I’ve Been Thunderstruck

I was thinking today about my Garmin 76CSx, and got to thinking about whether GPS receivers (often called GPSr), are more gadgets than real pieces of technology? As GPSr’s become more and more prevalent in the marketplace, they will mature to a point where we can do things wirelessly, accessing the Internet and getting data we need on the fly. Sooner or later something like the iGPS will debut, and we’ll have more GPS functionality in the palm of our hands than we ever thought possible before. At that point, is the GPSr just a cool gadget, or an honest-to-goodness piece of technology? I think my GPSr, in all it’s basic glory, is an amazing piece of technology that stands on it’s own with the basic functionality : showing me where I am on the earth. If you think about it, being able to know almost exactly where you are on the earth at any given time is pretty amazing. Couple that with something like Geocaching, and you get very cool technology helping you engage in a very interesting sport. It just blows my mind how cool it all is!

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Technorati Tags: technology,internet,gadgets,iGPS,GPS,caching,geocaching

Recently I came across an article at wikipedia about Numbers Stations. I don’t recall how I got there…whether it was a link from somewhere else, of if I stumbled there, but there I was, reading about “shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin.” Apparently they broadcast voices reading strings of numbers, words, letters, tunes or morse code.

This totally reminds me of “Lost.”

I continue reading.

The voices that can be heard on these stations are often mechanically generated. They are in a wide variety of languages, and the voices are usually women’s, though sometimes men’s or children’s voices are used.

Evidence supports popular assumptions that the broadcasts are channels of communication used to send messages to spies. This has not been publicly acknowledged by any government that may operate a numbers station, but in one case, Cuban numbers station espionage has been publicly prosecuted in a United States federal court.^[1]

Numbers stations appear and disappear over time (although some follow regular schedules), and their overall activity has increased slightly since the early 1990s. This increase suggests that as spy-related phenomena, they were not unique to the Cold War.

This is one of the most spooky things I have heard of in a long time. I had to have a listen. So I scrolled down to the end of the article, found an external link, and ultimately found a recording for “The Lincolnshire Poacher.”

Weird stuff, huh?!

Back to the article, I learned some more:

According to the notes of The Conet Project,^[2] numbers stations have been reported since World War I. If accurate, this would make numbers stations among the earliest radio broadcasts.

It has long been speculated, and was argued in court in one case, that these stations operate as a simple and foolproof method for government agencies to communicate with spies working under cover (sometimes literally^[3]). According to this theory, the messages are encrypted with a one-time pad, to avoid any risk of decryption by the enemy. As evidence, numbers stations have changed details of their broadcasts or produced special, nonscheduled broadcasts coincident with extraordinary political events, such as the August Coup.^{[citation needed]}

Others speculate that some of these stations may be related to illegal drug smuggling operations.^[4] Unlike government stations, smugglers’ stations would need to be lower powered and irregularly operated, to avoid location by triangulated direction finding, followed by government raids. However, numbers stations have transmitted with impunity for decades, so they are generally presumed to be operated or sponsored only by governments. Also, numbers station transmissions in the international shortwave bands typically require high levels of electric power that is unavailable to ranches, farms, or plantations in isolated drug-growing regions.

Although no broadcaster or government has acknowledged transmitting the numbers, a 1998 article in The Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry (the government department that, at that time, regulated radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom) as saying, “These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn’t be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption.”^[7] Listening to numbers stations in the UK is illegal under Section 48 of the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006 , so it is unlikely you could get official permission to listen to them; however, it is unlikely that the legislation would be used to prosecute those who listen to the stations privately. Indeed, one could argue that a listener could not be prosecuted for listening to stations that officially do not exist and in any case, operate illegally on frequencies not allocated to them by the ITU.

I don’t know about you, but this stuff strikes me as very, very odd. Couple this with my earlier post about mirrors on the moon, and, I tell you, I’ve come to realize just how much about the world we live in I don’t know. There are some many strange things going on out there that we have absolutely no idea about. Do you know something? Post a comment and I’ll check it out!

I was walking around the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA, today, and came across a plaza they have created where they place tiles to commemorate all the products the company has shipped over the years. Below are pictures of some of the more strange products…a few of which I’ve never heard of before.

This is the tile at the entrance to the plaza…sums up their vision from quite a few years ago:

I’m pretty sure most of you have heard of this very popular product from Microsoft:

I bet the investors love this product:

And now the beginning of an animal theme:

I’ve never heard of this one, but as a lover of music, it might have been interesting:

I may head back someday and see what I missed. I wonder if any other software companies have similar commemorative tiles?

Last week I wrote about an interesting video I had watched called "Horizon : What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity?" I learned quite a few interesting things while watching that video, but nothing shocked me as much to find out that there are mirrors on the moon!

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon almost 40 years ago, it was not only the first time we landed on the moon, but it was the start of an experiment that continues to this day. There’s an awesome article about the whole thing from "Science @ NASA," but the crux of the mission is stated as such:

Ringed by footprints, sitting in the moondust, lies a 2-foot wide panel studded with 100 mirrors pointing at Earth: the "lunar laser ranging retroreflector array." Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong put it there on July 21, 1969, about an hour before the end of their final moonwalk. Thirty-five years later, it’s the only Apollo science experiment still running.

The mirrors were left of the surface of the moon so we, down on Earth, could shoot lasers at them and help understand the distance between the Earth and the moon in a very precise way.

Here’s how it works: A laser pulse shoots out of a telescope on Earth, crosses the Earth-moon divide, and hits the array. Because the mirrors are "corner-cube reflectors," they send the pulse straight back where it came from. "It’s like hitting a ball into the corner of a squash court," explains Alley. Back on Earth, telescopes intercept the returning pulse–"usually just a single photon," he marvels.

The round-trip travel time pinpoints the moon’s distance with staggering precision: better than a few centimeters out of 385,000 km, typically.

Targeting the mirrors and catching their faint reflections is a challenge, but astronomers have been doing it for 35 years. A key observing site is the McDonald Observatory in Texas where a 0.7 meter telescope regularly pings reflectors in the Sea of Tranquility (Apollo 11), at Fra Mauro (Apollo 14) and Hadley Rille (Apollo 15), and, sometimes, in the Sea of Serenity. There’s a set of mirrors there onboard the parked Soviet Lunokhud 2 moon rover–maybe the coolest-looking robot ever built.

Scientists have learned quite a bit about the Earth-moon relationship in the years that they’ve been hitting it with a laser. Three important points have emerged as a result of the experiements:

1. The moon is spiraling away from Earth at a rate of 3.8 cm per year.
2. The moon probably has a liquid core.
3. The universal force of gravity is very stable. Newton’s gravitational constant G has changed less than 1 part in 100-billion since the laser experiments began.

This is some pretty amazing work, and even more amazing that it’s been going on night after night for almost 40 years! In that time Einstein’s theories have been confirmed, as well as Newton’s Gravitational constant. But, it’s also cast some doubt on other theories, and continued exploration will ultimately flesh out the truth. This is a very interesting article, and I encourage you to read more!