Design Matters
Good design is all about making something that just works, that does what people want it to do with no fuss and perhaps with a little bit of style. Think about a plain old hard cover book. You buy a book because you want to read it, to get at the information or the story inside. You don't have to turn it on, you don't need a password, you don't even need to read the instructions. To get at the information inside a book you simply start reading and the data flows. Look away and the flow stops. Look back at the page and it starts again. Now that is great design.
Old traditional land line phones worked the same way: You never actually turned them on. To use a traditional phone you simply lifted the handset and the phone turned itself on. You could tell from the dial tone. Again, simply. Again, a great design.
The iPhone doesn't turn itself on automatically, but it is still a great design. The wonderful thing about the iPhone is that it just wants to be that little portable computer that you have with you all the time. But the iPhone doesn't aspire to spreadsheets and complex documents: Instead it simply does the stupid little computing tasks that need to be done. So the iPhone helps you figure out where you are and where the nearest pizza place is. The iPhone is computing in the small, at it is superb at it.
So what is good design? It is doing one thing really well: Be the repository for a certain chunk of information, or the always there voice communications conduit or the little computer that you always have with yout.
Good design also means doing things with a minimum of fuss: Thus, even though your book may contain important information, books don't generally come with locks on them. A lock might keep prying, non-paying eyes out, but it would be a pain in the neck to the actual owner. In the same way, the old phones just worked, they were always there and they were always ready to deliver your voice. And the iPhone fits in your pocket.
The ironic thing about high tech devices like the iPhone is that if they are well designed, they actually make the world a more human place. Or at least they make it easier to find good pizza, which amounts to the same thing.
Our opening theme is Them Say Piano by the 3AM Association. Our closing theme was Since I've Been Loving Your by SComber.
Russ
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
AG22: We Trip The Light Fandango
Download Episode 22
This week we talk about light - there's more to it than you think.
So what does the heat that seems to try to cook you when you get in a hot car, the radio that you play as you drive and the X rays that your dentist uses to find that cavity all have in common with a beautiful sunset? The answer is that the glow from your car, the radio signals, the X rays and the light from the sunset are all electromagnetic radiation, one of the fundamental forces in the world. They are all just different flavors of the same thing. You can think of the different kinds of EM radiation as different notes on a piano keyboard. The radio waves are the really deep, low notes down on the left end of the piano keyboard. The heat coming off your car are slightly higher notes and the visible light, the stuff that we can see with our eyes are higher still. Up the the really high end, the sharpest notes of all are the X rays. The different pitches - technically frequency - not only change the way that we perceive the radiation, but also affects how much energy the radiation carries. This is why you don't need to fearful of standing in the glare of a light bulb or next to a radio transmitter but should be very careful around the much higher frequency X rays.
Electromagnetic radiation is all around us - fortunately mostly the safer, lower frequency stuff. In fact, everything that is at all warm, (where warm here means anything above the coldest that you could be, which is -273 C ) naturally radiates electromagnetic radiation. That hot car is radiating EM that we perceive as heat. Turn up the temperature a bit, say on an electric stove and you get 'red hot' - the EM radiation coming off the stove is high enough frequency we see it as a dull red glow. Red light is the lowest frequency light that we can see. The other colors are all of slightly different frequencies with yellow somewhere in the middle and violet having the shortest. We call the EM radiation whose frequency is slightly less than red 'infra-red' and the stuff above violet, 'ultra-violet'.
Since electromagnetic radiation is a sort of wave - think of it as like ripples on the surface of water - you can make it interfere with itself. Interference is something that waves do. Throw a stone into a still pond and you will make a set of ripples, little circular mini-waves. Throw two stones in and you will get two sets of ripples. When those two sets of ripples run into each other something very interesting happens: In places they reinforce each other while in other places they cancel each other out. So when two waves hit each other you tend to get an interference pattern, the waves are alternatively stronger (as the two waves reinforce each other) and weaker - as the waves cancel each other out. You can see that kind of interference by looking at the back of a CD or a DVD. The rainbow that you see coming off the back of a DVD is produced by the light that is reflected off of the tiny dots on the back of the DVD. All those dots reflect a bit of light which then goes out and interferes with the other bits coming off of other dots and we get the rainbow. In the same way, scientists bounce X rays off of the atoms inside of crystals - which causes X rays interference patterns - to try and figure out how those atoms are arranged.
Electromagnetic radiation: The world would be a darker place without it!
The opening theme music for this weeks episode is called Walk With Me by our good friend Jason Dale.
The closing music is Air On A G String, performed by the Gardner Chamber Orchestra with soloist Paula Robison
Russ & Chris
This week we talk about light - there's more to it than you think.
So what does the heat that seems to try to cook you when you get in a hot car, the radio that you play as you drive and the X rays that your dentist uses to find that cavity all have in common with a beautiful sunset? The answer is that the glow from your car, the radio signals, the X rays and the light from the sunset are all electromagnetic radiation, one of the fundamental forces in the world. They are all just different flavors of the same thing. You can think of the different kinds of EM radiation as different notes on a piano keyboard. The radio waves are the really deep, low notes down on the left end of the piano keyboard. The heat coming off your car are slightly higher notes and the visible light, the stuff that we can see with our eyes are higher still. Up the the really high end, the sharpest notes of all are the X rays. The different pitches - technically frequency - not only change the way that we perceive the radiation, but also affects how much energy the radiation carries. This is why you don't need to fearful of standing in the glare of a light bulb or next to a radio transmitter but should be very careful around the much higher frequency X rays.
Electromagnetic radiation is all around us - fortunately mostly the safer, lower frequency stuff. In fact, everything that is at all warm, (where warm here means anything above the coldest that you could be, which is -273 C ) naturally radiates electromagnetic radiation. That hot car is radiating EM that we perceive as heat. Turn up the temperature a bit, say on an electric stove and you get 'red hot' - the EM radiation coming off the stove is high enough frequency we see it as a dull red glow. Red light is the lowest frequency light that we can see. The other colors are all of slightly different frequencies with yellow somewhere in the middle and violet having the shortest. We call the EM radiation whose frequency is slightly less than red 'infra-red' and the stuff above violet, 'ultra-violet'.
Since electromagnetic radiation is a sort of wave - think of it as like ripples on the surface of water - you can make it interfere with itself. Interference is something that waves do. Throw a stone into a still pond and you will make a set of ripples, little circular mini-waves. Throw two stones in and you will get two sets of ripples. When those two sets of ripples run into each other something very interesting happens: In places they reinforce each other while in other places they cancel each other out. So when two waves hit each other you tend to get an interference pattern, the waves are alternatively stronger (as the two waves reinforce each other) and weaker - as the waves cancel each other out. You can see that kind of interference by looking at the back of a CD or a DVD. The rainbow that you see coming off the back of a DVD is produced by the light that is reflected off of the tiny dots on the back of the DVD. All those dots reflect a bit of light which then goes out and interferes with the other bits coming off of other dots and we get the rainbow. In the same way, scientists bounce X rays off of the atoms inside of crystals - which causes X rays interference patterns - to try and figure out how those atoms are arranged.
Electromagnetic radiation: The world would be a darker place without it!
The opening theme music for this weeks episode is called Walk With Me by our good friend Jason Dale.
The closing music is Air On A G String, performed by the Gardner Chamber Orchestra with soloist Paula Robison
Russ & Chris
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