Slightly racist clock helps me wake up

A lot of these posts seem to be about me sleeping and here's another one on the same subject. I'm a very deep sleeper and it takes a lot to wake me up. As you saw in my Physics video, even when I wake up, I fall right back asleep. Many times I've been nearly late to school and people have laughingly told me later that they saw me running to school as my pants fell down, my backpack flew wide open, and I nearly choked on a bagel. Although I showed in my video that I use my cell phone to wake me up, I actually utilize a total of 5 different alarms. I have created an elaborate scheme where some alarms are near me and others are strategically placed around the house so that I am forced to walk around and turn them all off, thereby waking me up. Even with this set up, I sometimes fall back asleep. Therefore, my mother finally recommended that I get an alarm clock that vibrates, as this is the type of alarm that deaf people use to wake up. I thought "coolio" and couldn't wait. However, the alarm I received, while it does vibrate, came with another feature I found slightly disturbing.

This is the clock on my bed near my pillowIt looks a little funny, but innocent enough. However, the first night I used it, I was a little surprised when I heard someone with a horrible Indian accent telling me to wake up. That is because this clock, called the Timex Wacky Wake Up clock (horrible name) comes jam packed with 7 messages delivered by horrible stereotypes including a Mafia member, Redneck, and African-American activist. It does vibrate but the messages that come along with it, while funny in a guilty pleasure sort of way at first, became really annoying. This is a link to Youtube with all 7 messages if you want to hear them. They're good for a laugh once but after hearing them over and over, I'm frankly sick of the clock.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=timex+wacky+wake+up&aq=f

Anyways, this clock, like so many things in life, is another good example of Physics in action. The clock creates longitudinal sound waves by vibrating air within the clock, which escapes via a series of holes in the side of the clock.
The different pitches of the very bad accents are caused by differences in pitch and timbre in the voices. Pitch, determined by the frequency of the sound waves, determines what note the voice speaks in and at what octave. The different voices have different timbres. Timbre is the mixing of many different frequencies so that the same note can have different sounds. The multitude of voices are very different because of their different timbres. And finally, the vibration that I wanted the clock for is created by a small motor in the clock. When current flows through it, the motor spins and weights attached to this motor spin as well, jiggling the whole clock and causing the sensation of vibration. This simple seeming clock is chock full of Physics concepts including the buttons that work because of capacitors and the polarized LCD screen but I won't bore you. One thing that's scary is that now that I've had the clock for a few months, I subconsciously know the order that the voices play in. Man that's creepy.

I was pretty late to class because of this

This was a blog post I had planned to make (I had the pictures and everything sitting on my pc and cellphone for 4 weeks) but of course I forgot when the blogs were due. In any case, as I'm sure everyone who's had a class with me knows, I am often very sleepy in school. Whether it's a late night writing a paper or just being kept awake by the excruciating feeling of a grain of something under my eyelid digging into my cornea, I often come to school in a stupor and sometimes fall asleep.I work in the Registrar's office for scholarship (it's a little boring) and one day, I fell asleep. A couple of minutes later, half awake, I tried to look at the wall clock and see how much longer until the period ended. Unfortunately, I couldn't see see the time because of glare off the clock. By the time I woke up sufficiently to move and see what time it was, I noticed that I was about 5 minutes late. Luckily, the attendance window was only 20 feet away so I promptly grabbed an unexcused tardy before I ran to class and tried to finish a quiz in record time.
The next day, I took some pictures of the clock. This picture is my view of the clock when I was sleeping.As you can clearly see, glare from outside blocks my view of the clock's hands.

Now I move a little closer and it becomes clearer.
Moving even closer makes even more of the clock visible

And being right by it makes it completely clear

Because of the glare off of the clock, I was late. The reason the glare is reduced as I move closer to the clock is that the angle from the light source outside to my eyes changes. The outside light directly hits the clock face and bounces off of it into my eyes when I'm farther away. As I get closer, the angle of incidence between the clock and I changes and the light less and less directly hits the clock and more and more of it becomes visible. The glare is actually polarized light that vibrates in a vertical direction. If I had been wearing polarized sunglasses, I would have been able to see right through it. This very unfortunate incident, upon further inspection, was one that an understanding of physics helps resolve.

The Moon is Beautiful

In case you don't understand the reference for the title, it's a line from the song "Oh Yeah" by the band Yello. I'm sure you've heard it somewhere. Anyways, this chapter, we're learning about electromagnetic waves and have been focusing on light so far. While I was out and about yesterday, I spotted the moon shining at around 5 P.M. and thought that was neat.It's hard to tell but that little dot in the sky is not a balloon, it's the moon. The moon, as I hope you all know, does not create its own light but rather reflects the light of the sun. The moon is a nice white color but has blotches on it. The whiteness comes from the moon's rocks, which reflect all visible frequencies of light as there is no reason for them not to. The blotches though are made by huge craters in the moon where no light goes inside. Thus, they remain black. So ya, the moon is beautiful.

Sound

Sorry but this is a lame blog post. Didn't have much time to do anything this weekend so all i could think of was the sound equalizer on my cell phone which looks like this:

It's hard to see but all those bars have a number under them. 80 and 420 Hz and 1.4 and 3.7 kH. These are measures of frequency and thus also measures of wavelength (tone) as they are inversely related. I can change the levels of different frequencies in this way and change the sound of whatever i'm listening to. That's it.

Magnets

Whoa is it late. Anywho, I'm an avid "gamer" and my system of choice is the PS3, a much superior console compared to the Xbox 360. Well, as I play games, I sometimes do things that might damage my controller. I discovered today that several pieces of plastic were lying inside of the controller, snapped off from wherever they should have been because of a lack of care. The controller was still working but made noise so I decided to take it apart and remove these pieces. The screws were magnetic, which helped me to screw and unscrew them. Coolio.
This is a picture of the spare pieces in my controller.

My last incandescent bulb

My apartment is filled with fluorescent lightbulbs. As we study electricity and how incandescent bulbs work, it is clear that these bulbs are very inefficient. Most of the energy that goes into one of these bulbs comes out as heat that doesn't do anything but burn you. Thus, when our last incandescent bulbs burned out, we decided to get fluorescent ones. Anyways, I was looking for a topic to talk about and got a little thirsty. When I opened my refrigerator, I had a sudden burst of inspiration and looked at the lightbulb that illuminates my fridge. I noticed that it is an incandescent bulb, which surprised me.
It's really bright and thus hard to see but that is definitely an incandescent bulb. The fridge info is just a bonus. I then looked and spotted the switch that turns the bulb on when I open the door.
From our studies into electrical circuits, I'm pretty sure that when I open the door of my refrigerator, a spring pushes this little doodad out, which completes the circuit and turns on the light. When I close the door, this button gets pushed back in and the circuit is broken, turning off the light. Cool.

Electromagnetic Pulses

Nothing extremely physics-ey happened to me in recent days so the only thing I could think of blogging about was electromagnetic pulses because we're studying electricity. See, I watched the Animatrix a couple of days ago (it's decent if you don't mind anime and a bit of gore). It's basically like a bunch of episodes shot in the anime style that have something to do with The Matrix (you know, the movies). Part of it gives a history of what led up to the world as it's portrayed in the movies. The plot summary is that humans made robots, robots did all the work, we didn't appreciate them, robots gained artificial intelligence and one of the robots killed his owner in order to save himself from being destroyed. Humans react by trying to destroy all robots, they fail, robots make their own city which dominates the world economically b/c they're efficient and stuff. Humans get pissed, attack robots w/ nukes, doesn't work, they attack back, we fight em and are losing. We blot out the sky b/c they use solar energy (that's why it's always dark outside in the Matrix), we still lose, and then most of the people are put into those pod things to be used as a replacement energy source. It's all very intriguing stuff with the philosophical questions of what life is etc.
Over the weekend, I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which rocks, and in the game there is an electromagnetic pulse that turns off all electronic devices. This reminded me of the movie because I thought it would be a perfect way to kill the robots. Intrigued, I googled it up and read up a little on it and I was surprised on what it actually was.
Electromagnetic pulses aren't anything new, having been observed since the 1940's. They are bursts of electromagnetic radiation that causes very powerful electric and magnetic fields (electric fields ooh). The strong electric field creates high voltages in electrical devices, which causes damage and is the reason that these pulses are able to destroy electronic equipment. Electromagnetic pulses are created mostly by the detonation of nuclear devices. I was taken aback a little because the movie stated that the humans used nuclear weapons on the robots but that they were ineffective because the robots were resistant to heat and couldn't be hurt by radiation. However, the nukes should have created electromagnetic pulses. This is an example of some of the misconceptions people hold about EMP's. Learning about them was interesting and supplemented my current physics work so Yeah!

My mostly white Throne

I haven't posted here in a while but I was just hit by some great inspiration so here I go. As I'm sure everyone else did, I ate during Christmas. A lot. And when you eat a lot, well, obviously you do something else a lot. While I was doing this something, I'm sure you know what it is, I was taken aback at the physics present in my very own toilet seat. I noticed not one, but two different examples of physics in action. Here's a picture of a toilet seat. To spare your eyes the horror of my own, don't ask, I will substitute a picture of a nice one (If you really want to see what mine looks like, send me an e-mail and I'll send you some tasteful pics).
Anyways, one aspect of physics that becomes immediately apparent through this picture is the way in which the seat moves form the up position to the down position. Obviously us men will have a little more experience with this but I'm guessing that everyone has had some interaction of this sort (If not, just tell me and I'll explain in further detail). Anyways, the seat falls down or stays up due to a property of physics we just learned, the center of mass in relation to the base of an object. As you all know, every object has a center of mass that basically acts in physics as the only point in which the object has mass. In conjunction with the base of an object, I noticed that the seat falls down because it's center of mass is no longer over the base. As we learned in physics, whenever an object's center of mass is not supported by it's base, it'll fall.

A second mechanic of physics I spotted was torque. The screws that hold your toilet seat to the toilet are acted upon by torque. The circular motion they undergo whenever your seat flips down or back up again is the torque. When the seat is falling down, it's due to gravity exerting a torque on the screws. When it goes back up, it's due to your input of energy exerting a torque. And of course, friction occurs as well , the effects of which are negligible in most cases (but unfortunately not in all.) The combination of these two mechanics, center of mass and torque, was a big surprise to me in something so simple as my toilet. I was impressed by the way that these two aspects interacted. If you want to see these properties in action for yourself, just go to your own bathroom (assuming you own a toilet). Well that's it. Bye.