Freaky Fzx Friday - Large Hadron Collider

Large - 17 mile long loop and the biggest machine ever.
Hadron - Any particle made of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons.
Collider - A particle accelerator designed for collisions.

If you want to read about it, here's a great link:
     CERN's Large Hadron Collider

These videos'll help you understand a tiny bit.

Tek Tip 2sD - Know your Device and Hack it

Solving simultaneous equations:

We can substitute and solve, stack and solve, or use the graphing calculator and find the intersection of the two functions. My old TI-85 had a simultaneous equation solver.

Freaky Fzx Friday - Empty Space

HORROR VACUI - "Nature Abhors a Vacuum" - Aristotle, 350 BC

Aristotle seemed to believe that the speed ratio of an object falling in different materials is the same as the density ratio.  Using this logic, an object's speed while falling in a vacuum would be infinite.  Since that speed is not possible, a vacuum is not possible.

2,400 years ago, Aristotle was a proto-scientist.  He wasn't doing science as we consider it today but for various reasons his ideas stood for two millennia.  He was wrong on just about everything.

Turns out, however, that was pretty much correct on the vacuum thing.  Interesting.

Tek Tip 2sD - Electric Blanket Fix

Slim's Story - 

"So this [electric blanket] has been on my [impressively long] list for a while and I finally got around to fixing it.

"And I learned some things in the process.  Like there’s a term for the resistance of a capacitor in an AC circuit, called “Reactance.”  And since it is an inverse function of Capacitance and Frequency, as a capacitor loses its ability to store charges, it becomes a larger resistor.  I knew it had to be the two film capacitors, because they had mains voltages across them when I tested.

"Kids, don’t try this at home.  Never disassemble and power a device with exposed mains voltages.

Freaky Fzx Friday - The Higgs Boson

A field that gives objects their mass?
A field made of particles?  Virtual particles winking in and out of existence?
Various subatomic particles have no size but act like they do because of that field and those particles?

The Higgs field,
The Higgs boson.

Fascinating ideas.

Tek Tip 2sD - Oven Fix

The oven was taking a long time to light.  It's a gas oven and the ignitor was heating up but the gas valve wasn't opening.  Sometimes it would light up ten minutes after turning the knob.  And sometimes it would turn off before getting to the temperature I set.  It was annoying.

So I watched a YouTube video.

Freaky Fzx Friday - Gluons Hold the World Together

There are these tiny particles with ridiculous properties.  They are "virtual particles" and like virtual reality they simulate a real situation.  But Wikipedia puts it best - or in the most complicated manner imaginable:

"In physics, a virtual particle is an explanatory conceptual entity found in mathematical calculations in quantum field theory. It visualizes, usually in perturbation theory, mathematical terms that have some appearance of representing particles inside a subatomic process such as a collision. Virtual particles, however, do not appear directly amongst the observable and detectable input and output quantities of these calculations, which refer only to actual, as distinct from virtual, particles. Virtual particle terms correspond to notional "particles" that are said to be "off mass shell". For example, they can progress backwards in time, or travel faster than light."

Tek Tip 2sD - ICON 4x4

Some people start young and develop a brand that becomes world famous.  Without formal education.  It's rare, but it makes a good story.  Take a good old truck, make it a lot better, and sell it for $150,000.  

Jonathan Ward of ICON at http://www.icon4x4.com/ is a really interesting man with an interesting history.  

Freaky Fzx Friday - It's Never That Simple - Chemistry Lies Again

A couple weeks ago on Friday I showed you that protons and neutrons were made of quarks.  Freaky Fzx Friday - Chemistry Lies.

But it's not that simple.  The proton and neutron are far more complicated than the simple version I presented so here's a sugary story of the rest of the truth.

So quarks and antiquarks winking in and out of existence and gluons holding the whole thing together.  Real life is a lot more complicated that what you get in high school.  Or college.