Batteries, Alternators and Facebook Makes Me Foolish

For the past week or so we've been going over batteries and alternators. We all know how a battery works (in general): it's a case that has stored electricity. You hook it up to something and it'll provide electricity until it dies. Your car's battery doesn't die because your car's alternator feeds electricity back to it to keep it charged. Your battery's main goal in life is simply to start your car. After that, the alternator feeds the "hungry little bears" (as Mr. Shado would say) that make up all the components of your car.

One of the most interesting things I've learned in the past 10 weeks (interesting to me, that is--this may be basic knowledge to most of you) is that magnetism plays a huge role in the creation of electricity. I never realized this; I guess I never even thought about how electricity was created. If you move a wire over a magnetic field, current is created inside the wire. Current running through a wire creates a magnetic field over the wire. This is why a compass will change its direction when moved closer to a wire.

So you have a battery that needs help to maintain a charge, and you have an alternator that uses a little bit of the battery's charge to create a magnetic field that creates a whole lot of juice that feeds both the battery and the rest of the car components. Make sense? 3-5 amps of current going into the alternator can become 100 amps coming out of it.

Call me weird, but I think that's pretty cool.

Finally, The Mumbler has found me out. I blame it all on Facebook and The Mumbler's step-daughter. You see, he's shown me pictures of artwork his step-daughter has done that is quite impressive and pretty. I wanted to show it to my cell-mate at work because her daughter is also a really good artist and thought she would enjoy seeing it. He also asked me about some pictures I took from our Disney trip a few years ago and I offered to share those with him. So fast Facebook friends we became.

It didn't register to me that I post blog updates to Facebook and that I might want to continue my incognito journey for a while longer, until I got an email notification of a new comment on my post Dangers, New Players and I'm Found Out (Kinda):

My initial reaction was that it was a fluke. Someone's just playing a prank. But then I thought a little more about it and realized exactly how I outted myself. Stupid Facebook. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. My next thought, of course, was of damage control. Will he out me to everyone in the class? Should I backtrack and revise anything in the blog before I get crucified tonight? Not that I've said anything bad or evil or untrue--it's just that people don't like to find themselves the topic of conversations without their knowledge, and I can understand that.

The last place I want to find myself is having to defend something I've said online to these boys, but I'm not going to make any changes. I'm going to play it very cool tonight. Maybe it was just a prank. Maybe The Mumbler doesn't go on Facebook very often and my posts are always on the bottom of his update list. Yeah, right.

Having said that, if I could change anything, it would be the player names, especially The Amateur. The name I gave him doesn't really fit him, but I really wanted to write about him and wit wasn't something I was blessed with that day. I still don't know what I would call him. His true and proper nickname eludes me still.

But for tonight, please cross your fingers that all goes well. I'll report tomorrow on what happens (or doesn't happen). If you don't hear from me, you should probably worry. Those boys have lots of guns. And let's not forget about Jiffy's leaf-spring bow.