May 11th, 2024:
- The Sun spat out an X5.8 flare last night, the strongest of this solar cycle so far. I went out in the back yard and looked northeast, and damned if I didn’t catch fleeting glimpses of faint flickering light. Was too faint to discern color, but if it was an aurora, seeing it from Phoenix must be some kind of record.
- If you don’t have a link to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, bookmark it. I suspect that they’re going to have a lot to say during the solar maximum that’s now bearing down on us.
- I’m not expecting a Carrington-class event, but my longwire, by default, is switched to my engineered ground. I’m of two minds about listening to the low bands (or lack of low bands) while this storm is underway. 77 feet of wire is more than enough to develop enough voltage to spark with a strong enough coronal mass ejection. I don’t want to fry the front end of my IC-736.
- From the "That’s a Very Low Bar" Department: AIs can pretend to be stupider than they actually are. Forgive me if I say that they may be able to do it, but they’ll be BAD at it. Still, could AI’s "four-finger problem" be a joke on us? (By that I mean the tendency of AIs not to “know” how many fingers or toes a human being has.)
- Francis Turner’s opinions on LLM-style AI pretty much map to mine, and his Substack essay on the topic is a must read.
- I ran across an intriguing piece of music listening to KBAQ, our local classical station. It’s “Sky Blue After Rain” by Joseph Curiale, and consists of a piano and a Chinese erhu 2-stringed violin alternating with full orchestra. The piece is short (4:48) punchy, melodic, and when the orchestra picks it up, energetic. You can hear it on YouTube. Be sure to listen to the whole thing, even if the erhu grates on you. The orchestral part is worth it.
- Here’s a good short article explaining how cloud levels help regulate Earth’s temperatures.
- The highest observatory on Earth is now open for business, atop Cerro Chajnantor mountain in the Chilean Andes. The observatory was designed to capture infrared images with its boggling 6.5 meter (22 feet) clear aperture telescope.
- I have a robot dog with a 9mm gun in the (for now) dormant version of The Molten Flesh. What I didn’t imagine was a robot dog with a built-in flamethrower and laser targeting.
- While I was writing this entry, I had an idea: What if I unplug my antenna from the Icom and in its place on my antenna switch, put a coax plug with an NE2 neon bulb soldered across the connector. Well, it didn’t take but ten minutes (I’ve got plenty of neon bulbs and PL-259s) and the experiment is in place. Tonight when it gets dark I’m going to spend a little time out there in the garage, watching that NE-2.
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