Eskimo North

Posted earlier question why carbon seems to form on the electrodes when there is an arc between them, even if metals such as gold or brass or other alloys that would not normally contain carbon are used for the electrodes.

And that got me thinking to another phenomena in my pirate radio days. My first pirate station was when I was quiet young, maybe thirteen or so, and at that time wavelengths was something I really didn't understand, I thought just the more antenna you can get the better. The father of a friend of mine worked at the telephone company and would bring us home racks of relays and stuff that was old stuff that had been replaced with more modern gear. They weren't into recycling back then, used to dump tons of stuff into a dumpster and he would intercept some of it and bring us home some relays to play with and what not.

I rapidly discovered that there was lots and lots of very fine copper enameled wire in a relay core. We would make antennas out of this stuff, not the most efficient I am sure since the gauge was very small and resistance I'm sure was very high. The block I lived on had four houses along 15th Ave and then after that row of four it was two lots back to back all the way down the hill except at the very bottom there was a similar row of four houses.

So down the entire block there was a central fence except at the very top and bottom. We knew all the neighbors at the top of the block and most of them going down, except for this one grumpy man that would shoot at us with a rifle loaded with rock salt, or at least that was the story that was told; I never actually got shot at. He used to trap rabbits in his back yard, eat them and sell the furs. But we only needed to get permission from one of two to have a route for our antenna, and so we did.

The first part of the antenna from my house to the fence in the center of the block, it didn't run along a fence because there wasn't one there, it was strung between low tree limbs until it got to the fence. The antenna went our yard, a neighbors yard, and part of another neighbors before joining the fence and going the rest of the way, uninsulated, along the fence.

The house immediately adjacent to ours was occupied by a lady who really liked to garden. Her back yard had numerous fruit trees and vines; different types of grapes; vegetables; flowers, if you could plant it and it was legal; it was probably in her back yard. She'd allow us to pick fruit so long as we didn't pick more than we could eat and we were careful not to damage the plants in the process.

Our antenna went over the very back part of her yard right at the edge about six feet off the ground on average. And then it went into the next neighbor over.

The next neighbor was completely the opposite. Gardening is something they didn't do. They did have a huge apple tree in their back yard but it was there when they got there; the grass in the yard grew three or four feet tall in most places.

The one place it didn't grow three or four feet tall was under our antenna, there it would grow up to height the antenna was at, about six feet. And in our gardening neighbors garden; the plants near the antenna seemed to like it and grow faster also. Mostly we transmitted on 1200 Khz and at this time a low power, maybe a watt or so. Basically, we were using a mangled table radio where the 50C5 tube had been turned into an RF amplifier and modulated with another audio amplifier. So not a lot of power, still plants seemed to grow faster near or directly under the antenna.

There are many other life-electricity associations that come to mind, they are more tenuous but they are there, mostly fiction or anecdotal. People who report ball lightning often report that it seems to have an intelligent nature about it, either seeking out or avoiding humans. When they clone an animal, they first take an egg cell and remove the original genes and substitute the DNA from the animal they want to clone. They then have to zap the cell with electricity which starts the first division. Michelangelo depicting the Creation of Adam had God giving Adam the spark of life. In Frankenstein, the monster is brought to life with a Spark from captured lightning. Our own nervous system uses an electrochemical signaling system. Kirlian photography uses high voltage electricity to cause an object to create an impression on film. Some people claim it's capturing an aura but if so then dimes and quarters have auras.



Another association that exists for me, but probably not for many, is that of a phenomena known as the Dawn Chorus. The Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere interacts with the solar wind from the Sun and the Sun's magnetosphere and much interesting things result, like the Auroras. Part of the interaction includes the generation of electromagnetic signals within the audible range that can, with a suitable receiver and antenna, be picked up, recorded, listened to. Some mornings, it sounds pretty mundane, pops and ticks and whistlers that you can hear anytime, but perhaps more intensely, but otherwise, mundane.

Other days though, it sounds like hundreds of birds talking to each other, and the calls, just like the dawn chorus of real birds, seem to repeat and have definite patterns. It sounds, on these rare days, extremely organic, absolutely I can't listen to it and not feel I'm eavesdropping on great spirits talking to one another.

Plasmas, they seem to have a living aspect often. Neon tubes, you can't seem them with the naked eye but photographed at high speed you can, inside the tube there is not a continuous glowing arc as it appears to the naked eye, there are bands or beads of plasma, striations they call them, that are constantly moving rapidly; too rapidly for us ordinary to perceive. Sometimes you can see them in a dying fluorescent lamp that is flickering, not running at full brightness. You can see little bands of light moving about.

Tokamak fusion reactors, now there is a device in which we are trying to control a plasma, necessary for sustained fusion to occur. But the plasma, it does not want to be confined and controlled, it wriggles about in non-deterministic ways. That non-deterministic nature prevented us, for many years, from successfully confining it. Eventually, artificial neural networks were put to the task, they learned how to adjust the magnetic fields to contain it and continuously react in real time. In short; to confine it we had to outsmart it, and we copied from biology that which was necessary to accomplish that.

Auroras themselves, everyone has seen pictures, but the pictures are static, and as beautiful and complex and colorful as the static pictures of auroras are, they miss out on the motion, and for me that's the real awe of an Aurora. I've seen two in particular that really left a deep impact. One of them, the aurora was a find line of light across the sky, narrow like a neon tube, but it wriggled like a snake for the ten minutes or so that it was visible before fading out. Another, appeared as if someone tool a halogen spotlight and shined it on the ocean during a storm with big waves, and then those waves reflected back on a giant screen which was the sky.

These are associates I have in addition to the more common ones that I mentioned earlier. Surely, electricity is very involved in the process of life, but is it more than involved? Is there a living aspect to electricity? And if so, if we acknowledge that and treat it accordingly, might it be a little nicer to us?