Monthly Archives: June 2017

Solar Flares Are Electrifying

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Solar flares make for pretty Northern lights. And Southern lights. The bigger the flare, the bigger the lights. The flare has to be aimed, and timed, just right, though, to hit the earth.

A British amateur astronomer, Richard Carrington, was the first one to observe a solar flare, back on September 1st, 1859. Actually, another British amateur astronomer, one Richard Hodgson, saw it at the same time, but somehow Carrington got first dibs on it. The Carrington Event was named after him.

What was the Carrington event, you might well ask? Well, that flare came at us with a major rider attached to it, a huge coronal mass ejection that hit us 17.6 hours later. Coronal mass ejections are mainly composed of electrons and protons. Since those electrons and protons have, respectively, negative and positive charges, they wreak havoc on our magnetic field, making it surge stronger and weaker, back and forth, across the planet. The earth’s magnetic field twerks, as it were, the twerking continuing for as long as it takes for the mass of particles to go by.

Now, we all remember our basic high school physics, don’t we? What happens when you wiggle a magnetic field around an electrical conductor? Well? Don’t we? Do I hear crickets chirping?

Telegraph operators around the world, back in 1859, had a direct experience of what happens when a magnetic field twerks around a copper telegraph network. Electricity is generated. Sparks were reported flying off the key onto the operator’s hand, some getting burns from the shock. Sparks flew off insulators on the telegraph poles. Operators disconnected the batteries that powered the lines but were still able to key in messages using the induced current. Some wires melted.

There’s plenty of evidence that such things have hit the earth in the past, relevantly frequently, geologically speaking.

Here’s a hypothetical, quasi question: What effect would a Carrington scale coronal mass ejection have today? The answer is not at all hypothetical or quasi. It would blow out most of our satellites, electricity grid, cell phone network, radios, TV’s, cellphones, computers, anything with an electrical conductor in it could be toasted, even your toaster.

Need we worry? Surely, knowing that such things are likely to happen, our engineers, our governing bodies, our corporate masters, have more than adequately prepared things to get us up and running, toot suite. You know, an adequate supply of back up electricity transformers and such, emergency plans, and similar reasonable precautions, like putting our electrical grid underground and shielded?

Perhaps, in a happier alternate reality, our leaders have done so. But not in this timeline. When the next big coronal mass ejection hits us, it will be, as my college buddy Weird Ward would say, “Toot-toot-kablooie!”

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

The Junk Room, Part One

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Back in the mid-1960’s, my family lived in a house that we knew was haunted. It was an old farmhouse in the middle of town, built sometime before 1900. There were two floors, a basement, and an attic.

There were five of us siblings. Three of us slept in first floor rooms.

The second floor had two bedrooms, one large, where one of my brothers and I slept, and a very small one, which we called the junk room. There were five us siblings and we never threw out any toys. They were kept in the junk room.

When indoors, we frequently played in the large bedroom. We occasionally heard footsteps in the attic, at night, pacing from one end of the house to the other. We would then rapidly adjourn down the stairs to the living room where our parents would declare us to be, and I quote, “Nuts”. This happened a number of times. We lost count of the total.

One day, we were ordered to clean up the junk room and sort all the toys into new cardboard boxes. I say new boxes, but they were obtained from the alley behind the main street stores. The clean up was accomplished rapidly, which was understandable if you knew our mother. The room was very tidy. Our mother was pleased.

Here’s a side note on the junk room: It was always cooler than the rest of the house, except for the basement. We would not go into the junk room at night, alone. The closet was terrifying. Its door would not stay closed but never swung open while anyone was in the room. The junk room door had a separate lock, on the outside of the door. It appeared to be original to the house. We kids kept that door locked when we were not in that room. We often wondered why that door needed a lock on the outside.

One night a few days later, my older brother and my sister were playing “Sorry” in the large bedroom. They suddenly came screaming down the stairs into the living room claiming that somebody was in the junk room, apparently trashing the room. My dad grabbed a baseball bat and went up the stairs, with the rest of the family a reasonable distance behind.

The junk room door was still locked. He opened it, turned the light on, and declared that, and I quote, “You two kids are full of shit. There’s no one in here and the windows are closed and locked.” He continued, “Weren’t you kids supposed to clean this place up? We got you new boxes.”

The room was trashed. Toys were everywhere, but not broken. The boxes were empty and half ruined. The closet door was ominously open. Our mother did not say a word in our defense. She said she did not believe in ghosts.

A good twenty years later she admitted that she thought the house was haunted, too.

First shared in the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgSRtIshDfs&ab_channel=JeffreyKelley

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: