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Comment by gpuhacker | Hacker News Reader

I love these kind of stories. At Astron, the institute that builds and operates radio telescopes in the Netherlands, there's a story that they once gave a new TV to someone who lived a couple of villages from one of the telescopes, because the old set was causing too much radio interference. They could figure out the exact location of the old TV based on the data from the radio telescope

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Then there’s a group of observant Jews that’ll sometimes drop by and kindly come by and fix your fence for free if it’s a part of their eruv, possibly before you know it’s broken

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-invisible-and-often...

Fascinating reading about the agony of requesting permission to string the line; I would be surprised if the practitioners who established NYC's eruv jumped through the same hoops. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-manhattan-eruv-new-y...

> The Toronto eruv alone is estimated to cost $100,000 per year > But being difficult to maintain is kind of the point.

Why not implement it as an optical fibre?

Non-conducting and easy to continuously check that there are no breaks.

At least for fibre optic, I thought it required a carrier wire for rigidity? Dunno if they're okay with automated checking, it might make it too scalable and simple to be acceptable.

Additionally, you can't use electricity on the Sabbath [0]. Unless you come up with some very clever way to couple sunlight or candlelight (!) into the fiber-optic cable and then detect time of flight in a non-electronic and cheap way, then just going out and checking by eye is the best bet.

Great idea though! I'd always thought that looking at the phase of an electroni impluse would give you a good idea of how far along the path a break occurred, as the return signal's phase should be inverted at the break point and you can then use time of flight to infer the distance of the break.

[0] This is a hyper deep part of jewish law and there are many exceptions. Please consult your local rabbi before taking my word for anything.

Might be okay to use electricity if they're validating before the Sabbath? Isn't that how it works?

Dunno how they handle breaks during the Sabbath...

But I'm 100% out of my league here.

Or microwave ovens posing as astronomical objects [1].

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics/m...

they did the same thing in west virginia with a heating pad.

https://www.wired.com/2004/02/quiet/

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