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.