the opposite of laundry?

I am officially the proud owner of a 5 by 5 Rubik's cube. That is to say, the frustrated and confused owner of a 5 by 5 Rubik's cube. In other and slightly more interesting news: Credit cards, Student ID's and anything else with one of those black strips on the back of it work because of Magnetic Flux! Flux is the amount of something passing through an area. the Magnetic Flux is the amount of magnetic field lines passing through an area. aka Flux = B * A * cos(theta). Now most often its the CHANGE in this flux that's important. In other words how much stuff goes through the area in a particular amount of time. and this! is what makes your credit card work , (and thereby sink you into debt with the rest of America ). That black strip on the back of your credit card (or Disney Pass !) is Magnetic. Therefore when you swipe it the flux changes dramatically which induces a current! (more on this in another post) and the machine responds by giving you your candy (assuming its a vending machine). This is also why you have to do it fast, because otherwise the change in flux per time will be a lot less and the current induced won't be big enough to make the machine work.

Interestingly enough, this same basic method can be used to ensure that the light at the intersection changes when you pull up. Cars have ferrofluids in their suspension (?, I'm not completely sure where the ferrofluids are)...

so actually, after digging around on Google i couldn't find any support for this claim other than Dr. Martin's verbalization in class. what i did discover is that Ferrari uses ferrofluids in some of their cars' suspensions' and who can argue with Ferrari? (answer: a proud owner of a Lamborghini)

case in point...






But! since we're already talking about ferrofluids, lets look at something almost as sexy...



so this is a Ferrofluid. Its actually surprisingly easy to make, i had the opportunity to do so this past semester in my Nanotechnology Lab and we each manged to make it spike though we didn't have quite as cool towers as seen in this video. Its basically a liquid that when introduced to a magnetic field becomes polarised and ends up spiking. This particular one moves when the music starts and a stronger magnetic field is created. The structure that it moves on is simply an iron core and one electromagnet.

more information (and my source) at:
http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/04/19/ferrofluid-morpho-towers-two-standing-spirals/

the lambo pic was straight off of Google's image search.


il y a deux assez décent "cela est qu'elle a dit" blagues dans le premier paragraphe p.s.