Part of the reason why electricity seems so mystifying is because you can’t see it. But things such as voltage, current, power, and wattage can be explained by imagining electricity in cables as if it was water flowing in a pipe. Voltage is the “pressure of electricity”, and current is the flow-rate.

Voltage is potential, like a head of a stream, a static pressure of electricity waiting to flow.

Current is measured in amps. If electrons are the atoms of electricity, you’d see six million million million of them flow per second for each amp of current there is. (electrons are very small – many household appliances have several amps as a working current).

Power is easy to work out, as it’s voltage multiplied by current.

But on electricity bills you don’t pay for power, you pay for energy. Energy is power x time. A one kilowatt (1000w) heater running for one hour has used one kilowatt-hour.

I’d be surprised if the ratio of iPod owners to non-owners is less than 1:5. If the average size of an iPod is 20GB and Bloomington has 30,000 students there roughly 6,000 students carrying around 120,000 GB of storage. That is an staggering amount of data that moves on a regular basis.

Unless you are a hot girl who is currently in the vicinity of where I am don’t send me messages saying ‘Hi’, ‘Hello’. Try to have a point.

Update: I had to delete it for the exact reasons I listed above. Just message me on AIM (Ask2k3) and I’ll consider giving it to you.

Well moving on to the point. I got tired of using the little touchpad on the laptop so I brought down my optical mouse from upstairs and to my horror it didn’t work. So after a quick search on Google my questions were answered. Technology is amazing.

Developed by Agilent Technologies and introduced to the world in late 1999, the optical mouse actually uses a tiny camera to take 1,500 pictures every second. Able to work on almost any surface, the mouse has a small, red light-emitting diode (LED) that bounces light off that surface onto a complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. The CMOS sensor sends each image to a digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis. The DSP, operating at 18 MIPS (million instructions per second), is able to detect patterns in the images and see how those patterns have moved since the previous image. Based on the change in patterns over a sequence of images, the DSP determines how far the mouse has moved and sends the corresponding coordinates to the computer. The computer moves the cursor on the screen based on the coordinates received from the mouse. This happens hundreds of times each second, making the cursor appear to move very smoothly.

Because glass is transparent, the signal does not bounce back. I now use a mouse pad under the mouse.

The music is originally stored on a hard-drive and then loaded into its buffer memory. That’s why it appears to be ‘skip-free’. Most other Mp3 players are all buffer memory. It’s actually stored in the memory so its really skip-free but with current technology there is no way to get Gigs worth of music into buffer memory and keep the physical size down.

The apples site says that it has a 20-minute of memory, which I think is an accurate statement. When you skip forward a couple tracks you get 1/2 a second lag, cause that song isn’t in the memory so its being loaded into the buffer from the hard-drive and then being loaded.

So unless you’re going to be launching this back and forth for 20 min without stopping it’s going to be skip-free.

Most of you who either have a credit card or seen one know that credit cards have holograms on them for authenticity purposes and what not. A hologram is really a flattened version of a 3d object. When you look into a hologram you can see depth and other features of a 3-dimensional object.

A hologram can reflect a 3-dimensional object without taking on the size of a 3-dimensional object. If you stretch it to another level, what if our 3-dimensional world is really a 2-dimensional hologram? Or even more, what if our 3-dimensional world is 2-dimensional shadow of something with more than 3-dimensions?