Luke says Moo!

I promised a more substantial post today, so here it is:

Um. Yeah.

Anyway, for any of you out there who might want to shop at Sam’s…might I suggest not, I repeat not, allowing impulse shopping to persuade some of your decisions…you’ll end up with a lot of stuff.

Next on the list: this week hasn’t been as bad or as good as I thought it would be. My senior design group’ll end up being just fine. Not what I wanted, but we’ll make it work. My classes all suck…I had hopped at least one would be a cake class for the first couple of weeks and it turns out I’ve got a psycho prof. My other classes are just going to be very, very difficult and annoying.

The Rose Thorn turned out wonderfully this week. I was even done working on it not long after midnight. Yay! Hopefully we can keep this up for several weeks.

In class today I saw a nifty demonstration in my ElectroMagnetic Compatibility (EMC) class: one of the profs. for the class hooked up a light bulb to a T-splitter (it takes a single output and makes it into two connections). Anyway, it’s your standard DC/AC light bulb circuit.

He plugs in the light and it comes on…yeah…just like it’s supposed to. Then he takes a coaxial (cable-TV cord) cable about a meter long and shows us that it’s an open circuit…meaning that there’s no way for elecricity to flow and he plugs it into the other side of the T-splitter. Immediatly the light bulb turns off…sense making = none. You ever see a light bulb turn off just because you plugged in an extension cord to the circuit? I didn’t think so.

Anyway, he then unplugs the cable to show that the light bulb was still working. He then puts a short on the end of the cable and immediatly the light bulb turns back on…still not behaving like a “good” circuit.

To add to the fun he takes another meter length of cable and hooks it onto the other cable and…boom..the light comes back on…interesting…and then he puts the short onto the doubled cable and the light goes off. Fun. Now we have circuits that lose power just due to cabling being plugged in. No fun.

To make a short story long it’s called wave phenomenon and it’s caused by a frequency and wave movement through the cable…fun stuff which I don’t totally get. He goes on with some other stuff to show that a gigahertz signal needs about 2 inches to cause interesting things to happen on the connecting wires. Yay!

With that I think I’ll leave you for the night.