The Greenest Technology Company on the Planet

September 24, 2008

“Our customers have made it clear that they want the greenest technology possible,” Jeff Clarke, senior vice president, Dell Product Group said during the company’s mobility summit in Monte Carlo today. “As an industry, we can shape the future of green innovation and significantly reduce the carbon footprint associated with mobile computing. Dell is committed to leading the transition to energy-efficient LED technology.”

The "LED technology" which Clarke speaks of is none other than a light-emitting diode.



A light emitting diode is essentially a two-layered semiconductor—-it has both a p-type and a n-type semiconductor in a circuit. While current flows through the semiconductors, electrons from the conduction band of the n-type move towards the holes present in the p-type. As a result, the energy of the electron drops, and a photon is released with energy equivalent to the energy difference between the conduction to valence bands.

Fast forward to today, where owning a LED laptop is no longer an uncommon feat. This is great news for the environmentalists, as the benefits of LED technology seem endless:

"In addition to being mercury-free and highly recyclable, LED displays deliver significant energy savings compared to cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) technology. For example, Dell’s 15-inch LED displays consume an average of 43 percent less power at maximum brightness, resulting in extraordinary cost and carbon savings. The company estimates customer savings of approximately $20 million and 220 million kilowatt-hours in 2010 and 2011 combined, the equivalent of annual CO2 emissions resulting from energy use of more than 10,000 homes1."

I applaud Dell and its management in attempting to become the "Greenest Technology Company on the Planet."



source: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2008/2008_09_24_rr_000?c=us&l=en

Dynamic Systems

for those of you reading this at school (and can only read this at school; owned!), I'm not sure if flash games are surf controlled, so I apologize in advance.

I struggled for awhile to find something in my house related to nuclear physics, so I decided that really, it wasn't worth the effort. I'd have to find something else. While procrastinating, I stumbled upon this nifty game thing called 'dynamic systems.'

The game is extremely simple at first, but gets exponentially harder within the first five levels. The idea is simple: initially, a silver ball is present on the board, somewhere far, far, away from the bucket. Using the random assortment of tools provided and properties of physics, one must place various objects which, when the ball is set into motion, will successfully make the ball fall into the bucket.

There is, of course, a "reset" option if your setup does not work. There is also a 'solution' button which obviously gives you the answer if you truly are stumped.

After playing with the game a bit, I'll be the first to admit that it gets extremely frustrating rather quickly. By the ninth level or so, I had no idea what the tools given to me or assorted machinery on the map would even do. Nevertheless, I saw gears, levers, even a windmill type thing which seemed to undergo uniform circular motion.

However, no matter how complicated the levels get, the key to beating each individual level is correctly visualizing what will happen to the ball as it passes each obstacle. Some tools they give you slow the ball down, probably displaying some effect of high friction. Others such as a ramp (which you can put at any angle) allow the control of how quickly the ball falls, and where it lands. On the fourth level, there are even domino blocks which cause a chain reaction through conservation of momentum.

For those of you who want to see what the game looks like but are too lazy to click the link of the actual game, I'll throw you a bone. Here's one of the first levels, where the setup is relatively easy. Notice how you can also rotate the various objects provided.





and for the rest of you, here's the game itself, along with a bunch of other "physics" related games.

Online Physics Games

Playing around with some purple light thing

saturday night, nothing much to do, and it was time for the physics blog. of course, the camera was in video mode by chance, but before I switched it to picture mode, my good friend Richard asked, "what's that?" Sure enough, there was a random purple line thing in the middle of the screen. And it just wouldn't go away.

Confused, I sent the following message to doc!, in hopes of enlightenment:


-----------------------------
So, I was about to use my camera to take a picture at Richard's house, but the camera was in video mode. When I hit the "record" button, I noticed a distinct purple line which cross-sectioned the view of the room, and it seemed to originate from a lamp. I moved around the camera a bit, and saw that if I rotated it enough, the purple line disappeared.

Could you point me in the right direction so I could blog about it?

thanks,
andrew
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and here was the response:

Interesting. It appears to be some kind of internal reflection in the lens of the camera caused by the high intensity of the light. I would guess that it as you move the camera up and down, the purple line will stay directly on the lamp. Does the line rotate as you rotate the camera? This is something like the star effects that cameras as sometimes designed to produce ... those are diffraction effects.
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as the video verifies, doc!'s hypothesis that the purple line would only disappear if the camera were moved side to side is correct. unfortunately, I failed to grasp very much understanding here. I googled 'star effect' and every single result seemed to be selling something.

For now, the phenomena is unresolved, both because I am stuck and because I have a lot to do tonight. I am annoyingly very confused, just like how I will be on tomorrow's physics test.

Contacts

Busy weekend, busy day, busy sunday night.. not much else needs to be said!
so here's a quickie:

From my time here at Iolani, I'd say that I've seen more people wearing glasses than anywhere else in my life. I can't really tell you why we all have bad eyesight, but I do too. But me, I wear contacts. Contact lenses. Something we've been studying about in physics.

Since you unsophisticated people wear glasses, today's lesson is about how to properly put on a contact. While each pair of contact lenses is lightweight, transparent, and looks the same oriented forward or backward, believe it or not there's a very specific way to put them on. First, hands gotta be clean and dry, but moist. Contacts must be inserted, concave side up. Otherwise, as us sophisticated guys know, very painful irritation occurs and vision is severely impaired.



The issue is, the irritation only kicks in moments after you put in the contacts. And your vision is always impaired when you put in the lens, but if done correctly, should cease after a minute. If the lens are inserted convex side up, vision is strangely enough, impaired forever. To the point where one can see better without having them on. But I digress....

So to give you an idea of what life was like, when I confused convex side with concave side:

I woke up, but didn't really wake up, and could barely pry my eyes open to get the contacts in..
I was late, and noticed that my eyes, still tired and closed felt like they were swelling on the way to school. I opened my eyes and realized I couldn't see a thing. Class was pretty fun, having to tap the person next to me to figure out what my teachers were writing on the board. And then Mr. Park put me on the spot, and I didn't even know what the question was...

If you mix up the sign, it's almost as fatal as forgetting a negative sign on object or image distance on a quiz. Almost.

Is it good to be organized?; Seeing is not Believing!

To skip my midlife crisis, go past the dotted line!


Life has honestly become more and more of a mechanical grind. More than it ever has been, I think.

I wake up at a pre-determined time in the mornings, calculated precisely the night (or morning, hehe) before to account for leftover homework, head to school and finish it, and follow my generic schedule. After-school is pretty mechanical too. I have my schedules all planned out, for each day of the week. Mondays are scholarship, then doc!'s room. Tuesdays are cram for violin lesson. Wednesdays are violin lesson, and Thursdays are quartet. Well, you get the idea.

Even the stuff we learn is pretty mechanical. English will always be vocabulary, and analytical essays. Math will be.... math... and physics will be real world applications of math with lots of equations (kind of?)

So, I don't really know anymore. My friends, teachers, and family all seem to believe that being organized is a good thing. Especially after today, when I had a long talk with my dad about "having a sense of direction, of where I'm headed." I don't know though, if it's good to know everything about where I'm headed. Kind of takes the fun and thrill out of things, especially considering that I only get three more years to be a teenager.

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While pondering above thoughts, I had a water glass on my desk...

I quickly noticed an everyday example of refraction--the tendency of light to travel at different speeds through different mediums.

Light travels more quickly through air than it does through water. As a result, it creates a distorted image of a straw:



And here's some guy who saw the same thing I did, but with a straw, because that's normally what people have in water glasses. Comes with some analysis; which is cool, so I don't have to do any~.



So, although the straw appears to be bent from an overhead observer, the picture indicates that the 'real straw' is a continuation of the straw above the surface of the water, just like our brains would like to believe.

WANTED: Jason Preble, Destroyer of Magnets

I guess I've been aware of it all my life, but physics isn't always.. amazing. :[

Sometime during Saturday's performance, my precious magnet (see last week) was destroyed by a tumultuous force of nature. Our bassoonist, Jason Preble, haphazardly crushed my red, star-shaped clip.

Jason's force exerted by gravity (weight) is much greater than the magnet is able to handle. Assuming Jason's mass is about 60 kg, his weight would be about 600 Newtons. 600 Newtons divided by 4.184 Newtons per pound results in a weight about 143 pounds. Of course, it's no surprise then, that my magnet which weighs about six pounds, was brutally crushed.

Additionally, we can't forget about impulse: the product of force and time. Since we have already established that assuming Jason's foot came from straight above the magnet, impulse would simply be that number times the amount of time Jason took before realizing that he smashed my magnet and taking his foot off. I'd assume that this time is no more than maybe, half a second?

And then, there's the transfer of momentum from Jason's foot to my magnet. Since the magnet simply got crushed, without really moving much, the collision was clearly inelastic (kinetic energy is not conserved)

The mistake was of course understandable; after all, the pit area is always dark, and navigating through a sea of stands and instruments is difficult.

Don't leave home without your magnet; Kiss me Kate to open in Five Days!

As far as things that needed to be done and time available for me to do said things goes, this was probably the worst week of the year. Frequent readers of this blog have informed me that I begin every single blog this way, but it's so true. You have to put up with me, readers, because this is always the first thing that comes to mind when I start writing on Sunday night.

On Saturday, the pit orchestra had a Sitzprobe five hour rehearsal, in which we played the same stupid music millions of times, for five hours. And the music is in itself, impossibly hard (or maybe just for us violins). And we played this impossibly hard music for, you guessed it, five hours. Probably one of the most memorable (worst) experiences of my life, actually...

also, why the hell is Hawaii Theatre in the middle of Chinatown? cmon, seriously?

After the rehearsal ended around five, I decided to relieve some stress (read:procrastinate) by heading over to Ka'kaako park with a friend. The area itself is always hilly, almost always windy, and almost always a place with noone around. Of course, my friend had to lose her stupid keys at some point, with hills everywhere and nobody else around. So we spent a fair amount of time looking for a tiny gold thing in a probable three acre area, like a needle in a haystack [cliche, i know, sue me!]

so we searched for a while, of course with me chastising about not putting a string thing around the keyring like i do with mine.


I of course, came up with the brilliant idea of using the clip I used to hold my kiss me kate music together to find the keys. The catch is, that it doubles up as a magnet! Because keys are a metal, and magnets immediately feel an attractive force towards metals (which contain 'a sea of electrons' throughout), I was able to search much more efficiently by just running my magnet around the long grass (as opposed to moving it around with my hands). Soon the keys turned up!


I, of course, have no idea why I have a Hawaii State Teacher's Association magnet-clip, but it sure was awesome at the time.

had i left my house without this ridiculous clip, or had i forgotten about the awesome power of magnets, i may have been looking and annoyed for a very long time.

don't leave home without a magnet, kids!