Category: learning curve

Brilliant Hyundai ad

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I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot of the International Space Station. As it happens, I have a bit of soft spot for my Hyundai as well, but that’s not important right now.

What is important is that you watch this amazing Hyundai/International Space Station ad thing. It is, as the title of the post may have mentioned, brilliant.

Pretty cool, ne?

With our extremely connected, information-rich world, it can be tough to make one piece of communication stand out from the rest.

Well yes. But I must mention here that it only really worked because her dad was on the Space Station. It would have been less effective if he worked in, say, for example, a lab in Cape Town.

The project not only highlighted the difficulty in pluralising the word “Genesis”, it also broke the Guinness World Record for “the largest tyre track image,” measuring 59,808,480.26 square feet. Beeg.

More here, including some amazing behind-the-scenes stuff.

Radvertising.

Just where do perytons come from?

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You’ve asked, I’ve asked. Everyone has asked: Just where do perytons come from?

Well, now Petroff et al. are able to tell you. But first – some background:

“Perytons” are millisecond-duration transients of terrestrial origin, whose frequency-swept emission mimics the dispersion of an astrophysical pulse that has propagated through tenuous cold plasma.

Damn that tenuous cold plasma. But, there you go. A peryton is essentially a very short signal detected by a radio telescope, like the Parkes Radio Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. And while we (we radio astronomers, that is) were pretty sure that they were generated on earth, we weren’t sure how. The problem with perytons though, is that they are very similar to Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs. FRBs aren’t generated on earth – so they are of great interest to radio astronomers. It doesn’t help that they may be being masked by perytons.

In their submission to the journal Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, Petroff et al. claim to have found the source of these pesky perytons at their radio telescope:

Subsequent tests revealed that a peryton can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle. Radio emission escaping from microwave ovens during the magnetron shut-down phase neatly explain all of the observed properties of the peryton signals.

u wot m8?

Yep. It was a someone opening the door of a microwave oven on site before the bing that was causing that blip on a screen.

Awkward.

I’ve never really understood the need to open a microwave door prematurely. What are you going to do with the extra 9 seconds you just “saved”? And do you realise that you could have set radio astronomy back by several years as they struggle to work out what just made all their alien invasion alarms go off? No. No, you don’t, because you only think of yourself, don’t you?

Anyway. Whatever, because they’ve sorted it. I wonder who came up with the premature opening of microwave doors hypothesis? Can you imagine being in that meeting?

E.Petroff (for it is she): So, what could be causing these perytons, then?
Scientist 1: Aliens.
Scientist 2: Aliens.
Scientist 3: (eating recently warmed up braai leftovers): No idea, mate.

Anyway – there is a serious side to all of this. Now that they have had a good look at the microwave oven-generated perytons, they have worked out that one of their FRBs – FRB010724, to be exact – wasn’t caused by anyone in their kitchen and did actually come from way out there in outer space. And that’s quite exciting.

UPDATE: And here’s how they discovered this:

Brilliant. (And am I the only one who sees the middle finger in that graph?)

Niche

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Some time ago, we featured the Bollards of London blog on here. Sadly, it seems that that venture has disappeared from the internet. What a load of boll…ards. Presumably, they found them all and there was nothing else to document. But there are still plenty of other niche blogs around, and here’s one:

Pylon of the Month dot org

Yep. Really.

I know electricity is a bit of a sore point around here at the moment, but Pylon of the Month is actually rather addictive. I’m currently back in early 2010, close to beautiful Sheffield, looking at a stunning pylon-related sunset. The site has been going since 2008 and despite being a British based blog, even featured a snap from Somerset West (ugh) to open 2015. There was one from Japan last year as well. Cyprus, Scotland, Greece, Bulgaria, France, Ireland and Sweden are all also represented.
Wow. International.

It isn’t just pylons though. There’s a bit of information about the locality or the reasons behind the author being where he was when the photo was taken. And (perhaps because he’s a physics teacher near Oxford) then there’s educational stuff too. TIL about Stockbridge dampers:

A Stockbridge damper is a tuned mass damper used to suppress wind-induced vibrations on slender structures such as overhead power lines. The dumbbell-shaped device consists of two masses at the ends of a short length of cable or flexible rod, which is clamped at its middle to the main cable. The damper is designed to dissipate the energy of oscillations in the main cable to an acceptable level.

Without which, power lines would be wobbling and failing all over the world. Thank you, George H. Stockbridge, for your surprisingly simple – yet effective – invention. And you’ve all seen them, you just never knew what you were looking at. I love stuff like that.

Anyway, never one to shy away from getting involved in mildly odd stuff (at least on the internet), I’m going to submit a photo wot I took (of a pylon, obvs) to potm.org and see if I can get SA another place on the 2015 board. Watch this space. Or rather watch that space.

Second Language London

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I know – another London post. But this is interesting and kind of fun: a tube map with the second most common languages (after English, innit) spoken at each stop.

Tube map14FINAL_opt

You’ll need to click it to make it bigger.

A few things struck me immediately: the huge number of Bengali speakers in East London (the size of the dots relates to the percentage of speakers of that language). Perhaps unsurprisingly,Bengali is the second most spkoen language in London overall.
Also, the way that the groups stick together: that brown diagnonal of Lithuanians in the South East, equally, the dark orange of Punjabi in the South West and the light pink of Gujarati in the North West.

Afrikaans makes an impact too – in dark green, right at the top of the Northern line: Colindale, Burnt Oak and Edgware.

UPDATE: A beagle-eyed reader on Facebook notes that I may have got my Romanian and Afrikaans mixed up. This is always hapeening to me and has led to many unfortunate incidents here in SA (although, they are nothing, NOTHING! compared to my struggles on that recent trip to Bucharest).
A more detailed look at the map reveals that she’s almost certainly correct.

Two points arise from this:

1. The linguistic diversity of London is such that the researchers ran out of different colours to use, and
2. Well, where’s the Afrikaans then?

It took me a while, but I got there in the end – the penultimate stop eastbound on the central line: Theydon Bois. No, I’d never heard of it before, either, but I’m not sure how I’d missed it, given that it’s THE major large residential village of choice at the junction of the M11 and M25. Claim to fame-tastic.

[/UPDATE]

When I knew Saffas in London, it was all Acton and Putney – now replaced by Arabic and French. There are a lot of French speakers in London, which, as the cartographers point out, might include French speakers from North and Central Africa as well, although:

Since London is now the sixth biggest French city and has a resident member of the National Assembly to represent expatriates, it is a fair bet that many are from France

Linguistic diversity is rampant too:

Around Turnpike Lane 16 languages are spoken by more than one per cent of the population, topped by Polish at 6.7 per cent.

More details here.

There are three German warships off the coast of Struisbaai

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I’m not saying that it’s necessarily anything to worry about.
(UPDATE: Or is there?)
I’m just saying that they’re there.

germ

The Hessen, The Berlin and The Karlsruhe are probably just hanging around out there about 20 nautical miles offshore and enjoying the late summer calamari season. My sources tell me that squid is a very popular dish in Germany. Right?

The Berlin is essentially a supply ship, a support vessel for other German Navy ships.

Built in 1984, the Karlsruhe is a Bremen-class frigate. It’s got guns.

The Hessen is a more modern (2006) Sachsen-class frigate.

HESSEN
It’s got LOTS of guns:

These ships are optimized for the anti-air warfare role. The primary anti-air weapons are the 32-cell Mk 41 Mod 10 vertical launching system, equipped with twenty-four SM-2 Block IIIA missiles and thirty-two Evolved Sea Sparrowmissiles. Point-defense against cruise missiles is provided by a pair of 21-round Rolling Airframe Missile launchers. The ships are also equipped with two four-cell RGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missile launchers.

For defense against submarines, the frigates carry two triple-launchers for the 324 mm (12.8 in) MU90 Impact torpedoes. The ships also carry a variety of guns, including one dual-purpose 62-caliber 76-millimeter (3.0 in) gun manufactured by OTO Melara.
They are also armed with two Rheinmetall 27 mm (1.1 in) MLG 27 remote-controlled autocannons in single mounts.

Oh yeah?
Well, I’ve got a catty that I picked up at the robots in Somerset West (although I’m not ever so accurate with it) and I also have a beagle, albeit that it’s a beagle that generally gets quite scared when confronted with anything bigger than a seagull. (c.f. the Hessen at a length of 143m and a displacement of 5,800 tonnes.)

Having compared the respective weaponry at our disposal (and despite having noted with some glee that they have no specific anti-beagle measures available to them), I think that the German warships can stay right where they are if they like, or they can can even come and take over Struisbaai if that’s what they want to do.

I, for one, welcome our new Teutonic overlords.

Confirmed positions this afternoon: here, here & here.

UPDATE: Obviously they’re here using the convenient old “bilateral exercise” story:

The aim of the bilateral exercise is to facilitate the sharing of maritime expertise and to strengthen the military cooperation between the two countries.

Sadly, given the distinct lack of any SA Navy vessels in the vicinity, I have a sinking feeling (pun intended) that the strengthening of military cooperation may have been a bit of a one way street.