I don't get this, cause I'm stupid, but maybe someone will find this funny.

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[–] 49 points 3 weeks ago* (11 children)

That is pretty good. Current is roughly the flow rate of electricity through a material and is measured in Amperes. Resistance measured in Ohms is what restricts current from passing through a material. Voltage is the measure of the "pressure" that pushes the electricity through a material.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

    I still prefer the water metaphor. I don't want to imagine a hot girl dancing around my circuit undergoing various levels of BDSM-level bondage, whilst being bullied by the spiciest girl on the board

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  • [–] 22 points 3 weeks ago* (3 children)
  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago*

    Almost all electric heaters work by having enough ohms in their coils to turn the standard american 120 v,15amp circuit 100% into heat.

    By the above analogy, electric heaters are basically perfectly efficent bondage dungeons staffed by endless Ohm baddies.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

    I remember hearing the water analogy is technically incorrect in a way that ultimately makes it bad to use for intuition but can't remember why.

    This seems to demonstrate the same idea so now I wonder if I'm thinking of something else 🤔

    Edit: actually it might have had something to do with protons and physics nerds

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy#Limits_to_the_analogy

    Charge: Unlike water, movable charge carriers can be positive or negative, and conductors can exhibit an overall positive or negative net charge. The mobile carriers in electric currents are usually electrons, but sometimes they are charged positively, such as the positive ions in an electrolyte, the H+ ions in proton conductors or holes in p-type semiconductors and some (very rare) conductors.

    I think this is the main one where it breaks down for me

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago*

    I had the water thing explained to me so many times and I could never get it intuitively. I'm not sure why. These ladies are just the water analogy again.

    What finally worked for me was someone describing it to me like a bike chain of electrons. Maybe because I'm too dense to conceptualize a really tiny liquid inside a solid. But once it was described like amps are how many links go by, ohms makes it harder to move, and volts push the chain and it's a CIRCLE, and they are always touching each other. I was set.

    Maybe that's what you remember, water doesn't intuitively link to the concept of a circuit or the chain of electrons.

    There's still the possibility I didn't understand this analogy either, but at least I feel more confident.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago

    It's a reasonably ok metaphor for talking about power transfer but not information transfer. Analytical solutions for charge and fluid flow reduce to very similar differential equations. However for information flow, the models don't actually require charge to be exchanged, only that we can measure the fields which result from moving charge around. This means the boundary conditions for information transfer are established by quantum effects in the receiver. Literally the Brownian motion of doped semiconductor material expressed in terms of thermal entropy. That establishes the floor for how many individual atoms must do something coherently for it to be statistically separable from what atoms do without an information stimulus.

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