Rude Goldberg

Daniel Miranian
Journal 3-3
2/2/08

I. I found out that that normal incandescent light bulbs only have an overall luminous efficiency of about 0.7%-5.1%. On the other compact fluorescent bulbs have an overall luminous efficiency of about 6.6%-15.2%. Finally, LEDs (light emitting diodes) have an overall luminous efficiency of approximately 13%-22%. I found out that a LED uses a semiconductor that gives off incoherent narrow spectrum light. LEDs usually have a small light source area that has extra optics added to the chip that shapes its radiation pattern. Finally, you can achieve different colors of light depending on the type of semiconductor used. You can even produce ultraviolet and infrared light with LEDs.

II. This past week in class we started planning for our Rude Goldberg lab. My group came up with some very interesting steps. It will be tricky to get some of the steps to actually work. However, I am excited to see our final presentation. We also worked on a lot of worksheets that were on energy. On Friday we took a quiz on the energy diagrams we have been learning about and Hook’s law. I thought this was a fairly easy quiz. Finally we watched some Japanese videos that had some very elaborate but bizarre Rude Goldberg machines. I thought it was interesting that they built machines like that just for a television show. However, it was very cool to watch and it gave our group some ideas for our machine.

III. For next week in class I would like to find out more about how wire gauge is determined and measured.