Well it shows how infrequently the University staff do the lawns, if this is the first time it's happened :)
False Northern Lights alert issued to entire UK because of a lawnmower
An alert that the Northern Lights would be visible across all of Great Britain last night was wrongly issued because a sit-on lawnmower disturbed scientific instruments. Subscribers to the AuroraWatch UK mailing list were sent a “Red Alert” yesterday; informing them that it would be possible to view the aurora borealis from …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 25th August 2016 16:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Infrequent lawn moving
What's the betting it was actually a petrol one, but an alternator or similar accessory had caused the magnetometer reading? Not sure I believe "electric ride-on mower". Although seems at least 1 USA company is doing pioneering ones. Would need humungous batteries to do the choppy-choppy as well as drive, bigger than a golf cart needs? Typical ride-on needs 15kW if petrol-only and still lucky to get more than 20 mpg (compare to moped using same size motor getting 50 mpg or more ...)
Perhaps the alternator was getting old and needing some new carbon brushes or rectifier or something like that? :)
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 10:19 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
I thought the alert was odd, as I have been watching the sun closely, and had seen little activity to suggest a coronal mass ejection of any size. In fact, many solar observers had been bemoaning the lack of activity (although a few spots have bubbled up in the last few days). I am surprised, however, that a single station reporting weird values isn't trapped automatically. It would seem easy to detect this as an outlier and ignore it (or flag it to let somebody inspect it before issuing an alert.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 16:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lawnmower man
I used to work with a VAX administrator (no, not the vacuum cleaner ones) who came in one morning and found his terminal wasn't getting anything back when hitting a few keys (space, return, etc).
Seems the cleaner had mistaken his box for an aircon unit and had borrowed its power socket. And not plugged it back in :)
He had to go to a rarely-used room far away across the site and do the necessary :)
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Friday 26th August 2016 07:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lawnmower man
Umm yeah except that is a reference to one of the hoarier urban legends.
'fraid not. We had systems in a booth at a large trade show restart for two successive evenings, after the show had closed. Only a notice taped to the power strip (in English & Spanish, this was California) stopped the cleaners from unplugging the server to vacuum the booth.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 10:51 GMT Pascal Monett
"what had caused the huge anomaly"
The huge anomaly was actually caused by lack of common sense and non-existent correlation between local readings and solar activity.
In order for any sort of aurora to occur, the sun must have surface activity - activity which is at a low point at this time. So correlating whatever reading with current sunspot activity would have nipped that alert in the bud.
Plus : auroras in the UK night sky ? When was the last time that happened ?
Edit : by Jove, apparently it does happen, albeit rarely. My gast is flabbered.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 11:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "what had caused the huge anomaly"
space weather dot com has some nice pictures, predictions etc
a regularly updated image is hosted here:
http://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/aurora-forecast-northern-hemisphere.png
note: the aurora is measured in GigaWatts (that's quite a lot of PP-3 batteries)
I have successfully transmitted duplex data from Spurn Head, (east Yorks) north via the auroral curtain reflected into central Italy, on occasion. . . before harp was built even!
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 11:45 GMT gypsythief
Re: One sensor?
Unfortunately, their primary sensor was offline for maintenance, so they were running off their backup sensors:
"As you may know, the CRK2 (Crooktree, Aberdeen) magnetometer is normally used to issue alerts, however, this had itself been “playing up” and so our system had swapped to LAN2 as a back-up. Unfortunately, it seems our back-up needed a back-up."
But what about a back-up for the back-up for the back-up, eh?
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 13:00 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Re: One sensor?
Unfortunately, their primary sensor was offline for maintenance, so they were running off their backup sensors:
But the article shows graphs of four sensors which seem to correlate with each other apart from the anomalous single sensor reading.
There seems to have been enough data available for them to be able to determine that the reading was actually anomalous.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 15:30 GMT AndrueC
Re: Sheep
A relative of mine used to work somewhere festooned with large, low frequency aerials of the vertical type
The area involved was many acres, so they used a low tech approach for grass cutting : Magnetically inert sheep!
There might still be security concerns. I hope they were all positively vetted.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 14:01 GMT Chris G
Re: ride-on lawnmower’s electric motor
A ride-on mower is going to have a 8HP-20HP+ engine depending on size and make, if it's a petrol model it will most likely have an ignition coil on the flywheel plus a lighting ring to recharge the battery and run headlights (yes they do have them).
A diesel engined mower will usually have a quite powerful permanent magnet alternator. Both types will put out a fairly strong magnetic field, enough to affect a sensitive sensor when close, also the cutters, cylinders or rotary blades can often become magnetised too so quite a lot of strange magnetic field for a sensor to pick up.
From the article, the alert was automatic so I guess they need to improve a bit on the criteria that trigger an alert.
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Friday 26th August 2016 14:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: ride-on lawnmower’s electric motor
That's exactly what I said and they all didn't upvote me at all, wahh! :) I didn't know about the Noddy electric arrangement on the petrol ones or the magnetised blade tho, is it the rubbing/polishing action on the grass doing the magnetising, I heard metal can get like that for example feeding bins for animals etc on farms, leading to wonky welding arc wandering paths when trying to patch them!
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Friday 26th August 2016 14:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: ride-on lawnmower’s electric motor
Why does the diesel need the proper alternator? Don't doubt you but seems like that might be to charge a beefier battery to start the higher-compression diesel motor? (Otherwise the petrol might be more electricity-hungry, needing electricity for its spark plugs and so on)
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Thursday 25th August 2016 06:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: ride-on lawnmower’s electric motor
Now consider the effect upon the local environment of a typical tesla e-sports car , at max regime , dumping fifty kilowatts to each wheel for a two-hundred kilowatt dissipation. Would that disturb 'owt?
Nissan Leaf is a much more respectable eighty kilowatts max consumption . . .can some of this be recycled/harvested by the road?
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 13:13 GMT W4YBO
Intermittent interruptions...
I tried for several weeks to diagnose an intermittent interruption in a Scientific Atlanta digital satellite receiver. Usually only on Fridays before lunch, but occasionally randomly throughout the week. Worked out to be two causes. First was the guy with a spark transmitter cleverly disguised as a Weedeater brand string trimmer. It generated every frequency from DC to Light and would swamp the LNA on the dish antenna. Had the disk jockey on duty flag the guy down just before the top of the hour to give him a ten minute break. The second cause (random throughout the week) was a private plane at the local airport that just had a radar altimeter installed. When he would fly over, his radar's outgoing pulse would overload the LNA and knock a three second hole in the received audio.
Black helicopter for the radar altimeter...
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Thursday 25th August 2016 07:25 GMT ChrisBedford
Re: Intermittent interruptions...
spark transmitter cleverly disguised as a Weedeater
Many years ago I heard a report (may be apocryphal) of a LAN that worked only in short bursts, which turned out to have been affected by the pulse of an electric fence. Can't imagine who would be so dim as to run a LAN cable (and we are talking RG58, here) so close to the HT line of an electric fence, but I guess... early days + ignorance = dimness...?
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Thursday 25th August 2016 12:41 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Re: Intermittent interruptions...
Had something like that sometime in the early 1990ies. LAN cable next to power line for a freight elevator in a warehouse. No problems when the elevator was used - except on the odd day when the elevator was loaded to maximum capacity. Took some time to find the fault...
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Friday 26th August 2016 14:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Intermittent interruptions...
I have an even more moronic one. A certain Port Authority running their LAN across the harbour to support not only DATA but also IP telephony for main office phones. Pretty sure they bought their dishes at Maplins or something and bodged them in themselves. Regular outages of the far side of the network due to, wait for it, .... entirely predictable crane movement paths on RAILS in the port. Plus, you know, also, SHIPS.
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Friday 26th August 2016 14:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Intermittent interruptions...
Nice, I used to work on a certain prison extension project, mostly done in a modular prefab block way.
So, *huge* artic-HGV-cranes with nice big extensible booms. This old dear comes over and complains that she gets cut off from watching Corrie regularly ... some compromise on timing possibly reached, with an element of "bite me, love, we'ļl be gone soon anyway" :D
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 13:40 GMT Nick Kew
Hancock rides again
Radio 4 recently broadcast a reconstructed episode of Hancock's Half Hour, where he gets himself a telescope and starts seeing things. This story could so easily have been one of his.
BBC website isn't responding just now, so I can't follow/confirm the link from google, but the Tony Hancock Appreciation Society's website lists it as Series 3, episode 7.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 13:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Seen the Aurora from North Wales
I've seen the Aurora from North Wales (specifically, Anglesey), as have others.
But I guess Traffic Wales can't blame magnetic disturbance for yesterday's "Systems Failure" which closed the A55 tunnel under the River Conwy for a couple of hours...
http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/conwy-tunnel-closure-chaos-caused-11793225
http://highwaysmagazine.co.uk/costain-updating-tunnel-safety-systems-on-a55/
http://corecontrols.co.uk/case-studies/penyclip-tunnel-control-system/
Anyone shed any light on that? Anyone at El Reg want to make a phone call or two?
Maybe the PC in charge got a delayed auto-update to Win10 and decided to take the evening off, and the dailover system did the same?
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 22:21 GMT MondoMan
BTDT
I remember chatting with a Caltech student some decades ago as he described his friends' plan to set off the Southern California major earthquake alert system by simultaneously detonating (very) small charges near a number of Caltech seismographs in the region. Apparently, at least 3 seismographs had to register an event for the major earthquake alert to be triggered. This was in pre-GPS days, so getting the timing right was the tricky part of the plan.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 13:53 GMT Stevie
Bah!
We’ll work with the facilities team to try and avoid an incident such as this occurring in the future!”
Or, you know, look at all the other instruments before yelling about science.
SEE: Particles that go faster than light, water discovered on Mars, intelligent signals arriving from space.