One Point Twenty-One...

I'll admit, I can be kind of a geek.  Or a nerd.  Or whatever.  There are a few things in particular I'm kind of geeky about, but two that really stand out are music and electronics.

So this blog may contain some of both, though mostly I'm going to be documenting some of the various projects I'll be doing involving fabricating my own parts and building or modifying electronic circuits and devices.  I will probably cover a pretty broad range of things, as a lot of different kinds of projects appeal to me.

The name of the blog was obviously inspired by the Back to the Future movies...  I mean, what greater modder of the twentieth century is there than Doctor Emmet Brown?  Dude hacked a DeLorean in to a time machine.  So for the heck of it, I'm going to blather on briefly about just how much power exactly one point twenty-one gigawatts actually is.  (This might be indicative of the kind of blog posts I may indulge in occasionally)

Power expenditure or consumption is measured in watts.  We hear about "volts" and "amps," but watts are a measurement based on both... basically, volts times amps equals watts.

Yeah, this guy.

So what is a watt, in practical terms?  Well, a 60-watt light bulb takes about 60 of them to produce light.  A 37 inch flat panel LCD TV requires about 120 while its on, and so on and so forth.

Next you need to understand the gradiations used in measurement of electrical concepts.  A watt is one watt.  A kilowatt is a thousand watts.  A megawatt is a million watts.  So every time we step up a gradiation, we're increasing by multiples of a thousand.  That means a gigawatt is - that's right - one BILLION watts.

So, if it takes 1.21 gigawatts of electrical energy to power the flux capacitor for a single time jump... that's the same amount of power required to run ten million televisions!  That's assuming all the TVs are that size, some might be larger, some might be smaller, but its a darn good guess.  I'm willing to bet if time travel is possible, it requires a whole lot more power than that, though.  Ten million is a whole lot of televisions, but its still not that significant in a more time-space bending sort of sense.

I'll mention also that creating unique, custom things of all sorts is something I do well and I do accept comission work on occasion.  ;-)

"Yeah Doc, but why a DeLorean?"

So, stay tuned in and I'll share of my hare-brained ideas, modifications, creations and general electronic tomfoolery with you.  Hang on, its going to be a geeky ride.