You can get 1000fps in a consumer camera for around $1000 these days.
Not one with a telephoto lens that will zoom in from yards away to resolve a potato chip bag. Your consumer camera spy equipment is a pipe dream...
You'd be better off hiring a lip reader. Of course, all of this could be averted by closing the blinds in front of the window where the subject wishes his conversation to be private... I'm filing this one under "Dumb ideas".
Yeah... except that your spy van in your target's parking lot housing the high speed camera and its zooming lens will be obvious. With an IR laser you could do it from blocks away and nobody in the room would be the wiser.
After all, video normally has an update rate of 24 - 30 fps. The sampling rate will be half that at about 15 Hz.
If you have to have a video camera that can take pictures at audible sampling rates (very expensive), why not just bounce an IR laser off that potato chip bag?
Well, I guess I learn something new every day. Siemens sells them to power companies: they look like they'd mount on a semi with a flatbed. The installations look like banks of those mounted on a metal framework. It looks like they've installed them into lines at about 20 sites in the world. I have little doubt that would work to stop the DC current from a solar event.
Don't ask me how much an installation costs. (The website didn't have a retail price.:-) )
Thank you. And now I think we agree that under your worst scenario:
1. A few transformers (but probably only one) will be fried if the effects of a solar flare aren't noticed. (Which is unlikely because the sun is being constantly monitored for flare activity.)
2. The safety features in the rest of the grid will automatically shut transmission down if/when an affected transformer fails. (A cascading failure is fine if all you care about is protecting the grid infrastructure.)
3. The voltages induced by the flare (being much lower than the ordinary AC voltages across the transmission lines) won't arc across the open safety switches and/or breakers that have tripped.
4. The entire grid will remain substantially as it was before, but perhaps down for a few hours for most people who are dependent upon the few blown transformers.
5. Civilization will not be coming to an end as suggested elsewhere in this thread.
We can argue about how much DC current will be flowing in the event that a transformer fails. But my point is that once it fails, there are safety features in the grid as it is that will protect it.
I'm not an expert in this field, but I understand that the induced DC from a solar storm isn't as instantaneous as a lightning strike. It takes minutes to develop, which leaves time to disconnect the lines and affected transformers if they are properly monitored. As I understand, the induced DC is something on the order of hundreds of volts, which is much less than the tens of thousands of volts transmitted across ordinary high voltage transmission lines; disconnecting them should not result in arcing problems across the switches. It will result in thousands or millions of people going without power during the storm, but it doesn't have to destroy the electric power infrastructure if it is properly monitored and protected.
Feel free to correct my viewpoint as you may desire.
If you've got voltages being induced on your primary wiring much higher than the peak-to-peak of the regular supply, I think you've got much bigger things to worry about.
Telegraph wiring of the 1850s was typically connected to a battery; I imagine that the voltages induced in those long wires was overloading those batteries to the point there were fires. The batteries would have been small: big enough to work the mechanism on the other end for the receiver. Today's loading would be the equivalent of thousands of such batteries; with ordinary resistive loads such as light bulbs and the kitchen stove, multiplied by the number of households having something on, the induced voltage seen at your house should be pretty close to zip.
You mean like at the U.S. / Mexico border? Wow - that could be entertaining to watch. I'll bring the soda if you'll bring the popcorn.
Seriously, though. Chain link fence is steel connected through a coating of zinc and its oxide. I think the resistance in that kind of fence would keep it from having any substantial currents being induced inside. If it were mounted on steel posts, or even wet wood ones, the fence would be grounded out. I'd be more concerned with the cable-TV wires: they're often not grounded very well and are mounted well off the earth. I can see it potentially knocking out the preamp in your TV or your personal network router.
"And long, electricity-carrying wires spark, start fires and even operate and send signals when there’s no electricity! This even includes, believe it or not, when they aren’t plugged in."
In 1859, the "long, electricity-carrying wires" were telegraph wires, and there was nothing plugged into anyone's wall as suggested by the image in the article. Yes, there were large DC voltages induced in these miles-long wires: that's because they were MILES LONG. The wiring in your house and personal electronics might have a couple of millivolts induced within: something akin to the power induced when you rub your shoes on the carpet and zap them. (There's thousands of volts there: oooooh, I'm scared! NOT!)
If these solar events could induce significant voltages in meter-sized objects, then you'd have a lot to worry about. The human body is very conductive on the inside. But, I don't hear historical reports of people keeling over dead during this Carrington Event, so I'm not particularly worried about my electronics.
If you're really concerned about what's coming into your house from such a solar event, then all you need to do is walk over to the circuit breaker and turn it "OFF". You won't have power for a few hours, but that should keep you safe from any DC voltages above 150 volts.
Honestly people: your chances of being harmed by a lightning strike are much greater than this silliness.
Oh, I don't know. Perhaps I can claim an intellectual pursuit of testing the acumen of those who post to Slashdot. Or maybe I do it because I get tired of watching the same old cage-bottom-print-equivalent on cable TV. I think there's an aspect of it that I enjoy in working out the logical flaws and exposing the lack of quality in media sources. Perhaps I have a psychological need to dominate conversations that I get fulfilled.
Or, maybe I enjoy taking my.22 of practicality out and plinking the figurative gophers here that keep popping their heads up... there's a reason why those silly games at the amusement park are so popular (do you remember "Whack-a-mole"?)
I expect you to accept that there are some problems that cannot be solved. Global warming (to whatever extent it exists) is probably one of those problems.
Please don't expect me to become excited/outraged/whatever about this issue. I'm here to judge the case on the merits: give me just the facts, please. (I'm speaking to you in the press who continue to overstate the case for manmade global warming for the obvious purpose of attracting an audience for your advertisers. I'm speaking to you, slate.com and to you *cough* Slashdot *cough*.)
No, it wouldn't be a testcase at all because you'd have no idea whether you had succeeded, or whether natural geology relieved the pressure on its own.
Your declaration of the existence of a consensus in part or all of the scientific community and your "high degree of confidence" does nothing to prove the existence of significant global warming to the people who would decide whether anything is to be done. Your words are just as susceptible to criticism as those who deny global warming.
As for me: I doubt whether anything can be done to stop it. If it is man-made, then substantially all of mankind would have to change their ways. There is no global emperor that can decree that everyone stop burning fossil fuels. There is no common consensus that will stop individual countries (such as China) from exploiting available resources. Mankind can't even agree whether it is wrong to kill.
One half of humanity is running up their credit cards, and the other half is consumed with whether there will be enough food for them to eat tomorrow. Very few concern themselves with what some people speculate what might be 50 or 100 years into the future. If the world of Mad Max is coming, then it is coming.
From that Wikipedia article, that method has a number of problems:
First, the article suggests that this proxy has a resolution of something like a million years. (Certainly not less than a thousand years.) The data (and I'm looking at the graph in the article) suggests a variation of something on the order of 3-5 degrees F (2-3 degrees C) for periods less than a thousand years (represented in gray). It's hard to say what would cause that variation, whether that is from actual temperature variation or from some geologic phenomenon (does this oxygen diffuse through the calicite?) I'm not ready to use this data to show that a variation of less than one degree (as indicated in the Japanese summary) over the course of about 100 years isn't natural.
Second, the ratio is precipitation-related (the heavier isotopes tend to rain out first): a wet location (one closer to a body of water) will have a higher concentration of the heavier isotopes. Limestone deposits on the wind-facing side of a mountain will have a higher concentration than deposits on the leeward side; a change in isotope ratio could indicate a change in the direction of the prevailing winds in the region of the deposits. Thus the variations seen in the limestone have other potential causes than temperature.
Third, this method doesn't yield a temperature measurement on an absolute scale, but a relative one. (It can't tell you what the global or regional average temperature was for any particular time: it can only indicate a relative change between average temperatures in the region of a deposit and those at more northerly latitudes broadly.)
This is nowhere near a compelling proxy for comparison against modern temperature readings (even if you're only trying to see a difference in the rate of change between ancient and modern temperatures.)
If you'll look at the map about 1/3 down the page, you'll see a nice color coding showing stations that have data longer than 100 years (in red) that could possibly have data back to 1891 as the article claims. Those stations are predominantly in Japan and portions of the U.S. Note (from the visual representation requiring almost no linguistic intelligence to interpret) that most of the Earth has no data recorded at all, and well over 95% has no data going back more than 50 years.
Okay: I'll admit that the JMA dataset is more broad than to Japanese lands and territories only (as it apparently includes data from stations in the U.S. and sparsely cities in other countries), but hardly covers the entire Earth back to 1891.
Q: And from which of those proxies can one determine the average temperature in the month of June in the year 1891 for an ordinary terrestrial location within one degree F?
A: None of them. They are useless for comparison with the datasets used by the Japanese Meterological Agency.
The composition of the atmosphere does not directly determine the temperature at any location at any particular time.
under the same conditions? That's what would really be interesting.
This new device needs a temperature differential and humidity to operate. A thermocouple only needs a temperature differential. The new device won't work anywhere where there isn't a humidity high enough to provide condensation (such as space).
It's a curiosity, but I'm not investing any money in it in the short term...
If a collection of boulders/rocks have the same shape and density (individually), then they will have the same space between them regardless of their size. This is ignoring the conflicts with the walls of your hypothetical box. However, asteroids in space have no walls. Your experiment should not show what you think.
It might be more accurate to say that smaller rocks settle down more readily than larger boulders (in the spaces between), and the effect perceptively "floats" the boulders to the surface.
I was rebutting your assertions that (1) there was a reliable census taken for each individual country (2) there was a United Nations that could compile such a world census, and (3) that those (fictional) capabilities showed that there were reliable data sets for the Japanese.
And, no, generally there were no censuses taken before 1948 (and even today) for many/most countries of the world. The reason it is done historically in the U.S. is because that's how the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are apportioned (and today for other reasons as well such as for federal funds transferred to the states.)
If you're right and I am wrong, it should be easy to prove with a link. Go right ahead...
Slashdot Mirror
You can get 1000fps in a consumer camera for around $1000 these days.
Not one with a telephoto lens that will zoom in from yards away to resolve a potato chip bag. Your consumer camera spy equipment is a pipe dream...
You'd be better off hiring a lip reader. Of course, all of this could be averted by closing the blinds in front of the window where the subject wishes his conversation to be private... I'm filing this one under "Dumb ideas".
Yeah ... except that your spy van in your target's parking lot housing the high speed camera and its zooming lens will be obvious. With an IR laser you could do it from blocks away and nobody in the room would be the wiser.
After all, video normally has an update rate of 24 - 30 fps. The sampling rate will be half that at about 15 Hz. If you have to have a video camera that can take pictures at audible sampling rates (very expensive), why not just bounce an IR laser off that potato chip bag?
The Siemens website described an installation on a 750KV line, so I'm sure you're right.
Well, I guess I learn something new every day. Siemens sells them to power companies: they look like they'd mount on a semi with a flatbed. The installations look like banks of those mounted on a metal framework. It looks like they've installed them into lines at about 20 sites in the world. I have little doubt that would work to stop the DC current from a solar event.
Don't ask me how much an installation costs. (The website didn't have a retail price. :-) )
I would be curious to see these capacitors -- they would be gigantic. Do you have a link?
Thank you. And now I think we agree that under your worst scenario:
1. A few transformers (but probably only one) will be fried if the effects of a solar flare aren't noticed. (Which is unlikely because the sun is being constantly monitored for flare activity.) 2. The safety features in the rest of the grid will automatically shut transmission down if/when an affected transformer fails. (A cascading failure is fine if all you care about is protecting the grid infrastructure.) 3. The voltages induced by the flare (being much lower than the ordinary AC voltages across the transmission lines) won't arc across the open safety switches and/or breakers that have tripped. 4. The entire grid will remain substantially as it was before, but perhaps down for a few hours for most people who are dependent upon the few blown transformers. 5. Civilization will not be coming to an end as suggested elsewhere in this thread.
We can argue about how much DC current will be flowing in the event that a transformer fails. But my point is that once it fails, there are safety features in the grid as it is that will protect it.
In order to do that, the solar flux would have to reverse at the frequencies of the induced AC you theorize. It don't do that, man.
I'm not an expert in this field, but I understand that the induced DC from a solar storm isn't as instantaneous as a lightning strike. It takes minutes to develop, which leaves time to disconnect the lines and affected transformers if they are properly monitored. As I understand, the induced DC is something on the order of hundreds of volts, which is much less than the tens of thousands of volts transmitted across ordinary high voltage transmission lines; disconnecting them should not result in arcing problems across the switches. It will result in thousands or millions of people going without power during the storm, but it doesn't have to destroy the electric power infrastructure if it is properly monitored and protected.
Feel free to correct my viewpoint as you may desire.
If you've got voltages being induced on your primary wiring much higher than the peak-to-peak of the regular supply, I think you've got much bigger things to worry about.
Telegraph wiring of the 1850s was typically connected to a battery; I imagine that the voltages induced in those long wires was overloading those batteries to the point there were fires. The batteries would have been small: big enough to work the mechanism on the other end for the receiver. Today's loading would be the equivalent of thousands of such batteries; with ordinary resistive loads such as light bulbs and the kitchen stove, multiplied by the number of households having something on, the induced voltage seen at your house should be pretty close to zip.
You mean like at the U.S. / Mexico border? Wow - that could be entertaining to watch. I'll bring the soda if you'll bring the popcorn.
Seriously, though. Chain link fence is steel connected through a coating of zinc and its oxide. I think the resistance in that kind of fence would keep it from having any substantial currents being induced inside. If it were mounted on steel posts, or even wet wood ones, the fence would be grounded out. I'd be more concerned with the cable-TV wires: they're often not grounded very well and are mounted well off the earth. I can see it potentially knocking out the preamp in your TV or your personal network router.
"And long, electricity-carrying wires spark, start fires and even operate and send signals when there’s no electricity! This even includes, believe it or not, when they aren’t plugged in."
In 1859, the "long, electricity-carrying wires" were telegraph wires, and there was nothing plugged into anyone's wall as suggested by the image in the article. Yes, there were large DC voltages induced in these miles-long wires: that's because they were MILES LONG. The wiring in your house and personal electronics might have a couple of millivolts induced within: something akin to the power induced when you rub your shoes on the carpet and zap them. (There's thousands of volts there: oooooh, I'm scared! NOT!)
If these solar events could induce significant voltages in meter-sized objects, then you'd have a lot to worry about. The human body is very conductive on the inside. But, I don't hear historical reports of people keeling over dead during this Carrington Event, so I'm not particularly worried about my electronics.
If you're really concerned about what's coming into your house from such a solar event, then all you need to do is walk over to the circuit breaker and turn it "OFF". You won't have power for a few hours, but that should keep you safe from any DC voltages above 150 volts.
Honestly people: your chances of being harmed by a lightning strike are much greater than this silliness.
Oh, I don't know. Perhaps I can claim an intellectual pursuit of testing the acumen of those who post to Slashdot. Or maybe I do it because I get tired of watching the same old cage-bottom-print-equivalent on cable TV. I think there's an aspect of it that I enjoy in working out the logical flaws and exposing the lack of quality in media sources. Perhaps I have a psychological need to dominate conversations that I get fulfilled.
Or, maybe I enjoy taking my .22 of practicality out and plinking the figurative gophers here that keep popping their heads up ... there's a reason why those silly games at the amusement park are so popular (do you remember "Whack-a-mole"?)
I expect you to accept that there are some problems that cannot be solved. Global warming (to whatever extent it exists) is probably one of those problems.
Please don't expect me to become excited/outraged/whatever about this issue. I'm here to judge the case on the merits: give me just the facts, please. (I'm speaking to you in the press who continue to overstate the case for manmade global warming for the obvious purpose of attracting an audience for your advertisers. I'm speaking to you, slate.com and to you *cough* Slashdot *cough*.)
No, it wouldn't be a testcase at all because you'd have no idea whether you had succeeded, or whether natural geology relieved the pressure on its own.
Your declaration of the existence of a consensus in part or all of the scientific community and your "high degree of confidence" does nothing to prove the existence of significant global warming to the people who would decide whether anything is to be done. Your words are just as susceptible to criticism as those who deny global warming.
As for me: I doubt whether anything can be done to stop it. If it is man-made, then substantially all of mankind would have to change their ways. There is no global emperor that can decree that everyone stop burning fossil fuels. There is no common consensus that will stop individual countries (such as China) from exploiting available resources. Mankind can't even agree whether it is wrong to kill.
One half of humanity is running up their credit cards, and the other half is consumed with whether there will be enough food for them to eat tomorrow. Very few concern themselves with what some people speculate what might be 50 or 100 years into the future. If the world of Mad Max is coming, then it is coming.
From that Wikipedia article, that method has a number of problems:
First, the article suggests that this proxy has a resolution of something like a million years. (Certainly not less than a thousand years.) The data (and I'm looking at the graph in the article) suggests a variation of something on the order of 3-5 degrees F (2-3 degrees C) for periods less than a thousand years (represented in gray). It's hard to say what would cause that variation, whether that is from actual temperature variation or from some geologic phenomenon (does this oxygen diffuse through the calicite?) I'm not ready to use this data to show that a variation of less than one degree (as indicated in the Japanese summary) over the course of about 100 years isn't natural.
Second, the ratio is precipitation-related (the heavier isotopes tend to rain out first): a wet location (one closer to a body of water) will have a higher concentration of the heavier isotopes. Limestone deposits on the wind-facing side of a mountain will have a higher concentration than deposits on the leeward side; a change in isotope ratio could indicate a change in the direction of the prevailing winds in the region of the deposits. Thus the variations seen in the limestone have other potential causes than temperature.
Third, this method doesn't yield a temperature measurement on an absolute scale, but a relative one. (It can't tell you what the global or regional average temperature was for any particular time: it can only indicate a relative change between average temperatures in the region of a deposit and those at more northerly latitudes broadly.)
This is nowhere near a compelling proxy for comparison against modern temperature readings (even if you're only trying to see a difference in the rate of change between ancient and modern temperatures.)
Here's a link for you to look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
If you'll look at the map about 1/3 down the page, you'll see a nice color coding showing stations that have data longer than 100 years (in red) that could possibly have data back to 1891 as the article claims. Those stations are predominantly in Japan and portions of the U.S. Note (from the visual representation requiring almost no linguistic intelligence to interpret) that most of the Earth has no data recorded at all, and well over 95% has no data going back more than 50 years.
Okay: I'll admit that the JMA dataset is more broad than to Japanese lands and territories only (as it apparently includes data from stations in the U.S. and sparsely cities in other countries), but hardly covers the entire Earth back to 1891.
Congratulations. You've just proven me right.
Q: And from which of those proxies can one determine the average temperature in the month of June in the year 1891 for an ordinary terrestrial location within one degree F?
A: None of them. They are useless for comparison with the datasets used by the Japanese Meterological Agency.
The composition of the atmosphere does not directly determine the temperature at any location at any particular time.
under the same conditions? That's what would really be interesting.
This new device needs a temperature differential and humidity to operate. A thermocouple only needs a temperature differential. The new device won't work anywhere where there isn't a humidity high enough to provide condensation (such as space).
It's a curiosity, but I'm not investing any money in it in the short term...
Because they prefer the truth over racism.
If a collection of boulders/rocks have the same shape and density (individually), then they will have the same space between them regardless of their size. This is ignoring the conflicts with the walls of your hypothetical box. However, asteroids in space have no walls. Your experiment should not show what you think.
It might be more accurate to say that smaller rocks settle down more readily than larger boulders (in the spaces between), and the effect perceptively "floats" the boulders to the surface.
I was rebutting your assertions that (1) there was a reliable census taken for each individual country (2) there was a United Nations that could compile such a world census, and (3) that those (fictional) capabilities showed that there were reliable data sets for the Japanese.
And, no, generally there were no censuses taken before 1948 (and even today) for many/most countries of the world. The reason it is done historically in the U.S. is because that's how the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are apportioned (and today for other reasons as well such as for federal funds transferred to the states.)
If you're right and I am wrong, it should be easy to prove with a link. Go right ahead...
I can't stop you from exhibiting your lack of attention. I certainly do not believe that (and again I quote from the article) that:
The Japan Meteorological Agency said June 2014 was the warmest June GLOBALLY since at least 1891, when its dataset begins.
That goalpost is and was 1891. Ignore it if you want to...
Oh, I didn't know they had a global telecommunications system in 1891. I'll have to rethink my position ... NOT!
Do you want to try again?