The Power: Difference between revisions

<b>nb: if this reads like a script, that's because it was originally going to be a video in my [[DANKTECH]] series. maybe it still will, one day.</b>

ass-rocking quality. i [[Schwarzgerat_III|rebuilt my workstation]] recently, and it left me with a

that theme is: <b>power</b>. in the world of huey lewis and the news, love can be measured in watts, the SI unit of power. love applied over time would furthermore be work, and measured in joules. but i'm an engineer, so this evening we'll be quantifying the power of love, but mainly the love electrons feel towards cations.

==Intro==

was a 1995 Intel standard for PSUs, motherboards, and chassis (<i>chassis</i> is borrowed from

the french <i>châsse</i>, derived from the Latin <i>capsa</i>, meaning case or box, so

[[File:Xtkeyboard.jpg|right|thumb|IBM keyboards were chungi indeed]]

cloned. in fact, if you remember the ISA bus—the "Industry Standard

Architecture" that preceded the VESA Local Bus and PCI—was just a renaming of

have some AT naming legacy in your machine today—SATA is the serial version of

ATX is still the most common motherboard design for workstations, and other designs—mini-ATX, XL-ATX, SFX, etc.—are usually compatible with ATX in their common areas.

* 4-pin 18 AWG AMP 1-480424-0 / Molex 15-24-4048 + AMP 61314-1 contacts

* 4-pin 20 AWG AMP 171822-4 "Berg" connector for floppies

* 20-pin Molex Mini-fit Jr. motherboard connector

problems—Parkinson's Law, "work expands to fill the time available for

its completion." And indeed Gustafson's law indirectly formalizes this concept—Amdahl's Law says "the reduction in total time due to increased parallelism

[[Noctua]] release their NH-U12P, and one year later the legendary NH-D14. I

ordered one of the latter for my 2011 Sandy Bridge i7 2600K build, and it was

like a piece of alien technology. I'd never seen anything remotely like it. and now the kids are delidding their processors and boofing "liquid metal" and communicating exclusively through eyerolls and dick pics. you can't let the little fuckers generation gap you.

voltage, lest they die. Put 2V into your modern processor, and you'll kill

buck converter switching at N times the speed <b>without the increase in

switching losses that would be expected</b>. It also allows the heat

Joule heating: <b>P = I²R</b>.

wants. And thus in February 2000 ATXV12 was born, adding a 4-pin Molex Minifit

applicable to passive power testers like that i just showed, as well—it's not

the 240V NEMA L6-30R, where the L indicates locking.

two quick facts you might not know:

* the plug's ground pin (the one in the middle) is 1/8" longer than the power blades, or at least it ought be. this is so that it makes contact before they do, grounding it before it's live. grab a nearby cable and check it out if you don't believe me.

* secondly, you'll notice that in the majority of configurations, it's the receptacle that has the live wires behind it, for the obvious advantage that you'd otherwise have powered blades extruding out, ready to shock. one place this isn't true is the headers on your motherboard, but they're 5 or max 12V, so unless you're fellating them, you're more likely to stab yourself than even feel it (your dry skin is thousands or tens of thousands of ohms, quite impervious to 12V; your wet tongue is about 7 ohms. go lick a 9V battery and see).

so how do we test a wall outlet? bah, you've known since you were a child—we

* <b>if neutral-to-ground is large and hot-to-ground is small</b>, hot and neutral have been reversed. many loads, including most electric ones, aren't sensitive to AC polarity, but some appliances are. fix this if appropriate.

* <b>if hot-to-neutral is greater than hot-to-ground</b>, neutral and ground have been reversed. note that you generally have to have some load to see this, and the more load, the greater the difference. fix this, as a dirty ground can fuck you in a great many ways.

* <b>neutral-to-ground ought have some small voltage in the presence of load.</b> if you're measuring 0 volts while the outlet is loaded, your neutral is likely in contact with your ground. if you're measuring more than a few volts, the circuit is likely overloaded.

<youtube alignment="center">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpjMWN9CVm8</youtube>

with the computer—that would lead to heat and potentially slagging. i realized

anyway, that was the introduction. now let's get into the meat of this episode.

energy—in fact, it's just the amount of energy delivered in some unit time.

a watt-second, a coulomb-volt. an amount of energy, applied for some amount of

time. between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow, as [https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men mr. eliot said]. so

[[File:Bindingcurve.gif|600px|center|thumb|the curve of binding energy. to the left of iron/nickel, fusion is generally exothermic, with He, C, and O being particularly favorable. to the right, fission is generally exothermic, with ²³³U, ²³⁵U, and ²³⁹Pu being particularly dank candidates (but don't count out ²³⁷Np!).<br/>do you see a pattern in the fissile isotopes?]]

 

 

it'll behoove us to do a quick recapitulation of fundamental terminology. the money split is between bosons and fermions. bosons have integer quantum spin, fermions half-integer. another way of saying this is that a boson's total wave function is symmetric. another way of saying this is that in low-temperature, high-density regimes, bosons display Bose-Einstein statistics, and fermions Fermi-Dirac statistics (hence the names). once things get hot or sparse, quantum effects cease to dominate, and you can enjoy Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics for everyone. what really counts from our perspective is that bosons don't honor Pauli's Exclusion Principle. they can smush up into the same quantum states. not so for fermions. note that if you are a bound state of an even number of fermions, you're a boson. when we speak of bosons we usually mean the gauge bosons and the Higgs. gauge bosons are force carriers, in that we can model particle interactions as exchanges of virtual gauge bosons. the Higgs is spin 0, a scalar boson. all known gauge bosons are spin 1, vector bosons. the theorized graviton would be a spin 2 tensor boson. the composite bosons are responsible for the Bose-Einstein condensates you've probably heard of, and superfluidity and other low-temperature parlor tricks, but not particularly interesting beyond that.

 

the fundamental bosons are all their own antiparticles. photons and gravitons are massless, and lack self-interaction, and it's exactly these properties that lead to the infinite reach of gravity and electromagnetism. the weak nuclear force works with two charged W bosons and a neutral Z boson, all three of them massive. the Heisenberg uncertainty relation smearing out the bookkeeping of virtual particles is inversely proportional to the energy involved, and thus the weak interaction is effective only over short ranges, and it's slow even there. we might have to tolerate massive charged bosons popping into existence, but there's no need to let them live their unseemly off-shell lives on the couch. now you might be asking "but niiiiiiiiick, we know the top quark only decays via flavor-changing weak interactions, but its average lifetime is so shooooooooooooort niiiiiiick". well, the top quark approaches 175GeV. it doesn't <i>need</i> to borrow virtual bosons at the First Bank of Heisenberg. if a 172GeV top wants an 80GeV W boson, it whips and drives the little bastard. the next down the line is the bottom quark, at a mere 4GeV. not so much of a power bottom, as it turns out.

 

 

[[File:forcemap.png|left|thumb|no one likes neutrinos]]

 

 

our final pointlike, fundamental particles are of course the quarks, all of them fermions. quarks are the sluts of the standard model, interacting with all four forces, six flavors of hot mess. you don't get quarks by themselves at any reasonable state, but hadrons begin to boil into a quark-gluon soup around the Hagedorn temperature: 150MeV (1.7 terakelvin). hadrons (from the Greek ἁδρός for "stout") are bound collections of quarks: mesons (Greek μέσος for "middle") pair a quark with an antiquark having its anticolor, while baryons (Greek βαρύς for "heavy") combine three quarks of different color (color is the tripartite charge of the strong interaction). the unstable mesons are of little interest to us, and we'll not speak of them again outside of the pion-mediated residual nuclear force. baryons, on the other hand, are quite useful if you're a fan of atoms. the proton and neutron are the lightest and second-lightest, respectively, possible baryons, and thus the stablest. indeed, protons seem completely stable, supersymmetry be damned. so that's the end result of baryogenesis.

 

[[File:abundances.png|center|upright|frame|atomic abundances in the earth's upper crust. note logarithmic y-axis.]]

remember e=mc². for now, we'll be working in terms of energies and masses.

it's gravity and these nuclear potentials which give rise to everything that follows

of primeval leptons and bosons (i'm leaving out relativistic jets from accretion disks until you can do something with astrophysical jets).

939.565MeV/c². the proton boasts two up and one down quark, for a rest mass of

938.272MeV/c². the up is the lightest quark, and doesn't change without

know decays to a proton outside the nucleus, with a half-life of about 612s—the

experiments seem sound. no one yet knows the truth. <b>neutrons can't melt steel beams!</b>

ionized, stripped of electrons—just protons flying around by themselves,

so every source of power we might use—fossil fuels, geothermal,

yes even the power of love (love being a phenomenological measure arising from the neurological statistics of <i>homo sapiens</i>)—originates in these few nuclear, gravitational,

back at the more efficient—but less safe—240V). need power for our rgb

on in my CPU—what's it doing with 280W?

15.2 gigatransistors on TSMC's 7nm process and another eight on 12nm. nvidia's a100 has 54 billion.

go read Feynman's <i>Lectures on Computing</i>, right now, but it's basically computing

and that's Landauer's principle, and you really ought go read john archibald

wheeler's <i>"it from bit"</i>, which is fantastic.

still, that's only two orders of magnitude down—we're not at all

holds its electrons too tightly—its 4 valence electrons are all in the second

so to answer our original question, we need power—electric power, zee Watts

delivered as polarized direct current—to drive all those transistors. we need

[[File:Hassebinary.png|center|frame|Hasse diagram of binary Boolean functions]]

[[File:Cmosnand.png|right|thumb|NAND is a minimal CMOS gate]]

is exactly what we want for NAND—we're true whenever not (a and b).

representing one fundamental charge. an amp is about 6.24x10¹⁸ elementary charges.

this is why you don't tend to see consumer PSUs above 1600W—common breakers in

than any massive particle will or can move, as we know

gets deeper into classical emag than we really want—if you're interested,

the Corrective Labor Colonies of the Soviet Union's GULAG, the <i>Zwangsarbeiter</i>

of Organization Todt, the chattel slavery of my own Southern United States, the

and we're talking weak hydrogen bonds here: a few kilojoules per mole.

and (b) it's not reliably different from the external temperature—we don't

9 kcals, know that it's the Atwater system, it's digestibility-scaled (proteins

to nutrition is DRAINO-brand clogbuster. Drink it, put it in your eggs, or

just rub it on your gums: you can't go wrong.

dioxide, water, work, and heat—it was burned, just without combustion.

the corresponding yak volume would draw some very low-pH words from management.

fin de siècle london moved 7000 horsepower over 180 miles of pipes carrying water at

[[File:Greenhouse.png|left|thumb|it's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes, and study stratospheric aerosol geoengineering.]]

energies, the result will still be electricity. the United States in 2021 generated

volt-amps-reactive, and it's the reactive power—power returned in the load.

inductance and capacitance. by the way, you'll see doubleEs and CmpEs write

pronounce the word "jimaginary", but i was a cs/math major by god, and

Descartes called them "imaginaires" in 1637 (<i>"...quelquefois seulement imaginaires c'est-à-dire que l'on peut toujours en imaginer autant que j'ai dit en chaque équation, mais qu'il n'y a quelquefois aucune quantité qui corresponde à celle qu'on imagine."</i>), not "jimaginaires", and Euler called them i, and Ampère maybe ought have used a different symbol for

<i>intensité du courant</i> two-fucking-hundred years later. why wasn't it