This week’s class revolved around electricity, and how we put and biological forms have put it to work. Covering the three greats of electricity: Volta, Ampere, and Ohm, we discussed the history of the field and how electricity came to be understood.

We also discussed the American icon: Benjamin Franklin and what he did with a kite and a key. Interestingly enough, Franklin had his son take the kite into the storm.

We discussed electronic complexity, and how pathways of circuits, and the way electricity flows creates a dynamic system. This electricity transport information and stores it in many useful ways to us through technology, and living organism through the nervous system.

Our brains use circuits and information theory in many ways that we have yet to understand. More often used neural connection grow easier to use, and less often used neural connections decay, and take a while to be called into action. Through complex arrays of connections our brains turn electrical-chemical signals and turn them into the sights, sounds, and emotions we expirence on a daily basis.

The final part of the discussion was on information theory, and how computers get information’s with electrons. We found that electrons acting as yes and no type answers to questions can specify information rather quickly. This can be demonstrated by the game 20 questions, thinking of a binary “1” as a yes, and a “0” as a no.

We further discussed this by going into how our own language breaks down to simple information bits. With our words being the simplest, and sentences, paragraphs, and so on becoming more and more complex strings of information.

Our experiment was designing circuits in different ways to accomplish different goals. By rearranging circuits, the students were able to see the differences in information flow that incurred changing the output.