Monday, April 27, 2009

Oh How I Love You, Red, Green, and Blue

Here is a picture of Erika and me in Times Square in NEW YORK during spring break. Erika and I stayed with Erika's cousin for about a week, and I would have been lost without both of 'em. However, in Times Square it's kind of hard to get lost if you pay attention to the huMONGOUS, brilliantly lit signs and billboards. I chose this picture because, well one, Erika and I just look so cute with our umbrellas and boots, and more relevantly, two, because of the lights! I'm not exactly sure if these signs and billboards are made out of LEDs or not, but I do know that when the ball dropped in Times Square last year they used LEDs which are much more efficient than regular incandescent light bulbs. Although I don't know if these are LEDs behind us in the picture, I would surmise that the colors are created like those on a computer screen. The pink background behind "OH BOY" would be made with the three primary colors of light: red, green, and blue. On the computer screen, they are arranged exactly like that, "red, green, and blue," but in tiny blocks which, at each frequency of the lights creates a unique color. Each light color (red, green, blue) has 255 frequencies, which can blend to make more than 16 million unique colors that our eyes perceive. The pink would be a high frequency of red, maybe almost the maximum 255, a relatively low frequency of green, less than 100, and a surprisingly high frequency of blue, around 200. It is truly amazing how our technological world is colored by red, green, and blue, all because of the way we, as humans, perceive light.

Monday, April 6, 2009

"We Represent the Lollipop League"

Cutting the balloons off of their ribbons.
Cutting slits to make inhalation faster.

End products of our music videos.



This weekend we went to Nicole's baby shower where there were super fun games, good food, and of course, balloons decorating the place. So, of course, as teenagers, Elysia, Erika, Laurie, and I sucked up some helium and made our voices squeaky. Up until this past week I wouldn't have thought anything of it, other than pure fun, but now, after a week of learning about sound, I realized that it's physics! We get such squeaky, high pitched voices because the air around our vocal cords is changed by the helium gas which is lighter than our usual oxygen/nitrogen blend that we use when we talk/sing. The lighter helium gas causes the natural resonance of our vocal tract to change, creating a faster vibration, which results in a higher pitch than normal. Too much inhalation of helium can be dangerous, i.e. making breathing hard, but a little bit once in a while is (hopefully) innocuous. In these brief moments where we were under the influence of helium, we managed to make a few music videos, the one above was the best one, I wonder if that was really how they got the Lollipop League to sound like that...?