ELECTRONICS, PART TWO

Electronics is electricity mashed through various components. The simplest electrical circuit is to put a wire put across the terminals of a battery. You will find out two things in a hurry:
(1) The wire gets hot, red hot maybe. It might even burn through if it is a small diameter (gauge). (2)The battery very soon goes dead. A direct short across a battery discharges its stored charge very soon.

That was a demonstration of current flow. The rush of electrons through the (small) resistance of the wire generated heat. So you had voltage, current, and resistance all in play. This is Ohms Law, E=IR. Voltage (volts) equals current (amperes) times resistance (ohms). So if you have 1.5 volts DC, and a wire with, say, a tenth of an ohm of resistance, 0.1Ω, you are drawing 15 amps. That's a lot through a small wire.

I find electricity to be boring (although you will not think so if you get zapped by it). I will not beat you over the head with it anymore. Just remember that without electricity, the magic smartphones and computers we love could not exist.

ANALOG & DIGITAL
Let's discuss some aspects of digital information versus analog information. Here is the primary difference: Analog is constantly varying content. It is "real life" since all natural sounds and physical phenomena are analog: when a tree falls in the forest, the waves it generates in the air, whether they make a sound or not, are analog. They vary in amplitude and frequency to exactly reproduce the sound a tree makes as it crashes its way through the underbrush and smashes into the ground.

Digital is always man-created. Remember, it may take a village to create a child but it takes electronics to create digital. There are no naturally occurring digital phenomena as far as I know. But I do not know everything; There may some bug that generates an irritating digital rasp.  Digital electronics encompass the related areas of binary logic and math. That is what is important to us. Analog is dead, except as it relates to our senses.

Digital is ones and zeroes, on and off, high and low, open and closed, two-state logic. It requires some dipping into numbering systems. Don't worry, it will not hurt ...