Electrical Current And Circuits Quotes

That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It. It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one. The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

This week in live current events: your eyes. All power can be dangerous: Direct or alternating, you, socket to me. Plugged in and the grid is humming, this electricity, molecule-deep desire: particular friction, a charge strong enough to stop a heart or start it again; volt, re-volt-- I shudder, I stutter, I start to life. I've got my ion you, copper-top, so watch how you conduct yourself. Here's today's newsflash: a battery of rolling blackouts in California, sudden, like lightning kisses: sudden, whitehot darkness and you're here, fumbling for that small switch with an urgent surge strong enough to kill lesser machines. Static makes hair raise, makes things cling, makes things rise like a gathering storm charging outside our darkened house and here I am: tempest, pouring out mouthfulls of tsunami on the ground, I've got that rain-soaked kite, that drenched key. You know what it's for, circuit-breaker, you know how to kiss until it's hertz.

We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will. We arrange the circuits properly, and we see the mass of iron and wires behave as though it were endowed with life,

His thinning hair was standing on end, as if the frustration of dealing with his wife’s pigheadedness had overloaded his circuits, sending a jolt of electric current through him.

A modern CPU is just a circuit of millions of microscopic wires and logic gates that manipulate electric currents of information.

We send electric currents down orderly runs of circuits and switches, but the shape that electricity wants to take is of a living thing, a fern, a bare branch. The strike point in the center, the power seeking outward.

System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare capacity” is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task. We know that they followed that instruction, because the timing of the visual target had no effect on the main task. If the critical letter was presented at a time of high demand, the subjects simply did not see it. When the transformation task was less demanding, detection performance was better.

System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare capacity” is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task.

Three Moonie 65-megaton hydrogen bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at very high altitude. With no air around the bombs to absorb the initial blast of the explosions, and convert the energy into mechanical shock waves——all the nuclear energy blasted out in its electromagnetic form. It was a brutally intense pulse of Compton recoil electrons and photoelectrons that created huge electric and magnetic fields that were MURDER on sensitive electronic equipment at tremendous distances. The electro-magnetic fields, coupled with electric and computer systems, producing huge voltage spikes in the circuits and damaging current surges along all signal paths, fusing precision engineered memory and micro-boards and virtual drives and CPUs into fried silicon laced junk! Nanobots to Nanoscrap in Nanoseconds!

Despite international calls for Chernobyl to be decommissioned at once, it endured a very gradual demise. On October 11th, 1991, just five years after the Unit 4 explosion, there was a third major accident at the plant, this time at Unit 2. Prior to the event, the Unit had been taken offline following another accident - this time a fire in its section of the turbine hall, which had broken out during minor turbogenerator repair work. After extinguishing the blaze, the generator had been isolated and its turbine coasted down to about 150 rpm when a faulty breaker switch closed, reconnecting it to the grid. The turbine rapidly sped up to 3000 rpm in under 30 seconds, then, according to a 1993 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “the influx of current to TG-4 overheated the conductor elements and caused a rapid degradation of the mechanical end joints of the rotor and excitation windings. A centrifugal imbalance developed and damaged generator bearings 10 through 14 and the seal oil system, allowing hydrogen gas and seal oil to leak from the generator enclosure. Electrical arcing and frictional heat ignited the leaking hydrogen and seal oil creating hydrogen flames 8 meters high, and dense smoke which obstructed the visibility of plant personnel. When the burning oil reached the busbar of the generator it caused a three-phase 120,000-amp short circuit.”265

Stanford University’s John Koza, who pioneered genetic programming in 1986, has used genetic algorithms to invent an antenna for NASA, create computer programs for identifying proteins, and invent general purpose electrical controllers. Twenty-three times Koza’s genetic algorithms have independently invented electronic components already patented by humans, simply by targeting the engineering specifications of the finished devices—the “fitness” criteria. For example, Koza’s algorithms invented a voltage-current conversion circuit (a device used for testing electronic equipment) that worked more accurately than the human-invented circuit designed to meet the same specs. Mysteriously, however, no one can describe how it works better—it appears to have redundant and even superfluous parts. But that’s the curious thing about genetic programming (and “evolutionary programming,” the programming family it belongs to). The code is inscrutable. The program “evolves” solutions that computer scientists cannot readily reproduce. What’s more, they can’t understand the process genetic programming followed to achieve a finished solution. A computational tool in which you understand the input and the output but not the underlying procedure is called a “black box” system. And their unknowability is a big downside for any system that uses evolutionary components. Every step toward inscrutability is a step away from accountability, or fond hopes like programming in friendliness toward humans. That doesn’t mean scientists routinely lose control of black box systems. But if cognitive architectures use them in achieving AGI, as they almost certainly will, then layers of unknowability will be at the heart of the system. Unknowability might be an unavoidable consequence of self-aware, self-improving software.

The events in computers do not amount to genuine understanding. Indeed, given that symbols are symbols only to someone who understands that they are symbols, events in computers considered in isolation from conscious human beings do not even amount to the processing of symbols. There is merely the passage of minute electric currents along circuits which may or may not cause other physical events to happen, such as the lighting up of a screen in a certain pattern.

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

Voltage is measured in volts. Current is measured in amperes. Resistance is measured in ohms. One volt is the electrical pressure required to cause 1 ampere of current to flow through a resistance of 1 ohm. Scientists have made experiments which show that 6280 trillion electrons pass a given point each second when there is 1 ampere of current in a circuit.

Now we saw that when you put motor and sensory nerves together into a reflex arc, the current flow formed an unbroken loop. This solved the mystery of what completed the circuit: The current returned through nerves, not some other tissue. Just as Gerard had found in the brain,nerves throughout the body were uniformly polarized, positive at the input fiber, or dendrite, and negative at the output fiber, or axon. We realized that this electrical polarization might be what guided the impulses to move in one direction only, giving coherence to the nervous system.

By analogy with electrical engineering, democracy might be defined as a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggle. No period of human history has been—even remotely—so overcharged with antagonisms such as ours… Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is what the short circuit of dictatorship represents.

A wire attached to the brass axle, and a wire heading in a wire brush pressed against the copper disk, made a circuit with the galvanometer. When Faraday cranked the copper wheel through the magnetic field, the galvanometer registered a flow of induced electric current that continued so long as the disk was cranked. So electricity produced magnetism, and magnetism produced electricity. The two forces were indeed one powerful, invisible force: electromagnetism. That deep proof won Faraday the respect of the scientific world. It also cleared the way to generate electric charge steadily, in any volume, without the need for batteries. Faraday’s copper-disk generator was a simple magneto, a first example of a mechanism that would become common in automobiles and other machinery, a way to convert mechanical work into electricity.

Shopping List A breadboard (Jameco #20601, Bitsbox #CN329) with at least 30 rows. A standard 9 V battery to power the circuit. A 9 V battery clip (Jameco #11280, Bitsbox #BAT033) to connect the battery to the circuit. A standard LED (Jameco #34761, Bitsbox #OP003) A 330 Ω resistor (Jameco #661386, Bitsbox #CR25330R) for limiting the current to the LED. A polarized 1000 µF capacitor (Jameco #158298, Bitsbox #EC1KU25)

Shopping List A breadboard (Jameco #2212218, Bitsbox #CN204) with at least 60 rows. Breadboard jumper wires (Jameco #2237044, Bitsbox #CN236)—you’ll need around 35 for this project. Standard hookup wire works, too. A standard 9 V battery to power the circuit. A 9 V battery clip (Jameco #11280, Bitsbox #BAT033) to connect the battery. A 555 timer IC (Jameco #904085, Bitsbox #QU001) to create the timing. A 10 kΩ resistor (Jameco #691104, Bitsbox #CR2510K) to set the game speed. A 100 kΩ resistor (Jameco #691340, Bitsbox #CR25100K) to set the game speed. A 1 µF capacitor (Jameco #768183, Bitsbox #CC006) to set the game speed. A 4017 decade counter IC (Jameco #12749, Bitsbox #QU020) to control the LEDs. Two standard blue LEDs (Jameco #2193889, Bitsbox #OP033) Two standard red LEDs (Jameco #333973, Bitsbox #OP002) A standard green LED (Jameco #34761, Bitsbox #OP003) Ten 100 Ω resistors (Jameco #690620, Bitsbox #CR25100R) for limiting the current to the LEDs. A 4011 NAND-gate IC (Jameco #12634, Bitsbox #QU018) to create the SR latch for starting and stopping the game. Two 1 kΩ resistors (Jameco #690865, Bitsbox #CR251K) to act as pull-up resistors for the start/stop circuit. Two push buttons (Jameco #119011, Bitsbox #SW087), one for resetting the game and one for playing.

A Counter to Turn the LEDs On To control the LEDs, you’ll use a decade counter, which is an IC that counts input pulses. Every time the clock input on pin 14 goes from low to high, the counter increments by one. It counts from 0 to 9, and it has 10 outputs marked 0 to 9. For example, when the counter has counted three input pulses, output 3 (that is, pin 7) is high, and the other pins are low. If you connect an LED to output 3, then when the counter is at three, the LED will turn on. If you connect LEDs to several output pins, then as the counter increases, the LEDs turn on in order, according to their output pins. When the counter is at 9 and receives a 10th input pulse, it goes back to 0 and turns the output pins on in order again. But the counter counts pulses only if pin 13 is low. This means you can use pin 13 to tell the game when to start moving the light across the LEDs and when to stop the light. Each output has a resistor to reduce the current through the LED and make sure the LED doesn’t get destroyed. Because two output pins connect to each LED, the resistors keep the voltage to each LED high, even though one output will be low and one will be high. The resistors also ensure that two outputs aren’t connected directly together, which could damage the IC when one output is high and the other low.

Under certain circumstances semiconductors are also known to be good “rectifiers”; that is, they allow an electric current passing through them to move in only one direction. This property made them potentially useful in certain kinds of electronic circuits. Shockley believed there could be a way to get them to amplify a current as well. He intuited that one common semiconductor—copper oxide—was a good place to start.

It’s more than just an electrical conductor, it’s a superconductor. “You might think of it this way: the conductor is a road with lots of obstacles in it. The electrons carrying the charge are deflected from their path so the traffic is slowed up. But this plastic is like a wide speedway. The electrons can move in large loops and avoid all the obstacles. So they go around and around at high speed, and if the speedway is a circle, they will never stop.” “Never?” Danny gazed up at the Professor in wonder. “You mean it would be a kind of perpetual motion? But I thought that wasn’t possible.” “Nevertheless, that’s just what it would be.” Professor Bullfinch leaned forward to inspect the plastic. “Look here. The two ends of this coil are touching. It forms a closed ring. When you dropped the cable, it started a charge going through the coil. Now, my boy, a moving charge of electricity flowing around a circuit produces a magnetic field. What we have here is a very powerful ring magnet, so powerful that when I tried to touch it the magnetic field caught and held the metal of my wrist watch.” “A supermagnet,” said Danny. “That’s right. And it will go on being a magnet, with the current flowing on and on around the circle until I break the current. Like this.” Professor Bullfinch glanced about. He found a pair of heavy rubber gloves and put them on. He seized the coil and pulled its two ends apart. There was a flash and a snap. The Professor turned to Dr. Fenster. “As you can see, this means—” he was beginning.

Fuller and Pearson placed a thin layer of the first type of doped silicon (extra electrons) atop a layer of the second type (extra holes). The two Bell researchers attached the little assembly to a circuit—a loop of wire, in effect—and an ammeter, a device that measures electric currents. When they turned on a desk light, the ammeter showed the two-layer silicon suddenly generating an electric current. The same thing happened with sunlight. Fuller and Pearson realized that the photons were penetrating the top layer with enough force to knock electrons into the bottom layer, creating a flow of electrons that moved into the wire: a current. The two men had accidentally created a new type of solar panel.

There were natural electrical currents running through the surface of the Earth until electrical utilities short circuited them with electrical ground rods.

Conductors have tons of free electrons and they keep moving in random direction (due to thermal energy), and each of these small movements contribute to an Electric current. You might be thinking, if an electric current is produced this easily in a conductor, why do we need batteries and generators and power plants and stuff. Can’t we just hook up a small piece of copper wire to a bulb and be done with it. Unfortunately, that won’t work. That’s because the currents produced by each free electron are in random direction (in accordance with the direction of their motion) and when we consider the conductor as a whole, these currents cancel each other out and net current is zero.