It’s pretty  obvious something is going on with the sun and for the most part we have don’t have a clue. It’s a fascinating subject to investigate, at the intersection of astronomy, physics, engineering, electromagnetism, chemistry, and  geology.

We have some theories, but don’t understand how two new Jupiter-sized sunspots, coincident with multiple near-record breaking electromagnetic solar flares blasting out at more than 4 million miles per hour  from the sun’s inner core, will make their presence known on planet Earth.

But first, don’t look directly at the sun, as it can cause serious harm. Second, don’t look directly at the sun. Am I clear on not looking directly at the sun? It would be the equivalent of taking a pistol, putting six bullets in the six chambers and playing Russian ruelette with your eyes.

If you really do want to get a glimpse of these sunspots, either go online www.space.com, or find a friend with a quality solar filter on her telescope. I can assure you, viewing these two, new huge sunspots is, as the expression goes, "totally awesome."

What we’re going to do here and in the next two or three Scitech blogs is offer an overview on the solar phenomenon currently taking place, the aurora borealis that is one of the historic indicators of such activity, and what it all might mean to us, from using our cellphones, flying in an airplane, to watching the NFL Sunday afternoon on Satellite TV (now that’s important).

Today’s blog offers some historic context.

Before satellites gave us the knowledge that there were electromagnetic bursts of pure energy emanating from the sun in the form of giant solar flares, or that there was a continuous solar wind washing over our planet, humankind, unwittingly, only acknowledged the influence of such solar eruptions as lights flickering in the northern night sky – the Northern Lights. We did not know what caused them, only that they were there, and they were beautiful and mysterious.

When satellites went up into space in late 1957 and took readings of the upper atmosphere and beyond we learned a lot. Instrumentation discovered the Van Allen radiation belts, and the role they played in filtering the solar wind – actually measurements correlated with solar flares. Something a  Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland attempted to measure, without fully understanding what it was that he was measuring. His original data gathering at research stations in frigid northern Norway at the dawn of the 20th century began the modern scientific investigations of the Northern Lights. (For obvious geographic reasons, Norwegian scientists are prominent in Aurora research).

Aurora borealis is the scientific name for the Northern Lights. The expression was first used by Galileo in 1619. He coined the term to suggest the similarity of what he viewed in the night to an early dawn emanating from the north, rather than the east. The "Lights" sometimes appear to those who live at low or intermediate latitudes in the northern hemisphere.

The term was not fully developed by the famous astronomer. The reason given for his lack of detail (an aberration from his normal approach to matters scientific) is that at the time the Roman Inquisition severely limited what Galileo could and could not say publicly. It is believed his writings on the subject were made under the name of his student Mario Guiducci.

Galileo discussed the Northern Lights in support of his idea that the earth was not the center of the established universe. Correct on this major Copernican point, he was wrong in thinking that the aurora was caused by sunlight reflecting from the high atmosphere, suggesting that the aurora was sunlight glinting off the high atmosphere, bouncing off the polar icecap, falling snow, or ice crystals.

When a great scientist makes a mistake, it can last a long time. Galileo’s mistake lasted almost four centuries. But, as imprecise as Galileo was, compare his observations to the earliest known record of the “Lights.” More than 2,000 years old, it comes to us in written form from China in 208 BCE:

"During the night luminous clouds were seen, gold and white, with long streamers, which lit up the hills. Some think it is Heaven’s Sword, but others think that it is a deep hole with a large blazing fire in the sky."

Consider further the record of myths and popular imaginings of the aurora in the northern hemisphere. There is no geographic bias here. The aurora in both the northern and southern hemispheres (aurora australis), though simultaneous, are more readily viewed in the northern latitudes. There just weren’t, and aren’t, many people living near magnetic south. (Australian aboriginal myths from the "Dreamtime" are one exception.)

For the Lapps in northern Scandinavia the luminosity pulsing across the sky was fierce and powerful. The lights could be Odin’s messengers, the Valkyries. This sisterhood linked the phenomena to omens of war and bloodshed. The belief persisted for centuries. In Norway, they became "blood lights," the souls of departed warriors newly engaged in heavenly battles.

Parents in Iceland warned children that the risk of their hair catching on fire from the Lights was great. In the presence of the Lights a person was foolish not to wear a hat.

Gradually, explanations for the ghostly shimmering took on a more naturalist hue. Myth gave way to folklore: "the Lights were reflections from the silvery shoals of herring swimming close to the water’s surface, or that they were the light bouncing off icebergs rocking in the polar sea; that they were created by sunlight reflecting off the wings of migrating geese, or off swans trapped in the polar ice flapping desperately to free themselves," writes Lucy Jago in,  The Northern Lights, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

By the early 19th century, Galileo’s intuitions and observations had evolved (mutated) into the premise that the aurora were the result of sunlight reflecting from ice crystals suspended high in the atmosphere.
Concurrently, developments in electromagnetism, and the discovery and exploration of the magnetosphere began. The more robust the scientific evidence in these two fields, and the closer the linkage between them, the more scientific were the connections to the "ghostly" lights. Like the dominant star in a binary pair gravitationally absorbing its weaker companion, magnetosphere research absorbed the formerly imaginative fancies given the lights.

Next: Modern discoveries

By Elizabeth Armstrong

The music industry as we know it is about to change. Nobody knows how, exactly, but the tension between old media (vinyl, cassette tapes, compact discs) and new media (MP3s) is near breaking point, according to Josh Bernoff at Forrester Research, and something's got to give.

In the past month, according to The New York Times, five major events have seriously altered the music-downloading landscape. But, argues Times reporter Neil Strauss, they don't necessarily signal a victory for online retailers.

1. Apple Computer made its iTunes player and music store available to PC users
2. A legal version of Napster emerged
3. A new download store called Audio Lunchbox announced it would open on Halloween
4. Musicmatch added an online store to its music player
5. EMusic added restrictive rules to its music subscription service

Mr. Strauss calls this a "striking lack of originality," given that all these services essentially mirror the iTunes mold. Which is one way of saying they're all compromises.

During the mid '90s, the future of the industry hinged on allowing downloaders access to any volume of music for a monthly fee. The fitting slogan: "all you can eat." But KaZaA and the like, all of which remain unauthorized and free, are the only services to come close to accomplishing this near-unlimited access. The technology is there, but authorized downloading services haven't been able to deliver because record labels and publishers fear they would become obsolete.

That so many people are taking all they can eat through unauthorized services - despite the risk of being caught and fined - indicates that record labels and publishers have already become obsolete. Their job is to convince the rest of us otherwise.

By Elizabeth Armstrong

It is August 17, 2002. A 16-year-old girl is pulling out of her driveway in a Florida suburb when a blur of a car slams into her trunk, killing the girl and her friend. The driver admits to doing 50 in a 30 zone, but the cops don't believe him. One warrant and a little surgery later and they've gained access to one witness that doesn't lie, a witness that tells them this man was doing 114 five seconds before impact and 103 one second before.

So who, or what, detected the driver's lie? The airbag module (ABM), it turns out. Csaba Csere explains in this month's Car and Driver:

The airbag module ... is a small computer that determines if the airbags should be deployed, based on information provided by several sensors. The most important data come from one or more crash sensors, which detect an impact. For the ABM to fire the airbags, the impact must exceed a certain deceleration threshold. The ABM also considers vehicle speed because it doesn’t want to trigger the airbags when you hit a light pole at 4 mph in a parking lot.

So the ABM records the values of said sensors around the time of impact as a means of determining how the airbag performs. But it also records engine rpm, throttle position, brake activity, and the vehicle's speed. So if the ABM so much as considers deploying the airbag it records all this information onto a memory chip, retrievable by, say, your friendly neighborhood law enforcers. For $2495, Csaba Csere reports, Vetronix Corporation will sell you a crash-data-retrieval system that can transfer the recorded information from the ABM to a PC.

The type and amount of data collected could be easily broadened, too. As more cars get stability-control and anti-lock brake systems, the car could record your steering-wheel motions, lateral acceleration, and braking force. And with the increasing popularity of navigation and OnStar systems that track the location of your vehicle, your complete driving history could be memorized.

Now might be the time to retrieve some data I seem to remember from my youth, back when it was still excusable to read Orwell. Let's see. Paragraph five will do:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct -intheassumptionthateverysoundyoumadewas overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Jim Bencivenga

Saturday night, Nov. 8, dinnertime.

Your date will be here soon. Just step outside, look east. Your tryst is getting ready, has been for the last few hours.

What’s going on? What date is this?

The moon is passing through, "encountering," the shadow cast by the southern half of the earth, as the third rock from the sun gets between the moon’s reflected light and the source of that reflection, the sun. Your date will be visible from all of North America - a lunar eclipse.

The moon will be completely blocked by the Earth’s shadow. Astronomers call this totality. It last 25 minutes, starting at 8:06 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and until 8:31 p.m.. The moon will look like a Christmas ornament gone over to the dark side.

Of course, even more fascinating than watching a totally blocked-out moon, and which only folks on the night side of the Earth see, is how the white orb gets nibbled until it is, literally, a mere shadow of itself. Europe gets to see every stage of this eclipse. Here in the US the beginnings of the eclipse start around 5 p.m. in the eastern states. The effect will be minimal but with close inspection you will note a slight “dimming” of the moon’s light. Over the course of a few hours, the Moon darkens and Earth’s umbra, (shadow) turns it a deep red color, filtered and bent by Earth’s atmosphere until the moon disappears completely.

The entire movement of the umbra will be visible from the Great Plains eastward since the sun will have set in time to make the effects of Earth’s shadow visible. Not so out west. When the sun sets, the moon already will be partially eclipsed. Everyone can see its full "return."

Almost as thrilling to watch as the moon disappearing at totality is the way stars not-visible before the eclipse, or only dimly visible, "pop" out in the moonless sky.

To the right (south) of the dark orb and on the same plane you’ll see Mars. Note how it  shines much more brightly during the 25 minutes of  totality. Check out the Perseids, a star cluster just left (east) of where the moon was. They’ll glitter like a star wars trailer. Look further left for the  "reclining" queen Cassiopeia and  mother of Andromeda, the princess whom Perseus saved from the sea monster. The constellation is easily recognizable as a big W on its side.

And for those fortunate enough to be under really dark skies – well outside major cities - the Andromeda galaxy should be visible. Look slightly right and above where the eclipsed moon hangs. What seems like a faint cloud, is the closet galaxy to our own Milky Way, some two-and-a-half million light years away. 
What a great date.

The only thing that can ruin it is cloudy skies.

Tom Regan

Now that I'm back in Beantown, I just wanted to pass along a note of congratulations to the organizers of the most recent Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. It's been a long time since I've had the opportunity to exercise my brain in such an enjoyable fashion. What makes Pop!Tech so special is that it give you the chance to see the connections and underlying themes in a broad range of sciences and human endeavors that are not immediately apparent when examining them individually.

More important, it has given me, as a journalist, a lot to chew on. The ideas and scenarios presented at Pop!Tech hold many opportunities for humanity. But like flowers growing in a mine field, we've got to be very careful where we step when we approach them.

As for writing about them ... well, good thing I brought my mine detector with me.

By Elizabeth Armstrong

When it comes to ubiquitous computing systems, the more power you want, the more privacy you sacrifice. It's a general rule, and it's come up from time to time since the earliest discussions of artificial intelligence. But not until recently, with the rapid introduction of ubiquitous computing technologies (i.e. video monitors, wireless hot spots, radio tags), have we been forced to look at what, exactly, we'd be willing to reveal about ourselves for the sake of comfort and convenience.

Many computing engineers want to create networks of tiny little wireless devices that can tell you, say, that you're late for a movie or the oven is still on. Useful little reminders. Designers envision invisible (imagine that) sensors and transmitters in public and private places, watching and recording all sorts of activities. Among the first devices envisioned for such a technology: your cell phone.

Aside from the obvious "what about my privacy?" argument, the most impressive backlash raises the question: What might this do to human memory? No human act, after all, can escape the cold, unforgiving, binary recording of an artificially intelligent computer. So, just as I no longer memorize telephone numbers because they're all plugged so handily into my cell phone (a small act of sacrificing my privacy, I suppose), we humans may some day prefer to rely on the recollection of machines over our own flexible, fallible, emotional memories.

One engineer, who himself prefers anonymity, summed it up pretty well last week at UbiComp 2003, a ubiquitous computing conference in Seattle. "The more awareness you have in the system," he told Wired News, "the less privacy you're going to have. That's the trade-off."

Not only will something else know my business, but it will remember it, too.

By Elizabeth Armstrong

The New York Times is reporting that the Recording Industry Association of America has warned 204 people suspected of swapping music online that it plans to file lawsuits against them. The RIAA began mailing the warnings last week, a month after launching its initial campaign against file sharers. The difference: This round of targets is being notified before the lawsuits are filed, as opposed to after.

RIAA President Cary Sherman makes it sound like hand-holding - "We want to go the extra mile and offer illegal file sharers an additional chance to work this out," he announced - but this "extra mile" may be little more than an attempt to avoid the embarrassment that followed last month's suits against a 12-year-old girl and a grandmother accused of sharing the latest hip-hop hits (the RIAA dismissed the lawsuit as a gesture of good faith).

So far, according to The Associated Press, 64 (out of a total of 465) suits have been settled at an average of $3,000 per settlement. That's $192,000, a tiny fraction of the millions the industry reports to have lost to file-sharers.

A couple questions that quickly come to mind: Does this mean there will be a minimum and maximum age for eligible file-sharing targets? And will seeming mismatches (a grandma with a penchant for P. Diddy, say) be dismissed "on good faith"? If so, I'll be sure to tell my 17-year-old cousin that swapping Brahms is OK, so long as he plays the part of a Goth freak who only touches Marilyn Manson.

Tom Regan

The final morning at the Pop!Tech conference.

Two speakers so far: ecologist Michael Rosenzweig on the win-win solution to save the world's ecology, and Dr. Sally Stanfield, of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, talking about global health care.

There's a great deal to say about their presentations, especially Dr. Stanfield's rather pointed remarks about how the market-driven economy has ignored most of the world's more serious health care issues because there is "no money" to be made in finding solutions.

After three days, I am finally seeing the thread running through the conference: We really do live in a global community, and if we're going to solve the various problems that the world faces, we can't do them country by country. Almost all the issues raised in the past few days – global warming, health care, environment, the communities we live in, peace, digital journalism, the uses of wi-fi for communication, exploring the heavens and the seas, etc.  – require global cooperation. No nation, the speakers are saying, can be an island anymore, regardless of how wealthy or powerful it is. Even the wealthiest and most powerful nation ... guess who?

Looking at the current political and cultural landscape in the US, it's not hard to see that many of the most powerful men and women in the country want us to drop global ties and international cooperation, and focus on US interests, for what they consider valid reasons. It's going to be interesting to see how the challenges brought forth by many of the people at Pop!Tech (often the top researchers in their field) will be met by an administration for whom the idea of international problem solving is an oxymoron.

Tom Regan

Now, this was an "in-your-face" session. David Martin on the "future of patents." Martin is the founding CEO of M.Cam, which developed the world's first international property auditing system to identify the commercial validity and value of intellectual property patents. Currently, Martin says, 37 percent of all US patents are forgeries –  often clever re-wording of items or ideas that have already been patented. Martin said there are lawyers who make millions for themselves, and for big Wall Street firms, writing these bogus patents. The result is that many companies are vastly overstating their worth by listing these bogus patents in their financial statements

He talked about one scam in particular. A big firm decides that a patent has no value any more. But the patent may have a paper value of, say $25 million. The firm donates the patent to a university's endowment fund, for which it received a tax credit for $25 million. The university, which is often aware of the bogus value of the patent, then uses it as a lever to raise money from alumni: "See, this big firm gave us this important patent, so you should donate as well." Martin said the US treasury has lost $35 billion in patent transfers and patient donations. He also said some universities (but probably not the firms that donated the patents) are going to be called on the carpet for these practices soon, and may lose their not-for-profit status within the next 18 months.

And in spite of what analysts have been saying recently, Martin believes the economy is not headed for a robust recovery. In fact, he said, we are probably going to see the "tech bubble burst again" very soon, with even worse results than when it happened in 2000, and 2001. And these counterfeit patents are going to be one reason why this will happen.

Tom Regan

The only problem in trying to blog the conference is finding time to write down the best parts of each session. I don't like to blog during the actual presentations because they are so darn interesting, I just want to listen.

So far today ...

After Clay Shirky talked about the blogosphere (all the blogs on the Web taken as a single entity), Xeni Jardin talked about the experience of freelance videojournalist and photographer Kevin Sites writing a blog from Iraq during the war. (Sites, you may remember, was eventually asked to stop doing his very popular blog by CNN because they saw it as competitive to the work he was doing for them ... at least that's what they said.) Jardin tried to contact Sites, who was on sat phone in Tikrit, but it didn't happen. (After spending many hours each night during the war trying to contact Ben Arnoldy's sat phone when he was writing for csmonitor.com in Iraq, this did not surprise me.)

Author James Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere (about the decline of the American landscape), gave a very funny, but pointed, talk about the "parking lot nation." He argued strongly in favor of a new form of urban design that would help create a "hopeful present." Right now, he said, most urban and suburban spaces exist in the "asteroid belt of architectural disaster." Kunstler was particularly outspoken about the I.M. Pei-designed Boston City Hall, which he thought represented "entropy made visible." Kunstler said that the urban and suburban environment we have created in the late 20th century send out a message that "there's no hope here."

Kunstler was followed by Virginia Postrel, who looked at how the desire for things of aesthetic value has become common place in American life. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to this session. Postrel is absolutely right when she said that Americans want an aesthetic experience in all aspects of their lives these days, and that "there is no such thing as an undesigned graphic object anymore." But when she said Starbucks has become the urban commerical environment that every business wants to emulate, I didn't know whether to scream or to cry. It's not just about coffee, said Postrel, but about the "whole multisensory aesthetic experience." The new motto is "the best surprise is no surprise."

Facts and figures: 71 percent of US women aged 45-54 dye their hair, while 13 percent of American men are doing the Grecian forumla thing. Sales of hair color to young men are up 25 percent in the past five years. Teen boys spend five percent of their income on hair color. And the number of nail salons nearly doubled in ten years.