(if I never get back)

[melannen]

Tonight we went to see the local AA baseball team play!

My family is loyal to the minor leagues, because we maintain that they're far more interesting to watch than the major leagues.

For example, in your average major league game, you're not too likely to see any of the following (much less all of them):

1. A run on four walks in a row
2. The entire audience on their feet cheering whenever the pitcher managed to throw a strike
3. 2 runs on a single fielding error
4. A ten-year-old as the main announcer
5. A bat, not just breaking but splintering, so hard that half of it ended up in the the outfield
6. A grounder down the first-base line being fumbled by the first baseman and bouncing foul, giving up a triple and a run
7. A live high school marching band and step squad
8. Three separate innings ending with bases loaded, full count, and two outs
9. More pitchers than innings
10. A foul into the stands, which landed so far away from where anyone was sitting that the 'crowd' had to goad the nearest person into going down and fishing it out from under the bleachers. (Okay, you might see that one at an O's game, but only in a particularly bad year.)
11. Little leaguers shadowing the pros on the field
12. Third base stolen on a ball. Twice.
13. A runner taking three bases - including home - due to the catcher repeatedly dropping the ball.
14. A live breakdancing contest between four twelve-year-olds to the tune of "Cotton-Eye Joe"

//this section of the post brought to you by all the cricket discussion I have been subjected to by Andy Zaltzmann on the Bugle. (If any non-Americans would like an explanation for any of the above, you are welcome to ask... except the break-dancing, I have no explanation for that.)

We also went to the National Electronics Museum, which was a lot more fun than I expected it to be, even if I'm still not sure I understand electrical potential. (It's possible I do understand it and it's just a very mushy concept. It may be time to pull out Physics for Poets again.) It's one of those old-fashioned museums that mostly an excuse for displaying an excellent collection of Stuff: there's everything from telegraph keys to an Enigma machine to a chronological display of vacuum tubes to an early microwave oven to a WWII communications truck, plus a lot of space program and aviation stuff (TRANSIT satellites? Look even more like UFOs in real life.) No Tesla coil though. It made me really want to write some good meaty scientifiction, while at the same time pointing up just how difficult it is for SF writers to keep up with current tech, much less predict the future. (Also, infrared mirrors=awesome.)

Comments

[twtd]

Your minor league baseball game sounds so much more fun than any minor league baseball game that I have ever been to. I think I might like baseball better if I went to your games.

[melannen]

Sometimes they are less interesting than that, but you're still much more likely to have things like that happen than at a major league game. Of course I've only been to the Orioles' farm teams; maybe they reflect the general incompetence of the team they feed? :D

[sara]

See, that's the right way to play the game. It's a grand game, but these big-money people take it too seriously. ;>

[melannen]

Exactly! I mean, I can admire the sheer athletic prowess of the greats, but I don't particularly want to watch strikeout after strikeout, occasionally livened by a pop fly, or if I'm really lucky, a line drive. I want so much unexpected stuff to be happening that I can't knit for dropping stitches. ;)

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Well, I keep up with science news by reading it online, and occasionally in magazines when I can afford those. NASA has about a dozen feeds over on Facebook and I'm subbed to most of those. I get plenty of poetry inspiration from science. *ponder* Plus stuff that friends show me, including prompts in fishbowls. I've had people link to articles and point out a possible future development or SF twist. It's fun.

Re: Thoughts

[melannen]

Oh, keeping up with science is fun, particularly from an SF perspective! But there's just so much going on that if you only follow what actually hits the news you only get the tip of the iceberg, and it seems like half the time you're missing the really useful stuff. ...as this museum showed me out, there's basic technologies that were developed in WWII that half the SF writers I read haven't caught up with yet. (Meanwhile there's stuff that recent SF writers have presented as futuristic space technology, and most of their readers bought it, that was based on pre-war tech... I'm not even going to start in on steampunk, which lately is usually about two decades behind the time it's supposed to be upgrading in terms of the tech that was actually out there.)

[adalger]

Electric potential is like real estate. A place with a higher potential is a more desirable place to electrons. A battery (or generator) is a place that welcomes electrons that aren't there, but makes the ones that are there want to leave. (Think of it as the flowery ads for those scummy apartments underneath the el.)

[melannen]

Yeah, I get that much, but-- why? What are the electrons doing in the place that has the potential? What is so special about this that makes it a basic physical concept? Why is it so much more complicated than gravitational potential energy? Do I really have to remember how to do curls and line integrals...?

[adalger]

Electromotive force is ... yeah, a bit involved, I guess. I think you can grasp it conceptually without any math, but my opinion may be suspect, because math has always come so easily to me that there may be advanced concepts that I *still* don't really regard as math.

That said, what makes the electrons want to move falls into three basic categories: electrostatic repulsion, electronegativity, and magnetism. (Overcrowding, LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION, and forced resettlement.)

Sometimes emf (aka voltage or potential) is generated because a lot of electrons are pushed into a place where there aren't enough atoms for them to all live in. If provided a convenient path where there are homes (or even just less overcrowding), excess electrons will tend to take that path. (Capacitors work like this.)

Sometimes emf is generated by chemical properties. If the flow of electrons can, by electrochemical reactions, cause a net decrease in the chemical potential energy in disparate substances, the electrons will be motivated to take that path. (Batteries work like this.)

Sometimes emf is generated by a conductor with loosely bound electrons and a magnetic field moving in relation to each other. Because of the rather close relationship between electricity and magnetism, electric fields and magnetic fields interact with each other in such a way that when a field of one kind is moving, it creates a field of the other kind. This causes things that already have their own static field of the other kind to tend to move. (Generators work like this. And motors, which are really just generators operated backwards.)

Caveat, of course, is that this is all top-of-my-head from when I used to do this, some 20 years ago. I'm not all that confident my explanation of batteries makes that much sense. ;) But if you like, I can take the time to reacquaint myself with the material and spend some time writing better (or at least different) answers.

[seekingferret]

Also, gravitational potential energy is something which, when we understand quantum gravity, will probably prompt the same questions from you. It's a fictive quantity with only indirect physical meaning that we use because the math works out. One hopes that when we understand gravity better we'll laugh at how ridiculous our models of gravity were.

"Why is it so much more complicated than gravitational potential energy?" is the million dollar question, at least in forms like "Why is the electromagnetic force attractive/repulsive and the gravitic force (apparently) only attractive?" If you knew the answer, you'd be in line for a Nobel Prize in physics and a million bucks.

[seekingferret]

Electric potential is a mushy concept. It's a historical artifact rather than a fundamental value. So much of electrical analysis is historical artifact, because so much knowledge about electricity was developed without an understanding of what electricity is and how it works.

There are things that I appreciate about minor league baseball, with cheap seats with great views being top of the list, but I don't find the same charm you seem to in the mental mistakes the players make. Double A is as low as I'm willing to go (and in my experience AA ball is a lot higher quality than what you suggest you saw). That sounds more like my experience watching rookie league play.

[melannen]

Re: potential: oh, good, that actually makes sense to me. (Now the question is: why is so much of electrical science still based on that?)

I think the quality of AA depends considerably on how good the teams above are - this being an Orioles farm team, lately any halfway decent player has gotten pulled up the minute they show a single gleam of competence. One of the 2011 O's starting pitchers was on the AA team last year. (Also this was an unusually excitement-filled game: generally three or four fascinating mistakes happen, not more errors than hits... I think the lighting was particularly bad, among other things it was clear the first-basemen couldn't see the field half the time.)

[seekingferret]

Because most concepts in electricity are mostly used by engineers, not by physicists or mathematicians. And we engineers use math because it works, not because it makes sense. Electric potential was developed because it was useful for describing what was observed, not because it had any kind of fundamental physical reality.

[adalger]

"And we engineers use math because it works, not because it makes sense."

Cosigned. ;) (Not an engineer, but learned all my electricity & electronics from the standpoint of understanding the engineering, rather than undestanding the science.)

[sarah]

Sounds like an excellent day!

The other (possibly good, possibly awkward) thing I've noticed at minor league games is that the players are often close enough to hear you when you heckle.

[melannen]

Yes, minor league games seem to be one of the few places in modern life where the ancient art of the heckle still has its proper place. (I suspect that most of players realize that by the time the audience gets bored enough to really heckle, they don't actually care about the outcome of the game any more.)