I know I shouldn't be surprised, but man oh man. These guys are irritating.

Sherwood Ensey, who goes by the name "Tuatha", has a Yahoo group and website where he makes the usual ridiculous claims. He is a PX acolyte, and has been promoting the idea that Jupiter might ignite fusion due to Galileo. He is also the guy who promotes SOHO anomalies, and I mention his garbage by name on my PX pages about SOHO.

Now he claims that there is evidence that something might have happened at Jupiter when Galileo went in. He points to that bastion of critical thinking, CyberspaceOrbit. :roll: They have a plot that shows an increase in cosmic ray activity here on Earth right after the impact.

Now, I know this must be garbage at worst, and coincidence at best. So I dug more. A little tiny bit more, and that iota of extra effort is something the cranks clearly didn't do, or didn't show.

The second link on the CyberSpace page goes to a Russian CR monitor, and there is the plot, showing the odd increase on September 21st. Sure, there is an overall trend of increase before then, but there does look like there is a knee in the plot around the time Galileo plunged into Jupiter.

But if you look a little farther down the page, you see a link to the past two years of data.

Take a look. You will see what I saw immediately: right now we are seeing below-average or perhaps just average levels of CRs, and last March the level was far higher. By only showing the past few weeks, Cyberspace is making it look like things are suspicious, when in fact they are not. This is exactly the same thing we see when PX proponents show sunspot or earthquake data; they don't give you enough history to understand the trends in the data. When you look at the trends, you see the obvious: there are not more earthquakes than usual, we should expect high sunspot activity even this late in the solar cycle, and we are not seeing anything unusual in the cosmic ray counts.

In fact, when I look at the two year plot, I see that last year, there was a rise starting in July, just as we see this year. It looks to me like we are seeing some sort of annual trend, completely unrelated to Jupiter and Galileo. Of course.

Shame on you, CyberSpaceOrbit and Tuatha. Alarmist garbage like the stuff you post is scaring people needlessly. Shame on you.

Oh, yeah, like, they're reeeeeally scared now, Phil... :P


But nice work anyway. Science should be spoken even if the woowoos are wearing pillows tied over their heads so they can't hear you.

I like howe they link back to a thread on this forum about galileo. :-)

Where is that link? Which site? I didn't find it...

http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/indexback95.html


scroll down a bit.

That is absolutely fascinating--he can't say, "oops, I was wrong and the BA was right," but he can't just ignore the whole issue, because he needs to preserve some vestige of unbiased credibility, so he merely links to the relevant BA thread as "Bad Astronomy Board", without comment.

[Spock]

Fascinating...

Phil:

Is this the same thing as "neutron spikes", or is Steadman talking about something totally different here?


If it's different, could you explain it, too? Thank you.

He is also apparently talking about BOTH things here.

I'm not a physics person to begin with, but all the jargon...oy. #-o

I'm confused.

When a cosmic ray hits our air, neutrons are created as "secondary particles", and that is what's being monitored in Russia. Here is a page from NOAA describing it. Kent, as usual, is way off base here.

Ah. Thank you.

"REPLY: Be as harsh as a warthog it still remains that there appears to be a neutron surge since last Sunday. Do we really understand the interaction between the worlds? Some think earth has a crystal core. Could there be a sympathetic resonance from an event on a sister world or for that matter from events deeper into the galaxy.

Ever own a crystal set? "



#-o I have to say I check Kents' sight from time...but always with a grain of salt... One of my hobbies is building crystal radio sets, and other electronic gizmos. On the radio side, sure the right mineral can make a good dector/primitave diode, but "ground wave propagation" is a myth. All the ground is good for is, the other than the other end of your radio(sometimes), is a skip point for long range reception.
I'm sure there are people out there looking at their screens like the RCA dog, so I won't get into the tech of crystal radio...My point is it's not the ground that effects a crystal set. Half the time my radios don't need an earth ground to get good DX (long distance reception). [/quote]

Hey, welcome to the board!


Am I the only one that noticed?

__________________
h00!

radio guy wrote:

If I might make a minor correction, ground wave propagation refers to how far a radio signal travels along the surface of the Earth. This can extend the range of the transmission beyond the horizon withoutthe aid of the ionosphere (i.e. skip). Mind you, this effect is usually reserved for high frequency and lower wavelengths.

And I even build a crystal set when I was in jr. high. (hobby shop project)

Lou Posted - 5 September 2003 16:38 "Also, I came across this statement on the web. I am wondering if the portion which says that a mirror image of the radio wave travels BENEATH THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH is wholly true,

"Technical Note: Radio signals (waves) such as we encounter in the am radio band have two halves. One half travels across the surface of the earth at the speed of light through people, buildings and other objects.

The other half, a mirror image, travels beneath the surface of the earth. This radio wave has a definite length. Its length is the speed of light divided by the frequency. For frequencies in the megahertz region this approximates to 300 divided by the frequency in megahertz."

Here is the entire link:

http://my.integritynet.com.au/purdic/crystal_set.htm"


sky Posted - 5 September 2003 18:14 " The notion of a mirror image of the electromagnetic wave traveling through the earth below the soil surface is a falacy.

The mirror image refers only to the broadcast antenna having a mirror image. What this means in practical terms is that a resonant antenna would only need to be 1/2 the hieght.

The electromagnetic wave has finite energy and the energy it contains is diminished by square law due to the spreading of the wave. The energy is also absorbed by nearly everything in the path of the wave both natural and man made. The largest portion of the wave's energy is absorbed by the soil as the wave passes over and charges the soil surface. The energy is absorbed as heat.

When an electromagnetic wave induces currents into an antenna those same currents re radiate a substantial portion of the wave back into the air. This is called the antenna radiation resistance.

Now in answer to your initial question. Back in the 1920's there was considerable research done in this area and one of the scientivic papers presented was the summerfeld analysis.
This paper goes into considerable detail of the properties of wave propogation. You can probably look this up on the web.

Be warned that the worst sources of radio information are common text books. Often the information is condensed for simplicity which can be misleading at best."

re's sky.

...Those were taken from a radio group I'm a member of. Some of these folks have been building and studying this stuff since they were kids in the 40's. If anyone is interested I can post the link.

Anyway thinks for the welcome. The reason for not responding till now was a much needed mini vacation... I check back later.
73's