#vortices

An owl gliding through a cloud of helium-filled soap bubbles reveals wingtip and tail vortices.

Sightings - S2E23 (Ghost Special) - “Manressa Castle” (sic) - May 14th, 1993

“Tonight, a special edition of Sightings dedicated to ghosts. We’ll help a viewer contend with a ghostly presence she believes is haunting her home, and we’ll show you the anatomy of a scientific ghost investigation. But first a trip to one hundred year old Manresa Castle, in Port Townsend Washington, it’s a former Jesuit seminary where people try to make contact with what they believe are the tortured spirits of the dead…”

Welcome to the penultimate episode of season two, and our second episode to be missing from my normal source after the psychic special. Luckily, a copy is available on the Internet Archive.

Tonight we visit a hotel in Washington named Manresa Castle, which has appeared on a lot of later ghost shows, apparently. Despite this, information is relatively scarce.

Meet Seattle-based photographer Steve Holderman. “We came to the castle today to try and capture ghosts. We want to see images on film that we can’t explain.”

Nick Gale says people from Seattle come, often on Halloween and the equinoxes, and someone is always in room 306 on Halloween, because the turret on the third floor is a energy portal that lets spirits come in from alternate dimensions.

Of course!

The "gimmick" of Manresa Castle is that each room has a diary for people to fill out with their experiences. Which of course primes the guests as to what to expect. A French website written in Comic Sans says this guy worked for the Castle, and claims a glass exploded in his hand; it also seems to imply the journals aren't in the rooms anymore?

Rod Freeman and his large family of children is using a ouija board, but only encounters the ghosts of a girl who jumped out a window in the 20s and a dead Jesuit and doesn't get why his son keeps asking about "this cool lady ghost named Sapphire". According to him, he's pointed to a Bible verse about perversion by the Jesuit's ghost.

“People want to be scared. That’s why we’re here, that’s why we come, to experience what others have written about in these diaries that are in the rooms.”

Psychic Rhonda Griffin makes contact with all of the castle's many spirits and is overwhelmed by their energy. She is very, very overwrought, but so is the camera work: after it was relatively staid for a while, this one is all wild upside-down zooms through the corridors.

She explains that the castle sits on a crossing of ley lines, and channels the Jesuit - and picks out the same Bible verse the Freemans read.

Finally, we return to the photographer, who discovered - a distortion! Of some kind! Ghosts real???

"Researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory (NSF NSO), the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, and the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) in the U.S. have made a discovery in solar physics. New images of the sun's surface taken with the world's largest solar telescope, the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, built and operated by the NSO in Hawaii, along with sophisticated computer simulations, reveal tiny plasma vortices that had never before been visible."

"The vortices occur at the edges of so-called granules, which densely cover the sun's visible surface. They measure between 500 and 2,000 kilometers (310 to 1,240 miles) in diameter. Taken together, they form the sun's granulation: a pattern reminiscent of bubbles in a boiling liquid.

In fact, the granulation stems from plasma flows that rise from the sun's hot interior, cool down and sink back into the depths. In the new study published in Nature, researchers succeeded for the first time in visualizing fringed structures at the edges of the granules. Time and again, these structures display swirling motions resembling breaking ocean waves. Some of these "fringes" are little more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide.

The researchers interpret the swirling plasma flows as signs of Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities. This is a well-known effect in fluid dynamics. It occurs when two fluids flow past each other at different speeds. This generates shear forces at the interface, causing minute disturbances to grow into wave- or vortex-like flows. The effect manifests itself in a wide variety of contexts and on different scales—for example, on the surfaces of lakes or in ocean waves, in cloud formation, in the atmospheres of the giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn, and in the interaction of the solar wind with planetary magnetospheres.

Apparently, adjacent plasma layers at the edges of solar granules also flow at different speeds, creating the necessary conditions for Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities."