What did you learn in school today?

[cryptogirl]

Today, I divided my time between the day job- proofreading some learning material* and ordering some odds and ends from Farnell/RS- and the would-like-it-to-be-day-job, writing sentences like 'I wanted to explore themes of alienation, exile and belonging while subverting mythical tropes'.**

After one of my practical examples didn't work, I had to do some research into the ohm-age of resistors- and, indeed, how they work, Ohm's Law and all that. You see, I didn't do much physics at school- Standard Grade Chemistry is all I have. I considered asking for help...and then I stopped, because I remembered the keyboard warriors would pile on to express their disbelief at my ignorance, or to have side-debates about what resistor I needed. (270 Ohm...I worked it out, thank you very much.)

I just wonder if anything actually filters back to the people who think they're being helpful about how, er, unhelpful they can be. I guess I could direct them at Pete's more articulate post about this sort of thing. I think from now on, I'm going to say how much I've learned despite the Internet. In the past few days, then, I've learned:

- Different coloured LEDs have different voltages and it's probably best just to use red ones in my examples because Numbers.

- I actually remembered V = IR and some quadratic equation stuff through being forced to test Mathematica. *shudder* I did get to do a maths Batman, though. :D

- What 'drop' means in terms of LEDs. Disappointingly, nothing to do with bass drop.

I also learned:

- Why players wear the colours of kits they do in the World Cup. (Because FIFA have many, MANY rules on this.)

- The different genres of national anthem. Latin American epics are the best <3

- That, despite many wasted column inches and insufferable bellends of presenters,*** life is still hard in the rainforest.

- Brazilians, like Peruvians, like putting chilli and lime on everything. This is not a complaint <3







* It's my day job to be pedantic! Like, total irony-o-rama, dudes!

** Yes, it's for a query letter. A little bit of sick still came up. Shameless whoring of life's work is hard :(

*** It's nice that the BBC have loads of documentaries on South America; it's something I'm kind of interested in at the moment. However, I couldn't watch this programme without hearing the Gap Yah guy going to Per-ah and chundering everywah. Ah well. It's still worth a watch; it should be on iPlayer.


Right, back to the sportball...

Comments

[pfy.livejournal.com]

In the spirit of hopefully-the-right-kind-of-helpfulness, have you found allaboutcircuits.com? It's become my go-to site when I need to look up how some electronic widget works.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I have not! That is most helpful. *adds to bookmarks*