Michael’s Blog

Merry Christmas, or if you actually care about political correctness, find something better to do with your life…
I spent Christmas with relatives and I got 6 pencils, an eraser, a mini tool kit thing (which is kinda cool), and 3 games!

• Battlefield 2 - Complete collection
• Lego Starwars: The video game
• Bioshock - Collectors edition thingy

I also got lots of money, which is what I actually wanted! Good old Santa’s Little Elves making counterfeit notes and giving them away for free…
I also got more capacitors for the coilgun, they are so big I need to plug in my charging circut into mains power to charge ‘em!

It now 450 joules!

E = Energy in Joules
V = Voltage (the means square it)
C = Capacitance in Farads

If you have no idea what a joule is, it is the work done, or energy expended, by a force of one newton moving an object one meter along the direction of the force. It’s also the work done to produce power of one watt continuously for one second; a watt second.

If you still don’t know what it is, the power of my coilgun is equal to:

• 2808.6778633905 ×10¹⁸ eV (electronvolts)
• 107.4806534826 cal (calorie) (small calories, lower case c)
• 1075.5 ×10⁻⁴ kilocalorie, Calories (food energy, upper case C)
• 4265.1770414085 ×10⁻⁴ BTU (British thermal unit)
• 331.90296717465 ft·lb_f (foot-pound force)
• 10665 ft·pdl (foot poundals)
• 1250.01 ×10⁻⁷ kilowatt-hour
• 1250.01 ×10⁻⁴ watt-hour
• 4441.14 ×10⁻³ litre-atmosphere

No, I did not spend much time calculating that, it was all on the wiki page, I just copied it here for reference…

And Yes, that is a lot of power…

1 joule, as in a single joule in everyday life is approximately:

• the energy required to lift a common apple (102 g) one meter against Earth’s gravity.
• the amount of energy, as heat, that a quiet person produces every hundredth of a second.
• the energy required to heat one gram of dry, cool air by 1 degree Celsius.
• one hundredth of the energy a person can get by drinking a single 5 mm diameter droplet of beer.
• the amount of energy released if a single textbook is dropped.

So theoretically, I could heat the air to 475 Celsius by just discharging the capacitors… or lift an apple 450 meters into the air… or lift 450 apples 1 meter into the air…
Bahahahahah