The Weird and Wonderful World of Wireless

Strange but true things; tales of what happens without cables and why

What is the coolest and most practical math equation?

Posted by Joel Young on November 5, 2009

I know that many of you will look at the topic of the blog and give a big “ick” or some other guttural sound that I don’t know how to spell. To you I offer my sympathy. Of course, for the rest of you that choose to read on, you may be wondering what in the world this topic has to do with a wireless blog. For you I confess that my mind has been rejuvenated by ...... Read More

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Did the world’s axial tilt just change?

Posted by Joel Young on September 30, 2009

As far as I know and after surveying the world’s top scientists, there is no evidence of any kind of recent shift of the earth’s axial tilt. Yet, I understand why people everywhere may be wondering about this. From my own recent experience, something in the world has recently changed. Being a person in my mid 40s, my professional career has lived through ...... Read More

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What is the best way to connect an iPod into my car’s audio system?

Posted by Joel Young on September 22, 2009

Okay, I admit it, I’m cheap. I don’t like overspending. I always like to try to do things myself or get by piecing some lower-cost, good-enough solution together. So I don’t drive a fancy new car with a dedicated connection for an iPod (or other portable music player). Most all new cars today have a nice little port for connecting a mu ...... Read More

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Why do we still have a traditional land line phone? In turns out that we don’t need one.

Posted by Joel Young on September 10, 2009

Have you priced traditional landline telephone service lately? I admit this is something that I haven’t really paid much attention to until recently. I say recently, because like many out there, I’ve been spending time trying to figure out how to save a few dollars. In my household of six (counting my eldest in college), we have six ce ...... Read More

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What happened to AT&T and the venerable Bell Laboratories?

Posted by Joel Young on August 27, 2009

I know some of you will look at this question and say - AT&T is still around, I keeping seeing ads for all sorts of AT&T stuff. Isn’t it the largest cellular carrier? Well the answer is of course yes, but I’m actually talking about the original AT&T, the one that invented telephony. The company who, with its research arm Bell Laboratories invented ...... Read More

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Why do we still have 800/888 numbers?

Posted by Joel Young on August 25, 2009

The toll free 800 number was born out of the long distance era. I call it the long distance era because that was where the “value” was in voice telecommunications. We have since moved beyond this era, but a remnant, the 800 number still remains. Recently I discovered that many of the younger generation aren’t familiar with the whole concept. For ...... Read More

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So all of Tesla’s work was cool, but how about a practical use of wireless power for say 10 to 20 feet?

Posted by Joel Young on July 28, 2009

Okay - well I acknowledge that, as cool as Tesla’s work was, it probably isn’t very practical in today’s world for all of the obvious reasons. Nonetheless, we can still learn a lot from this work as to how it relates to other wireless power solutions under development today. Unfortunately, while promising experimentally, wide availability of products ha ...... Read More

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So how can wireless power transmission work?

Posted by Joel Young on July 16, 2009

In the last blog I teased you by first stating that the traditional transverse electromagnetic wave method, i.e. how the sun works, doesn’t scale very well for more moderate systems on the earth and second, telling you that Nikola Tesla had figured out a better way. Unfortunately I didn’t give you any details. However, before we get into too many details, we need to understand ...... Read More

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With everything going wireless, what about wireless power transmission too?

Posted by Joel Young on July 8, 2009

This is probably one of my favorite and most complicated topics to cover. As most of us know, the wireless transmission of electric power using traditional electromagnetic transverse waves is not practical. Ignoring the effects of absorption and scattering, the power density of electromagnetic waves in free space spread out such that the power density decrease is inversely proportiona ...... Read More

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When I go to buy a light bulb, the packages seem to indicate light or color temperature in something called Kelvin. What is this and how can light have temperature?

Posted by Joel Young on June 30, 2009

For me this is a really fun topic because it connects a label on the packaging of common consumer product, i.e. light bulbs, to some of the cool properties of thermal radiation, worked on by such physics legends as Max Planck and Albert Einstein. In fact, these very properties helped disprove many of the commonly held notions surrounding classical physics, replacing them with the modern not ...... Read More

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I keep hearing about CFL and LED. What’s the difference between these types of light technology and the classic incandescent bulb? Which is the best?

Posted by Joel Young on June 23, 2009

Of course, in today’s world, we are all being encouraged to discard those ancient incandescent bulbs for the new compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) and light emitting diodes (LED), which for most of us seem really expensive to buy. I admit that I never really liked the traditional tube fluorescent lights, probably because first, I always have trouble getting the bulbs in - it seems that ...... Read More

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When I go the store to buy light bulbs, I keep running into all of these different measurements. What is the difference between lumens, lux, candelas and watts and why should I care?

Posted by Joel Young on June 16, 2009

Different from the rest of the electromagnetic vocabulary, the most important thing to remember about the terminology around visible light is that it is a complete human construct related to our own perceptions. In other words, the notion of visible light and associated color only exist because we have eyes, i.e. antennas that tune into these frequencies of the electromagne ...... Read More

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