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Mike Sowden Profile picture
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Jan 19 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
The first time I saw the Northern Lights in real-time, like many folk, I was shocked. "But - I thought they moved slowly, like clouds?"

As you can see: not so much:



So I got curious. What else don't I know about these amazing things?

1/
Firstly: they're not just green.

Different heights of our atmosphere = different gases, & when charged particles from the sun excite gases at different altitudes, you get different colours.

*Wildly* different. Blue, pink, purple, yellow and (rarely) red.

I had no idea.

2/
Secondly: here's a weird thing discovered during an aurora above British Columbia:

"The temperature 300km above Earth’s surface jumped by 3000°C and the data revealed a 25 km-wide ribbon of gas flowing westwards..."

3/
The amateur astronomers who saw this didn't know what they were looking at - so they called it Steve.

I'm not making this up:

wired.co.uk/article/steve-…

4/
Thirdly, it was only *last year* (2021) that scientists first came up with an explanation of how solar particles causing aurora get up to the insane speeds at which they hit our planet (45 million miles per hr).

The apparent answer? They go surfing:

livescience.com/aurora-boreali…

5/
So - yeah. Always something new to learn!

Here are some more pictures of Steve, courtesy of @guardian (I can't keep a straight face here)...

theguardian.com/science/shortc…

6/
...and if you like this stuff - you know about light pillars, right?

Because you REALLY should know about light pillars:



Ta.

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More from @Mikeachim

Mike Sowden Profile picture
Jan 18
With the best illusions, you can know how they're done and yet your mind's still immediately flummoxed.

This is my favourite. Those table legs? Impossible - but absolutely real. (This is a *photo*.)

An appreciation 🧵for the oldest trick in the book:

1/ Image
Here is Professor Brian Cox CBE OBE (far right of pic) in his former p/t job (1986-1992).

I post this to illustrate that scientists still have *all sorts* of backgrounds, including in the Arts...

(And maybe also because this photo is amazing. Which it certainly is.)

2/ Image
In the case of Adelbert Ames Jr. (born 1880), he started by studying & practicing law - then chucked it all in to try his hand at painting.

Along the way, he developed a passion for light & colour & how the human mind processes them - and ended up a professor of research.

3/ Image
Read 15 tweets
Mike Sowden Profile picture
Dec 8, 2021
It's common for writers under terrifying deadline pressure to rely a bit too much on Wikipedia? Ahem. Easily done. It can't be TOO far wrong?

But a few months ago, researching a newsletter, I learned just how disastrous this can be.

An alarming 🧵 with good, hard LOLs:

1/
I'm old enough to remember t'days before t'Internet (black & white, everyone walked really fast, piano music etc) so I can emphatically say I love Wikipedia.

An encyclopedia edited by nearly 200,000 people - and it's *readable*? (And democratic?)

I'm a fan.

But...

2/
OK.

Have you heard of the Bicholim conflict?

It's an obscure 17th-Century war that raged between the Portuguese rulers of Goa, western India, and the neighbouring Maratha Empire.

Don't look for it on Wikipedia, though. It's not there.

Not *now* it isn't.

3/
Read 12 tweets
Mike Sowden Profile picture
Dec 3, 2021
In January of this year, photos started bouncing round the internet of this deeply weird thing happening in the sky above Glasgow. Photoshop trickery?

The bizarre truth:
- yes, everyone really saw these
- no, they're not faked or manmade
- they absolutely don't exist.

🧵

1/ Image
Here's the same thing happening above London (the other one, in Ontario, Canada) in 2018.

Again: these *aren't* spotlights shining upwards. They alse aren't the Northern Lights.

Also, they aren't actually there, even though everyone can see them.

Deep, deep weirdness.

2/ Image
From a year early, again in Ontario (North Bay this time):

Yes, they come in different colours too.

Really gorgeous, right? Like an incredibly relaxing version of fireworks that even dogs could get behind.

(And yes, dogs should be able to see them too.)

3/ Image
Read 18 tweets
Mike Sowden Profile picture
Oct 24, 2021
I just wrote a piece about pareidolia, the "you can't unsee this" bias...

everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/why-everywhe…

...and all the examples I found are delightful, ludicrous and worrying! (It's amazing how completely it hijacks our mind.)

I dare you to unsee the following examples.

1/ Image
In 1994, Diana Duyser of Florida spotted...something in her grilled cheese sandwich (the "Holy Toast").

She immediately did what any of us would do: packed it in cotton wool & waited for eBay to be invented, so she could auction it to online casino Golden Palace for $28,000.

2/ Image
If you’re wondering how it didn’t evolve into an entirely new lifeform during that 10-year wait, here’s some science about how a grilled cheese sandwich can last a decade without going moldy, via @Slate:

slate.com/news-and-polit…

3/ Image
Read 29 tweets
Mike Sowden Profile picture
Oct 13, 2021
Seeing the Northern Lights is one thing - but have you ever seen a *city* up there?

Yes, like that scene in ep. 1 of 'His Dark Materials'.

Because here's the weird thing: they exist. You can indeed see cities in the sky. There's actual science on this.

Stay with me. 🧵(1/) Image
That’s what Jesuit priest Father Domenico Giardina saw on August 14, 1643. Looking across the Strait of Messina (Sicily), he beheld “a city all floating in the air...so splendid, so adorned with magnificent buildings, all of which was found on a base of a luminous crystal.”

2/ Image
If his record is to be believed - as he watched, the city shimmered and became a garden.

And then a forest.

And finally a landscape of vast armies, locked in combat over the ruins of buildings...

Before the whole thing disappeared completely.

Blimey.

3/
Read 20 tweets
Mike Sowden Profile picture
Sep 21, 2021
Last week, I got seriously obsessed with what, at first glance, looks like a really daft question:

What does the Internet actually *look* like?

All the ways to answer this are fascinating and full of surprises. Here are some in a thread:

1/
Here is the simplest, most straightforward and wrongest answer.

It looks like the box in the corner of your room that you sit in front of every day, "enjoying" its contents.

Devoid of context, that's what my senses tell me. But obviously this is absurd. Let's move on.

2/
If "the Internet" is the signal, all that data flying around, then in a sense it looks like this.

99%+ all international data races along sea floors at around 16 mill. times the force of a home Internet connection, through cables roughly the width of a can of Coke.

3/
Read 15 tweets

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