The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread V

[Ex-Ascot]

Morning folks. Sunny. Thatching continues. Garden destruction continues. Just made an online payment of a reasonable amount. It said payment failed try again. I did. It went twice

[OFSO]

Good oh Hydro. Soon be all mended (and ready for prostate).

[OFSO]

Search for drownded Frenchman continues here. Thought probably dead as 48 hrs have passed since post-party swim. Odd how stupid activités of youths leading to death vary by nation. With French it is drowning in sea or river. British leap from balcony to balcony and fall 15 stories. Germans rush into cold sea and have heart attacks. (Or invade Austria.)

[OFSO]

Two Just Stop Oil protesters have been arrested after smashing the case around the Magna Carta at the British Library.
Reverend Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher, targeted the glass enclosure around the historic document on Friday.
The pair then held up a sign reading "The Government is breaking the law" before gluing themselves to the display, footage posted online shows.

It's a good thing I was not in the British Library at the time (as I frequently am) as otherwise I'd have been facing charges of assault at the least and homicide at the most.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

A Just Stop Oil spokesman said: “Clause 39 of the Magna Carta is one of four clauses still enshrined in UK common law, a so-called ‘golden passage’ that states: ‘No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or in any other way ruined, except by the lawful judgement (sic) of his peers or by the law of the land.’

“Contrast that with civil law as it stands in 2024, where corporations are buying private laws in the form of injunctions that circumvent the people’s rights to a trial by jury for speaking out against the crimes of oil companies.”

The crucial section of Magna Carta would appear to be "or by the law of the land". That is, trial by jury is not an absolute right, so the protestors are simply wrong.

The argument about buying laws to suppress free speech is also somewhat spurious. Governments are shutting down free speech left, right, and centre without any need for such laws to be bought.

I note the Telegraph legal reporters can't spell judgment. Now that IS a crime

Given there seems to be a desire to get back to the roots of English Law at the time of Magna Carta, the two ladies should be aware that their act could have been classed as Treason at that time, for which the punishment was Burning At The Stake..and indeed the lady Anglican vicar could have been burned twice more for those two heresies.

[llondel]

Looks like a G4 geomagnetic storm this weekend. Aurora watch for those further from the equator.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/severe-geo ... lar-event/

[PHXPhlyer]

Looks like a G4 geomagnetic storm this weekend. Aurora watch for those further from the equator.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/severe-geo ... lar-event/

Why tonight’s massive solar storm could disrupt communications and GPS systems

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/10/business ... index.html

Buckle up: An unusual amount of solar activity this week could disrupt some of the most important technologies society relies on.

On Thursday, the US government issued its first severe geomagnetic storm watch in nearly 20 years, advising the public of “at least five earth-directed coronal mass ejections” as well as sunspots covering an area 16 times wider than the earth itself. A severe geomagnetic storm, or G4, is the second-highest grade in the US government’s classification system.

Radiation from this activity will begin to hit Earth’s magnetic field on Friday and last through the weekend, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA’s severe space weather watch suggests the storm could trigger numerous effects for life on Earth, possibly affecting the power grid as well as satellite and high frequency radio communications. Here’s what that means for technology users.

Communications impacts
The solar activity NOAA’s talking about involves the release of energy from the sun that travels through space and eventually reaches Earth.

When that radiation hits the magnetic sphere surrounding the planet, it causes fluctuations in the ionosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere.

Those changes can directly affect satellites and other spacecraft in orbit, altering their orientation or potentially knocking out their electronics.

Moreover, the changes to the ionosphere can block or degrade radio transmissions trying to pass through the atmosphere to reach satellites. And they can also prevent radio transmissions from successfully bouncing off the ionosphere — which some radio operators normally do to increase the range of their signals.

Since GPS satellites depend on signals penetrating the ionosphere, the geomagnetic disturbance scientists are expecting could affect that critical technology used by planes, ocean-going vessels, and in the agriculture and oil and gas industries. And it could affect shortwave radio transmissions used by ships and aircraft, emergency management agencies, the military and even ham radio operators, all of whom rely on the high frequency radio airwaves that NOAA says could be scattered by the storm.

“Geomagnetic storms can impact infrastructure in near-Earth orbit and on Earth’s surface, potentially disrupting communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations,” NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center said in a release. “SWPC has notified the operators of these systems so they can take protective action.”

What about your cellphone?
Consumer wireless networks rely on different radio frequencies than the high frequency band, so it appears unlikely that the storm will directly affect cellular service. The GPS features on your phone also typically use a mix of pure GPS and cellular tower-based location tracking, so even if GPS signals are disrupted, phone users may still be able to maintain a rough location fix.

So long as the underlying electrical infrastructure that supports wireless networks remains unaffected, even an extreme space weather event should result in “minimal direct impact to public safety line of-sight radio and commercial cellular services … and no first-order impact to consumer electronic devices,” according to researchers summarizing the findings of a 2010 study of extreme space weather conducted by NOAA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency outlined a similar report in a 2021 presentation on space weather, finding that line-of-sight radio transmissions are generally not affected by space weather except in specific situations. The presentation did note some risks for copper cables and telephone lines based on land.

In a slightly different scenario in February, NOAA noted two major solar flares. But despite “widely reported cellular network outages” around the same time, the agency said, it was “highly unlikely” that the flares played a role in those blackouts.

On Friday, NOAA officials reiterated that the impact to cell phones this weekend should be slim to none, unless there are broad disruptions to the power grid.

“We’ve not seen any evidence in the past that a space weather storm could impact that now,” Brent Gordon, chief of the Space Weather Services branch for SWPC, told reporters on a conference call. “If power is not available for those, then yes, certainly, the secondary impacts from that would be great.”

The power grid is potentially at risk
Severe space weather can jeopardize power grids, according to NOAA, whose alert this week said to expect “possible widespread voltage control problems” and that “some protective systems may mistakenly trip out key assets from the power grid.”

In 1989, a space weather event led to a massive blackout in Quebec, Canada for more than nine hours after geomagnetic fluctuations damaged transformers and other important equipment.

In October, an extreme geomagnetic storm stronger than the one predicted for this weekend led to power outages in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa, the SWPC said.

The largest known geomagnetic storm in history, known as the Carrington Event of 1859, caused telegraph stations to spark and catch fire.

A blackout of the electrical grid could have cascading effects for communications and other technologies, including cellphones. Cellular towers might lose power, as could the data centers that host websites and their information.

Still, many wireless carriers providers already maintain backup power generators and mobile cellular towers that they can deploy in the event of a natural disaster or other major incident. Redundancy and resiliency are watchwords of all critical infrastructure providers, so even if the power grid did fail, consumers might have to worry more about how to keep their phones charged rather than whether they could stay online.

As if to underscore that point, the US government’s advice to the public on how to prepare for a space weather event largely resembles the same steps you’d take in response to an extended power outage.

PP

[talmacapt]

The aurora are quite spctacular tonight in Southern Finland.

For once there are clear skies.

[llondel]

I've seen pictures of the aurora visible in Ireland, too,so it's coming quite far south.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Thanks for the heads-up. Skies are clear to the north right now, so I shall have a look. I'm further south than the others.

[Woody]

Lots of pictures of the Aurora last night, even seems to have been seen as far south as Switzerland.

[Ex-Ascot]

Morning folks. Sunny. No Auror here. No thatchers here either. Weekend off.

[talmacapt]

There are many pictures on the net but I will send my best.

It does not get completely dark here even at local mean midnight, so the contrast is not that good.

IMG_9404.jpeg (131.73 KiB) Viewed 580 times

IMG_9406.jpeg (36.51 KiB) Viewed 580 times

IMG_9411.jpeg (43.26 KiB) Viewed 580 times

[Karearea]

Red southern sky here a couple of hours ago, quite impressive.

[Karearea]

Seeing reports and photos of aurora from Auckland, ~37°S.

[Wodrick]

G’day

23°c, The soothsayer is going for 24°c I expect that will be exceeded.
Dome.

The Plum tree is in fact an Apricot it seems, Still got hundreds of fruit even after two big giveaways.

An uneventful run to AGP and back, biggest problem being the hoard of pedestrians.

Struggling with a meal plan for the weekend.
I go Supermarket for inspiration.

[OFSO]

Shopping after gym. Roads at near standstill as if it were July or August, not early May. France must be empty as blighters are all down here. Hot sun with cold wind.

[OFSO]

According to the news one could see the Aurora Borealis from here last night, if there wasn't a whopping great 1500' mountain to the north of our yard.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

46N, very bright Aurora here all night, right across the sky in a wide band from east to west. Almost all white, with very faint hints of colour on the edges of the flickery bits.
The wavy bits were only distinguishable almost directly overhead, and the rest was a solid sheet of white. There didn't seem to be much to the north, oddly.

[ricardian]

My sister lives in Perth WA and used to live in Bunbury as did my late mother:

Artemisia Blythe from PerthNow.com.au:
May 11, 2024 12:20PM
"WA has been hit with extreme weather events over the last couple of days, including a freak tornado in Bunbury causing damage to at least 40 houses."