Can I be first?
It's GCHQ tapping into Google's worldwide data!
And the mysterious beam- obviously the feed up to the Goggleplex's Elysium mothership! Or the souls of a billion artists, slurped by Google with no recompense.
Workmen are digging up the spot outside Google's London headquarters where a mysterious "beam" once made pedestrians' hair stand on end. Dotted around two freshly dug holes were small signs which said "beware: fibre optic cables" and the remnants of a police cordon. The holes were on the same spot where the odd force was …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q2OodKbztc
Assuming the 'video' is a screenshot of the bloke who is having his hair go all 'spikey' due to static charge why is the commentator flicking his arrow thing about background objects such as the roof of a car parked to the rear left and what might be the porch above a door entrance behind the bloke?
Right, usually with Captain Jack Harkness rising up to street level out of a hidden opening.
Of course a force field could just be a safety precaution in case one of the latest SHAFT models goes crazy. Kind of like what happened with the old ED-109:
A force field would have come in real handy there.
Nope it's just a "DO NOT DIG HERE" sign laid in the ground a couple of inches above the fibre, in the vain hope that it'll reduce the chances of some muppet cutting the cable.
The better sign is "HIGH VOLTAGE CABLE", as JCB drivers tend to pay more attention to those due to the really loud bang that happens when they dig through those.
A static electric field is hard to maintain under real life conditions. If it's to strong it'll build an arc and even if it's weak objects will gradually discharge themselves, particularly in moist situations, also large metal plates in public spaces are usually grounded for lightning protection.
Cables in the ground cannot be the cause as even if they are not explicitly shielded, they are shielded by the ground.
Properly insulating the mystic altars is an absolute sod. Especially in a city the size of London with all this astral noise. You're bound to bleed energies if you inkjet print the blood runes like Google do - the heads can clog and quality control is important!
Besides, they aren't hard to avoid. Has nobody checked Google's ley-line maps or Google Unearth? Just restrict search results to those for the next 24 hours.
So who would be conducting this investigation, the HSE police?
Has anyone been injured, has anyone been killed? No, from what has been reported some bloke has been saved a bit of hair gel.
Despite popular belief the HSE get directly involved after the event to establish potential negligence, prior to it they issue advice and guidance.
I am not a fan of theirs particularly but I would prefer their brief as it is thanks.....
PS. the cables aren't shielded, but they are probably armoured and the armouring connected to earth, if the earth connection is dodgy then magnetic induction can take place locally.
Anecdotal reports of "force field" like effects have been noticed by Bill Beaty of amasci.com fame, typically in plastics factories handling large amounts of glossy sheets of PET/PEEK/etc.
Usually it goes away if the humidity changes so it is possible that this was indeed the fix.
I actually had a similar effect manifest itself once (only!) when messing with miniature Tesla Coil, in my case a piece of equipment across the room levitated for a split second and for only a moment as I reached across to turn it off felt something grab my shoulder (seriously!) despite being well away from the charged parts.
This was running from a bodged setup involving CCFL inverters wired in parallel, homemade Veroboard spark gap, internal 9 turn primary and a clock wire 4" secondary which after said event got sent to a fellow TC'er as a freebie.
Come to think of it, haven't heard from the guy since...
Glacier Point in Yosemite often has electrically charged wind from a mix of glaciers, sun-baked rocks, and a few thousand feet of elevation to generate turbulence. Your hair messes up, your clothes stick to your body like they're wet, and you can feel a slight tingling when you move. The wind will blow your hair up and it will stay up. (I don't recommend stopping for selfies on the edge of the rock when this happens.)
This being far from glaciers and baking sunshine, I'd suspect it's just an updraft.
Something that's been in the news lately over here in Chicago - lamp posts are leaking electricity into the ground, which then causes other metal objects close by to conduct that electricity.
Haven't been able to find the actual article, but it has been used on TV as a 'magnet' to draw viewers to the 9pm news.
It's the obvious answer, surely?
The electrician helpfully noted that those cables are normally shielded, but if they've been damaged then that shielding is compromised. London is experiencing a lot of problems with underground power cables lately, with multiple explosions as water gets into damage connections. This would then explain why they are now digging up the street and why they turned off power to the street while doing the work.
I'd say it's a job for The Laundry!
Are they using ultrasound sensors on the driverless cars, and are they doing any experimentation on that therein? The SPL of a simple ultrasound burglar alarm (you see very few of these nowadays) used to be about 140dB, and an expert from NPL told me that he strongly suspected that ultrasound was as dangerous as audible sound, both to the ears and other body parts. Sustained 110dB is dangerous to ears and causes headaches, 140dB is 30 times worse! But, as with lasers, people were ignoring the safety aspects of what they can't see or hear. Testing these pesky burglar alarms in the lab was making people ill.
As to electromagnetic effects, quite possibly, broken armouring and screening (there is a screen on high voltage underground cables) could be causing a dangerous voltage gradient across the ground surface, but I don't think that would account for the symptoms. It is likely that there was a faulty cable, probably unrelated.
There could be a dangerous medium to high frequency electric and/or magnetic field if anyone was using "contactless" charging technology at more than a very minimal power level. Again, suspect electric cars and other high tech ideas, where people with much enthusiasm and no common sense have ignored the major drawbacks. Never mind the health risk, there is an efficiency loss and needless energy waste, which is not in keeping with the fine idea of things like electric propulsion.
Let's get real, people, and make all our fine ideas work, without the daft and pointless features. Use a clever plug and socket for energy transfer, for instance, or low power microwave and optical (eye-safe diffused laser beam, for instance) for obstacle sensors, etc. No daft things like high power sub- or super-sonics, eye-dangerous lasers, high EM filelds, etc. You can do everything that you need, and do it well, without any of those.