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Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

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Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#101

Post by garrettgarcia »

houseplant wrote: post #44

the phenomenon of "red sprites", massive discharges of electricity upwards into the ionosphere that counter every single lightning strike, are only now being observed and photographed. these energy ejections are SO powerful, they temporarily cause miniature aurora displays for a split second, by ionizing the same layer of the atmosphere where they appear. it's amazing to see photos of it.

Sprites and similar phenomena have been reported for many years by pilots and others, but scientists didn't believe them until recently because it didn't fit their flawed models. It's similar how scientists didn't believe centuries of stories about rogue waves from mariners until one was recorded with a buoy in 1995.

Pecos Hank, the best storm chaser on Youtube, has recorded beautiful video of sprites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGPQ5kzJ9Tg

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#102

Post by DCH3416 »

teeray wrote: post #68
cperciva wrote: post #2

Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?

“Americans will use anything but the metric system”

And there's nothing wrong with that. Pick the best unit for the job and move on.

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#103

Post by throwawaymaths »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #75

I wonder if this is in any way responsible for the increased biodiversity there - maybe a slightly higher mutation rate?

The genetic diversity of rainforests is largely an illusion and/or evo biologists looking for taxpayer funded safari expeditions.

Most of the biodiversity in rainforests is in megafauna and insects, largely because the megaflora are fumigating the shit out of the soil.

If you want a very high degree of biodiversity the place to look is temperate deserts, where the microbial diversity is extremely high -- probably because of intense competition for scarce resources plus boom/bust growth cycles driven by intermittent water and even a high degree of phased ecosystem overlay.

Of course that observation could also be evobiologists who like to go on taxpayer funded hiking junkets

Fierer, Jackson 2006 if you want a citation

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#104

Post by sneak »

benterix wrote: post #55
liversage wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc. Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...

> Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a sm…

Do you still use telnet?

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#105

Post by sneak »

andai wrote: post #77
benterix wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a sm…

Yesterday I considered writing a web scraper completely from scratch (just sockets). Without HTTPS, this is trivial. Of course, you lose out on much (most?) of the web, but I have a feeling most small / interesting sites would still be accessible. I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would con…

Even if you moved the entire TLS web to non-TLS, this is no longer trivial. The web requires Javascript to render, full stop. Fetching and parsing HTML alone is totally insufficient.

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#106

Post by Andys »

vanderZwan wrote: post #85

This somehow reminds me of the fact that you can produce (surprisingly high-quality) x-rays by unrolling scotch tape in a vacuum chamber[0][1]. I wonder if it turns out to be related in any way. Thunderstorms aren't a vacuum of course, but I dunno, maybe all that frozen hail being thrown around can bumping into each other still involves a similar underlying mechanism somewhere. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nat…

When objects collide or are separated, aren't we really just witnessing tiny chemical reactions, all involving the absorption and/or release of energy?

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#107

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

cperciva wrote: post #2

Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?

I think they should have said 150MV regardless of the comparison, but some sort of "intuitive" illustrations is useful for non-specialists. But as other commenters have pointed out, millions of batteries is also unintuitive because you're trading an intuitive voltage for a completely unintuitive quantity.

I would have gone a different direction by making the voltages and quantities "almost intuitive" - say the electric field is as strong as hundreds of high-voltage substations (500 or so). Laypeople don't have an intuition on substations' physics but they do have an intuition on the economics (tons of homes and businesses depend on that thing) and therefore at least some appreciation for how powerful that voltage is. Likewise we can't visualize hundreds of anything, but we can (sort of) visualize a 20x20 rectangle and appreciate how many 400 is. So I think 400 HV substations is at least vaguely graspable.

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#108

Post by benterix »

sneak wrote: post #105
andai wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I considered writing a web scraper completely from scratch (just sockets). Without HTTPS, this is trivial. Of course, you lose out on much (most?) of the web, but I have a feeling most small / interesting sites would still be accessible. I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would con…

Even if you moved the entire TLS web to non-TLS, this is no longer trivial. The web requires Javascript to render, full stop. Fetching and parsing HTML alone is totally insufficient.

> The web requires Javascript to render, full stop.

A small correction: some parts of the new web require JavaScript to render.

That's why on many websites teh experience is better without JS. To be more specific, several paywalled websites can be accessed just by turning the JS off. You could even say the opposite is true in these cases: JS is being used to prevent text rendering.

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#109

Post by benterix »

sneak wrote: post #104
benterix wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a sm…

Do you still use telnet?

No, it's no longer practical for any purpose. I mostly use openssl instead, e.g. for testing if my SMTP server is up and has a valid cert:

openssl s_client -connect myhost.com:25 -starttls smtp

Telnet stopped being useful a long time ago, is no longer shipped by default, and there are better tools to do things it was used for decades ago.

Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

#110

Post by not2b »

nkrisc wrote: post #54
BurningFrog wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40 millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions of dollars". This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands. My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.

> If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied That’s not what lying is. To tell a lie is to intentionally state as fact something you know to be false. Being wrong isn’t lying.

The number is being reported accurately, but with only one digit of significance. Rounding 39 to 40 isn't lying and isn't deceitful.
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