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Post by mrsonde on Dec 30, 2012 15:09:52 GMT 1
I received a delightful present for Christmas, which made a change from the socks and tangerines: an Admiral Fitzroy Storm Glass, an invention that's been around for 300 years but has until now somehow passed me by. It's a beautiful, ever-changing display of frost-like crystals in a glass tube. Various studies into its accuracy disagree as to whether its activity reflects the weather or whether...it's down to random chance. It's certainly not down to barometric pressure - the glass is a sealed container. And it doesn't seem related to temperature either - or if it is it's in a very unpredictable manner. What it reminds me of is Takata's flocculation index - the measure of the propensity of blood serum to "clump", which has been shown to mirror exactly, and immediately, activity on the sun (though it's still unknown I think wat that activity is, exactly - how our blood is registering so precisely on a continuous basis what's going on 93 million miles away. And it's not just our blood - every colloid, even inorganic ones, reacts in the same correlative way.) As the storm glass is essentially a colloid, and thanks to the internet it's now possible to see exactly what's happening on the sun from one minute to the next, I'm looking forward to seeing if its changes reflect flares, CMEs, sunspots etc.
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Post by Progenitor A on Dec 30, 2012 20:23:11 GMT 1
If the invention is by the famous Captain Fitzroy, who commanded the Beagle on Darwin's South American expedition, falling out with him as a devout Christian over his evolutionary theory and who later set up, at his own expense , the world's first meteorological monitoring stations, establshing the science of meteorology, with a chain of heliographic and telegraphic signalling communication links to covety the monitored information to London (later updated to the new electrical telegraphy), and who sadly committed sucide, then it is unlikely to be 300 years old - possibly 200 years or so old
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 31, 2012 0:36:14 GMT 1
Folklore suggests that storm glasses work best if allowed to settle in a shady spot for some time - weeks at least. How Fitzroy managed to use them at sea is therefore a bit of a mystery. However one can hypothesise some kind of mechanism for a sealed glass in, say, a house. They were a great source of interest in my youth, when many watchmakers' and opticians' shops kept them along with mercury barometers - often built into the same case. (Alas, Elfin Safety has wished away the mercury barometer, even though my GP still swears by her "proper" sphygmomanometer, which gives much more consistent and believable readings than the electronic box of tricks that has pronounced me dead on at least three occasions.)
Changes in weather are associated with changes in both pressure and 24-hour-averaged-temperature. A supersaturated solution of camphor can form a variety of crystal habits depending on the rate of heating or cooling, and a full, sealed glass tube will transmit variations of external pressure.
The problem is to unscramble the complex range of appearances of the precipitates from the rapid and chaotic variations in British weather.
The basic UK "weather cycle" associated with an Atlantic depression is about 3 days long in the south, and somewhat shorter in the north. During that period the mean outdoor temperature can vary through a full 20 degrees, precipitation from clear sky to torrential downpour or blizzard, the wind can shift through 180 degrees from calm to gale and back again, and barometric pressure can vary by up to 10%. Indoor temperature will change much less in that time period, and there will be a significant lag between the ambient and internal temperature of the glass. So by the time the glass has responded to a winter cyclone, it may have passed entirely - not a particularly good storm warning, and thus an apparently random response to actual weather.
However the anticylone pattern in the British Isles is for a fairly rapid drop in temperature, slowly building high pressure, and persistent clear, windless conditions for 5 days or more (the reason why windmills are useless for generating electricity!). My guess is that those beautiful feathery flakes in the picture represent the sharp cooling at the onset of an anticylone. In winter, the flakes will continue to grow and fall to the bottom of the glass, but in summer the mean temperature will rise and the flakes will melt back into the clear liquid.
Personally, I look out of the window. The shape, distribution and speed of the clouds tell me whether it's going to be a rough day, and once airborne or seaborne, there's buggerall I can do about it anyway.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 31, 2012 6:53:25 GMT 1
If the invention is by the famous Captain Fitzroy, who commanded the Beagle on Darwin's South American expedition, falling out with him as a devout Christian over his evolutionary theory and who later set up, at his own expense , the world's first meteorological monitoring stations, establshing the science of meteorology, with a chain of heliographic and telegraphic signalling communication links to covety the monitored information to London (later updated to the new electrical telegraphy), and who sadly committed sucide, then it is unlikely to be 300 years old - possibly 200 years or so old Aaahh...You're probably thinking of the famous Captain Fitzroy, I expect. This was his Great Aunt, the "Admirable" Agatha Fitzroy. She who famously rode a camel across the Empty Quarter in two days by drinking her own armpit excretions, rowed single-handedly down the trans-Siberian railway, when it was still a canal, and became the world-authority on how to roll the perfect Cuban cigar against the inner thigh in her retirement in a tepee in West Wales. She invented mechanical clitoral stimulation by means of her ingenious steam-driven wagon-wheel with suitably protruding lubricated goldfish fins attached to the rim; and lesbianism, of the non-poetic variety. She also eventually committed suicide, of course, though in her case it's generally agreed amongst the lesbian sorority that hers was a happy one. An easy mistake to make. The Fitzroy confusion, not lesbianism of the non-poetic variety. Here's what my enclosed booklet says: "The Storm Glass Barometer came into general use during the early 1700s. Sailors attached this instrument to the mast of their ship and by interpretation of the constantly changing crystal formation within, relied upon it to forecast good weather and bad for nearly 250 years." Then the Shipping Forecast came along, I suppose.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 31, 2012 7:24:06 GMT 1
a full, sealed glass tube will transmit variations of external pressure. It will? How so? Mine seems to fluctuate quite quickly. Within a couple of hours it's changed quite markedly. Yes, personally, I don't give a fig about what the weather is either. But as I said, I don't think it is responding to the weather - pressure or temperature. I strongly suspect it's reacting to the atmospheric electric field, and hence the geomagnetic field, as the rates of reaction in colloids and many catalytic interactions are known to do. This is the most feasible explanation for the Takata Reaction's direct correlation with solar activity, to my mind - unless there's some hitherto undiscovered form of ray being emitted by the sun, able to penetrate through walls, but not the moon (the Takata Reaction ceases during a solar eclipse.) The flocculation index of human serum is far from being the only colloid where crystal precipitates are responding to sunspots and heliospheric weather conditions - the Picardy reaction shows the same deep fundamental connection. the rate and shape of bismuth crystallisation, etc. That's what interests me about it. I'll let you know.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 31, 2012 10:30:48 GMT 1
Since liquids are almost as incompressible as solids, and glass is quite a flexible solid, the pressure inside a sealed glass tube full of water will follow fluctuations of the ambient air pressure for small variations of the latter.
Come to think of it, of course, the hydrostatic pressure will be even closer to ambient if the tube is open at the top.
I'm interested in the rapid changes you noted. Is your device in a shady, unoccupied room? Can you put it inside something like a transparent double-walled wine cooler?
Now you really have got me going - I can hear the call of the shed!
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 1, 2013 15:09:13 GMT 1
Since liquids are almost as incompressible as solids, and glass is quite a flexible solid, the pressure inside a sealed glass tube full of water will follow fluctuations of the ambient air pressure for small variations of the latter. This sounds...almost plausible. Can you think of any device or experimental application of this? The problem that pops into my mind is that actually water in most of its ordinary liquid phases is highly compressible - wouldn't the small fluctuations in the glass merely result in the (mostly) freely disassociated water molecules moving slightly closer together? Which would be virtually impossible to measure empirially, without state-of-the-art laser interferometry meauring density, or highly elaborate Rayleigh scattering measurements... If the water was in a highly ordered state, as it is in our cells, for example, such slight variations in pressure might lead to observable catalytic differences, I suppose. And it's possible that the specific ionic contents of the Strom Glass formula is inducing such long-range ordering, so that the water effectively becomes a single crystal - as around DNA molecules. In that case, what it's responding to is far more likely to be infrared light, I would have thought. No, just a standard one - sofas, a telly, computer, CDs, books, radio, a fireplace, various objets d'art like a Chrsitmas tree and a van der Graaf generator, to keep the squirrels amused. What it gets up to when unobserved is too deep a philosophical enigma when hungover. I have a fridge? How about a glass replica of the Great Pyramid? Or an iron replica of Stonehenge? Both scaled down a little, unfortunately. I've also just made a very attractive compost bin, with 360 degree stunning views of the Solent and English Channel, which is attracting great envious interest from the whole neighbourhood, as you can imagine. At the moment Aunt Agatha's suspiciously phallic invention is sitting on my desk, in the recess of an octoganal tower, facing south, so it has windows almost all around it...also, since it's been monitoring my local situation, the weather has been unusual, by anyone's standards. Perhaps it's just been working overtime to keep up. Last night it was almost full of crystals - at the moment it's blue and sunny and it's just growing an enchanted forest at the bottom, with a few shifting icebergs floating on the top. Ah, a man after my own heart.
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 1, 2013 15:14:57 GMT 1
This is it's New Year's Day spelling.
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Post by alancalverd on Jan 1, 2013 20:04:00 GMT 1
The plot thickens as I search around the internet to buy such a device. Some if not all have a considerable gas space above the liquid, so it ain't responding to hydrostatic pressure.
There's a fair bit of bollocks on the web about ions in the atmosphere. Trouble is that any charge would be distributed equally around the surface of the beast so it couldn't produce a great variety of crystal patterns and distributions.
The "double wall wine cooler" idea is to shield the beast from draughts and rapid indoor ambient changes due to squirrels watching the telly or lighting fires with a Van de Graaf. But if they can be persuaded to operate the VdG reasonably continuously, it will surely override any atmospheric ion content....the beginning of a controlled experiment, I think.
Failing which, you could take a hint from the pyramid and henge, and stick it up the arse of a sphinx to see which way the wind blows. Or was that the chorus of a rugby song? O tempora, o mores.
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Post by principled on Jan 2, 2013 1:58:29 GMT 1
As I sit here in the depths of coldest Canada, musing over your posts whilst my cranial frostbite subsides I remembered from the dim and distant past the use of shark oil for the telling of forthcoming weather events, especially hurricanes. It was many moons ago when I lived in the warmer climes of Bermuda that older Bermudians told me of the weather predicting capabilities of the oil. Placed in bottles, the oil apparently changes from clear to cloudy when a storm is on the way. So Alan, rather than pop down to your shed, which I am sure is cold, uncomfortable and lacking all homely comforts bar the odd bottle of brandy ;)you use for medicinal reasons, why not catch a plane to Hamilton? There you could buy a bottle of the oil and thus compare your results with those of Mr S. You never know, the BBC might employ you both to do a nightly weather duet! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_liver_oilP
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Post by alancalverd on Jan 2, 2013 12:11:21 GMT 1
Yeah, we have a sub-arctic version at the airfield. It's called the Pilot's Stone.
Stone wet - rain Stone white - snow Stone invisible - fog Stone moving - gale Stone blurred - Monday
Utterly infallible. Long before the invention of automatic radio reports, our ancestors built henges and pyramids to signal surface weather conditions to aviators. Well ahead of their time, and much misunderstood by subsequent generations.
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 3, 2013 5:21:28 GMT 1
The plot thickens as I search around the internet to buy such a device. Some if not all have a considerable gas space above the liquid, so it ain't responding to hydrostatic pressure. Are you suggesting that the small fluctuations in the glass that might be due to barometric changes would force the water into the space at the top? It's possible, but only if it's in a highly structured state - "vicinal" water. At around room temperature water is highly volatile and any such long-range structuring would ordinarily "melt". The slight changes in capacity caused by your proposed deformation of the glass container would therefore easily be absorbed by disassociated water molecules moving closer together. This might result in small changes in the number of hydrogen bonds formed, its viscosity, surface tension, etcetera - or, at least, it might if the water was pure. But it isn't - the contents are a heavily saturated colloid. This too might result in observable consequences of this compression, I suppose - but it's getting a bit fanciful now, especially as careful statistical studies have shown that there is no correlation between the behaviour of the Storm Glass and atmospheric pressure. I don't know what you mean about bollocks about ions. It's a vastly complex and still little understood subject. For our purposes, the essential point is that any standard climatological effect of pressure changes - wind, clouds, rain, temperature changes - are inevitably accompanied by concomitant changes in the immediate electric environment. The latter causes the former, in fact. Water at around room (body) temp is exquisitely sensitive to any em field it's exposed to, because the water molecule is highly polar, and between 35 to 40 degrees for still dimly understood reasons it becomes highly reactive to any magnetic influence. Every physical parameter it has alters in direct response to it. There is no known limit to the sensitivity of this response, either directly induced or through its constant response to the microfluctuations of the geomagnetic field. This is particularly observable in any crystal growth that might precipitate from a colloid, as is evident in protein construction or even in an inorganic colloid, as with Piccardi's BiOCl coagulations patterns. It's not the specific ionic dopants in the colloids responding to any surrounding em field - it's their hydrate shells: it's the water. Thus the Piccardi effect is identical in two completely different inorganic colloidal compounds, and mirrors the Takata Index effect in blood serum - both are determined by their water substrate responding in exquisitely precise structural realignment with the magnetic signals in its environment, from sub-Hertz frequencies to infrared wavelengths. This is why colloids as obstensibly different as BiOCl and human blood crystallise out in direct response to the electromagnetic weather on the sun, or the phases of the Moon. I don't rule out the probability that temperature changes are having some effect. But it can't be anywhere near the whole story. One study into the accuracy of the Storm Glass did conclude there was a temperature correlation - but only a slight, barely statistically meaningful one. If the crystallisation was occurring as a result of temperature this would be immediately obvious to any such scientific test, and would be conclusive. One would only have to study the effects of, say, turning on a nearby lightbulb. One observation I've had time to make is that crystal formation around the inside of the glass always begins and spreads out from due South. This occurs whether it's shielded from light or not, whether it's day or night, and whether I've lit the fire or not. Ah, I see. The ionic content of the environment is only one feature of our electromagnetic atmosphere - an important one as far as the weather is concerned of course, in its macroscopic effects such as cloud and front formation, rainfall, lightning, etc., but it's not what water is structurally responding to. That's primarily the orientation and fluctuations across a wide range of wavelengths of the geomagnetic field and the constant, and constantly changing (that is, it's far from "static") electric field between the ionosphere and the Earth.
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 3, 2013 5:28:05 GMT 1
As I sit here in the depths of coldest Canada, musing over your posts whilst my cranial frostbite subsides I remembered from the dim and distant past the use of shark oil for the telling of forthcoming weather events, especially hurricanes. It was many moons ago when I lived in the warmer climes of Bermuda that older Bermudians told me of the weather predicting capabilities of the oil. Placed in bottles, the oil apparently changes from clear to cloudy when a storm is on the way. Thanks P. I lived in the Pyrenees for a couple of years and had a nice sideline in honey, with sixty hives producing a highly valued delicacy (the wild flowers making it unique) for sale in Paris. Some of the old locals also used to predict the weather from the crystallisation state of a jar of honey - like the Storm Glass, it used to form highly complex fern-like misty webs, which would form and dissolve apparently without cause. I've seen olive oil do something similar.
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 3, 2013 5:57:12 GMT 1
I'm not saying this is impossible. It may even be likely, given that the container is indeed made of glass, rather than plastic as one might expect. I recall back in the 80s or early 90s there was a tremendous stink caused in water studies when it was found that most of the previous fifty years' measurements of water's density, surface tension, viscosity, electrical conductivity etcetera all had to be thrown out, and all the experiments thus far conducted into the changes of such parameters induced in the lab reassessed. It was found that water in contact with glass (as it normally is in such lab studies) formed a structured sheath of an indeterminate number of layers, and grew from the boundary of contact exactly like a crystal. The various forms of silicon oxide mirrors the various forms of the water molecule in its shape, and characteristic polymerised super-crystalline forms (basically, a tetrahedral pyramid, two corners protons, two lone pairs, standardly forming planar pentagons and from there dodecahedrons and isocahedrons and from there ever more complex crystals in helical pearl-chains.) The quartz of the glass was acting as a crystal bed for the water, and as quartz is completely transparent and polarising to infrared light of exactly the frequency of the H-O bond, it orientates the tetrahedral building blocks of water in precisely the correct configuration to link up in vast sort of "buckyball" layers, rapidly growing a single interlocked crystal stretching well into the body of the contained water. Thus changing the angle of the bonds; and proximity of the cjarges; thus changing the physical parameters of the molecules; thus completely skewing any previously accepted measurements of those parameters. Water in this state is effectively a unique substance, with totally novel properties, as different to ordinary water as graphene is to soot.
I recall Marchesa posted a link to a lecture about this matter a while back (sorry, I can't find it!), outlining research showing that this phenomenon is much more powerful than was thought - the structuring of water in contact with such a shaping substrate can extend for millimetres into the body of the water, and may in fact have no limit.
It's feasible therefore that the compound in the Storm Glass is effectively a single water crystal, and the observable colloidal precipitates are growing in its ever-shifting interstices.
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Post by mrsonde on Jan 3, 2013 7:48:13 GMT 1
As a very interesting (I think) by-the-by, Hameroff showed in 87 that the water in our cells exists in this vicinal state - perfectly so within the microtubules that give them their structural integrity (and functional communications and transport system), in the hydrate sheaths around DNA, and in the lipid boundaries of the cell walls. It seems highly probable that this is the mechanism primarily encoding short-term memories - and for that matter, representations in the brain of any kind (generating an electromagnetic holographic field). It permits an infinitely complex encoding system of perfect precision - perfect to the resolution of individual protons and electrons, able to generate by means of a recirpocated magnetic field (the brain produces a steady DC magnetic field of about one millionth of the strength of the geomagnetic field - it has a very large Hall voltage, so it's superconducting - pulsating in alternate polarities from one hemisphere to the next, allowing precise ongoing coordination of every neurone, and, via the body's DC network through the glial cells, to effectively every cell in the body.)
Also interesting - it's also how photosynthesis ultimately works. Water is not only the stuff of life, and its means of talking to itself, it's also its energy.
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