no comeback
Easy way to do it, climb a high mountain. No cell phones involved and you hear and see the clouds in person.
Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!
Why cellphones? I mean, really, what's the value of having people call in to hear wind whistling around, balloons rustling (latex/plastic rubbing together), and cellphones ringing.
Why not use higher-fidelity equipment, and make a recording available for download afterwards? I think the quality and value of that model would be much more attractive.
Additionally, there will be issues with either 1) there being too few cellphones to meet the demand, and no one being able to get on them and listen, or 2) there will be too many cellphones, necessary to meed the demand, that will occupy all the access points/lines at the cell tower sites, and interfere with each other due to ambient RF from the phones being packed so close.
I hope these folks are bright enough to have considered and addressed these issues.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
just enjoy it for what it is. Don't you have an inner child that loves balloons? Add that inner child to your outer geek...and this should be good stuff. Come on, not everything has to be bad.
(begin flame...NOW!)
(no, I'm not a hippie...but I HAVE been to Burning Man, and am going back this year as well){
Well, there's an amazing waste of time and money. But hey, it's their money, not mine.
I'm tempted to call for a minute or two, even if it's an international call. It'll break the monotony of office conversation.
"Ya last night I called a cell phone in England, hanging from a balloon. What did you do?"
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Wow, with an outlook like that, your life must really suck :P
Oh come on, read the article. This whole thing is being done as a bit of *fun* combining some interesting science and a big art component. It's meant to appeal to people's sense of wonder and interest them, not to be the most technically adept way of providing a multi-channel audio feed from 60M up. If you had bothered to read the piece you would have seen that, apart from anything else the act of contacting one of the suspended phones is meant to change the RF field in the balloon cloud enough to change the colour of the surrounding balloons change the colour of the light they emit. I live near Greenwich, and I suspect I'll be there, together with a lot of families with picnics having a laugh. And for those people asking about the funding - these people are coughing up: "The Daniel Langlois Foundation'spurpose is to further artistic and scientific knowledge by fostering the meeting of art and science in the field of technologies. " The foundation unfortunately has a terrible liking for bad Flash.
This is clearly not science, it is art. There are no untested hypotheses, there is no rigorous data being collected that may tell us more about EM in a deductive way...
It is no more science than a painting of a cat is a cat. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, right?
This is a moving demonstration of how complex the sky's environment is, and how much we can't see. Since people still have no clue about radiation, it will be a little educational... but mainly it will create an emotional response to an ordinarily invisible phenomenon.
Oh, and the funding is provided by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, which ends the discussion about whether it's worth the money. Daniel Langlois thinks art about science is important, and it's his money.