Electrical Fields 1/30

On the second day of class, our professor began teaching us about electric fields. An electric field is a physical force field. He drew an electric field as a bunch of vectors radiating from the center of the field, where there was a positively charged particle. As the vectors got further away from the center, they got shorter. The vectors represented other positively charged particles. Positively charged particles repel each other, so the vectors were proportional to how much the particles were repelled. He told us we could think of electrical fields as mountains, with the center as the top. The closer the particle is to the center, the higher it is on the mountain, and the more potential energy it has. Voltage is the length of these vectors. It is the electric potential difference between two points, and is measured in volts. It is also the energy potential per unit of charge, or the potential energy with respect to ground. All the same thing said different ways.

Current is the flow of electrical charge through something conductive, like wire. Current is measured in amps.

We also played around with some mysterious machines called oscilloscopes. Oscilloscopes are used to measure voltage and electrical signals. When we had nothing touching our oscilloscope, it displayed 60 hz. That is because in America 60 hz is the utility frequency, the frequency of oscillations of electrical current transmitted from the power plants.

Blogs 1/26

Welcome to my blog! My blog that is my entire grade for my Introduction to Engineering class....On the first day of class we talked about why we are taking the course, what we might do, and about our blogs.  Writing a blog is a completely new experience for me, and it is much different than any other kind of writing I have done. It will take me while to figure out the right the style, and find the right balance between the informal conversational style that most blogs use, and an academic style (since my grade depends on this blog.) To me blogging is a medium for sharing your own unique insights and opinions, Our professor said that our intended audience should be our mothers and our roommates. Our blog is supposed to teach about them what we are learning in class.

Another thing that I am completely new to is engineering! Full disclosure, I do not want to be an engineer. But I do want to be a Media Arts and Sciences major, and I know that things that I learn in this class will apply to that. As more of a right-brained than analytical person I am interested in exploring the creative and artistic aspects of engineering. I am especially interested in DIY and open source software and hardware like the Arduino. I have read a lot about and seen some very cool projects made with soft circuits and hope that at some point we may be able to learn about them. I find the projects that I see in Make and Wired very inspirational and wish I had the knowledge to make them. Hopefully, through this course I will acquire some of that knowledge. Ultimately, after this course I would love to be able to take classes at the MIT Media Lab, and perhaps do research with a group like High Low Tech.