OP: Because You Can’t Find It Anywhere Else

Using an MS8264 digital multimeter, I have determined that airheads candy, removed from its wrapper and left flat, can be used as an electrically resistive material.  A 1-inch section of the candy was found to have a resistance of approximately 70 Megohms.  The resistance of the material as a function of length follows an approximately linear taper; two inches from the end, the resistance was found to be 135 megohms.  At three inches, the resistance was found to be approximately 180 megohms.  The net resistance, end to end, of the candy, exceeded the 200-megohm upper bound of the multimeter.  Consequently, by attaching movable electrical contacts, an airheads candy can be used as a variable resistor/potentiometer.

Use of high currents is probably inadvisable, as the candy may melt.  However, the little I recall from chemistry class seems to suggest that resistance would fall toward zero as the candy melts.  Consequently, the candy may be used as an NTC thermistor.

Further experimentation could not be carried out, because I was hungry.

More to follow.

So I’ve been on codeine for a couple days now. For those of you not in the know, it’s Project Pat’s drug of choice and one of the key ingredients in Sizurp, also known as “Purple Drank.”

A review will be forthcoming. Suffice it to say that the works of Paul Wall, especially his chopped and screwed remixes, make a lot more sense now.

Somewhere there’s a someone for everyone
Somewhere there’s a someone for me
Though I may be lonely now
I’ll see it through somehow
To someone’s heart I know I hold the key
–Dean Martin, “Somewhere There’s a Someone,” 1966

But was old Dean right in his assertion? The fact that he spoke in such certainties when mathematics and modern physics seem to tell us, in stereo, that the only certainty in the universe is the lack thereof is unnerving to me. His words beg the question: is there really a someone? Somewhere? For me?

Perhaps even in this very university? Continue reading ‘For the love of the Gaussian function: a lonely math major crunches the numbers’