non-paywall article:
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ionosphere-smartphones.html
HAM operators have been engaged in activities of this sort for a
century, but this scale of deployment and automatic integration
qualifies as a global-scale sensorimotor "tissue" for the emergent
"superorganism"?
Early Redfish/SFx project (2011):
https://www.boston.gov/transportation/street-bump in this
citizen-science-facilitated-by-smartphone-at-scale domain. SimTable's
contemporary work in RealtimeEarth promises to contribute to the domain
in pretty broad/general ways IMO.
<hyperbolic tangent unto hyperbolic singularities>
I recently refired my parents' vintage "portable" Zenith Transoceanic
radio from the early 50s. I spent many a long winter's night with it's
orange tube-glow and blue-dial-lights and various hums and statics next
to my bed as I searched the dial for an unlikely ionospheric bounce...
sometimes catching foreign language broadcasts... often British Language
accented... occasionally "amateur" voices. KOMA (OKC) and KOB (DEN)
were at best faint signals in the mountain valleys of western NM but to
pick up a ionospheric bounce from halfway around the world was just
plain magic. I was also known to fire it up during thunderstorms and
try to use the wave-magnet antenna-coil as a direction finder. We lived
up on a hill where I had about 270 degree views with a distance of over
20 miles...
I've been reading my (paternal) grandfather's diaries starting mostly
during his time (WWI) in the Army first stateside in training then in
France as a medical tech just behind the front lines, going in to carry
out (litter and ambulance cart) the wounded and dead. This was his
first experience of radio technology, complementing the more ubiquitous
but vulnerable wired (telephone and telegraph) battlefield style
comms... Naval comms being a more obvious early adopter of wireless.
By the time he was settled back in the hills of KY, commercial radio was
ramping up. I (also) have what might have been his first radio which
was a "three dial" Crosley radio tuning/regeneration/volume of the
design type of the early 20s (5 tubes). This was pre-heterodyne
tech... so the human-in-the-loop (twiddling dials, orienting antennae)
was charged with adjusting for the various drifts that come with
transmitter variations, atmospheric conditions, drift in the tubes and
other components.
I haven't carefully inspected for electrical problems (shorts) given
that a mouse had raised at least one litter of babies in the cabinet
since it got packed away in a shed. There is a transformer coil which
I presume lowers the voltage from line (110) but haven't probed it for
operating voltage. The insulation (100+ years) on the wiring is pretty
fragile and the tubes (as they do) all show lots of heat-discoloration
but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. The main frequency tuning
device is a variable capacitor (lots of parallel plates on the back of
the dial).
When I worked as a DJ in the 70s at a 500w AM station we were still
driving that signal with a WWII era Xmitter which was prone to power and
frequency drift. My job included keeping an eye on those dials and
tweaking it back into spec. I would occasionally get calls from "fans"
who noticed our signal had drifted... at one point I started carrying a
transistor radio in my pocket with a earphone which allowed me to turn
down the monitor signals in the station (worked alone most of the time)
and listen to the transmitted signal rather than the source signal and
could notice the drift myself (as well as other infrequent reasons for
transmitter interruption.)
What 120 years and 3 generations has wrought?! The singularity is, in
spite of it's title has some "width" to it. I was surprised to find
that von Neumann is credited with first introducing the idea of a
technological singularity in private conversations with Stan Ulam in the
early 50s (but never writing about it) and that IJ Good might have been
the first to write about <Good, I.J. Speculations Concerning the First
Ultraintelligent Machine. Advances in Computers, 1965.>it in his
"speculations about the first ultra-intelligent machines" in 1965.
Ray Kurzweil (Age of intelligent machines 1987)
Verner Vinge /The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in
the Post-Human Era./ NASA Vision-21 Symposium, 1993
Damien Broderick (australian - /The Spike/ 1997)
Bruce Sterling (/The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole/ - 2002)
As a "bookend" I find Sterling and Gibson's 1990s "Steampunk" novel The
Difference Engine (set in 1855) a great alt-hist speculation about how
said "singularity profile" might have been ramped up earlier based on
steam-era tech.
Is the singularity exponential, hyperbolic or logistic? I suppose only
hyperbolic qualifies as a literal (vertical asymptote) singularity?
And my own techno-dys/utopian fantasies are all more logistic even if
they start out exponential and veer toward hyperbolic, reality (in the
form of physical limits and conservation laws) intrudes and damps things
out to a horizontal asymptote, only to be overtaken by another logistic
curve driven by a different process?
On 11/19/24 9:14 AM, glen wrote:
https://mastodon.social/@bruces/113510394317558182
For those who don't care about Mastodon or Bruce Sterling, Bruce links
to a Nature article:
Space weather mapped by millions of smartphones
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03545-5
Phone users around the world are enabling the creation of a
space-weather monitor that will deepen our understanding of the
physics governing Earth’s ionized upper atmosphere and improve the
accuracy of satellite positioning.
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ...
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
