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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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...who will answer?
I personally like calling stupid people to hear the echo of my voice in their empty head.
Setec Astronomy
Hope they turn off the ringtones / vibrators.
*imagines the sound of mission impossible theme over an earpiece*
would we get to see cell phones zapped by lightning?
Would that be considered roaming?
It would be interesting to listen to during a storm or tornado.
Subzerorz
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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-
Do they mean 1000 balloons will be enclosed in a 25 mile net at a height of 60 miles?
Or a 25 meter net at a height of 60 meters?
The first seems ridiculous; the second is not very high.
"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
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!
You know, I could really use a new phone. I think I've got some darts and a net around here somewhere...
I moderate "-1, Fool"
Even better, muck around with VLF/ELF radio. You can hear much more interesting stuff than just the sky, like whistlers from thunderstorms for starters...
Check out vlf.it for some interesting stuff on VLF/ELF radio.
Is April Fools Day the tenth of April in the UK?
And why wait?? Listen now, live. (not all at once now!!) If that site goes down, and I presume it will within seconds of posting this, this site has pre-recorded sounds of Earth's natural EM radiation.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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."
(Seriously, how high were the people behind this event when they thought of the idea?)
...that gets sucked into a jet engine...
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
The sky talks to me all the time.
It tells me to burn 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){
I can't wait to see how many people mistake this for a UFO. ;-)
What is the point of this?
Answer here
Presumably they will just hear a few wind noises as it blows past the microphones?
I found a pretty good explanation here.
Just out of interest, who is putting up the money for this?
I think if you dig around, you might find out here.
They sound like they are spending other people's money with no comeback
Science had known to occasionally be funded by someone for one reason or another. I would recommend reading this page to learn about the experiment.
Or you could just RTFA.
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.
I have been on the top of a pretty high mountain (Bald Mt, Butte County, CA) during Field Day 2003. The cell had full strength signals but we couldn't make a call. When my friend got his roaming bill it turns out he was hitting a tower about 150 miles away. The better gain antennas on the cell tower could hit us, but out little .3w phone couldn't get back to it.
I know that we could use a midget, but if you're going to send up a midget, you may as well just send a weather balloon with a microphone. You never think your midget friends are useful until you actually need them :)
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
Mkay...
At least that was MY first thought when I saw this story.
when will I be able to get a Smelloscope? I hope I don't have to wait until the year 3000!
... Greenwich, London had reported pellet gun sales going through the roof.
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.
Wow, with an outlook like that, your life must really suck :P
Arrgh.. My imagination ran aground... What's the point of this then, there isn't anything interesting in this stunt. On the other hand, all Britain were quite interested with a guy locked in a glass box suspended off meters the ground... I think we are experiencing sensory deprevation, at least in the interesting stuff department. :)
You're probably referring to the Schumann resonance, the resonance of the earth-ionosphere resonant cavity. Energy from lightning around the world excites this resonance, which then rings--much as hitting a bell with a hammer causes the bell to ring.
Also like an acoustic bell, there is a fundamental frequency of resonance and many overtones that grow fainter as you go up in frequency. The fundamental Schumann resonance is approximately 7.8 Hz; the first few overtones are usually given as 13.8, 19.7, 25.7, and 31.7 Hz. There is a slight variation in the frequencies involved over long periods of time, as the ionosphere changes in response to solar activity.
...because if they are, the GSM circuitry will detect zero noise and therefore send zero signal to the receiving handset. The receiving handset will auto-generate a random noise which is perceived by our ears as silence.
Thus, if you phone up these balloons, the sound you hear has been generated by the phone you are holding next to your ear!
That's a really low frequency. Is it a concidence that it's wavelength is the almost the same as the circumference of the Earth? Or is that the whole reason it works?
Thanks for the information and links!
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.
Since the atmosphere is only 12 miles high, it is obvious that they must mean a 25 mile net at the depth of 60 meters. The weight of the cellphones needed to fill it probably can't make a bigger crater than that. If it makes a sphere, it has a volume of 3.3E13 m3. Each m3 can probably contain about 5000 cell phones, each weighing in at ~200g. This comes to 1.7E17 cell phones at a total weight of 3.3E16 kg.
According to http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects, such a net of cell phones will create an impact of 1.16E9 megatons of TNT and create a crater 108 miles in diameter. It also notes that simliar sized nets of cell phones hit the earth about once every billion years.
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.
...everyone knows that the wind cries Mary...