A Word That Amazed

Still reading the A's in the dictionary, not going very fast either, and yesterday I read abamp which said: an abampere. That was it. No explanations or roots, no nothing other than that it was a noun. But the next word was abampere. Ahah! It said: A centimeter-gram-second (Okay, so which is it?) electromagnetic unit of current, equal to the current that produces two dynes per centimeter of length on each (each?) of two infinitely (infinite? as in sideways 8 infinite?) long straight parallel wires one centimeter apart. It is equal to 10 amperes. [AB- (absolute) + AMPERE]

Whoa! Now I'm not a total electronic idiot. I took Basic Electronics & Electricity (BE&E) along with a host of other electronics driven courses when I was in "A" school in the Navy. At one point they talked about holes moving and not electrons. It was an engineer's argument, not an electricians, and I didn't even have a clue as to how to interpret the, no doubt significant, differences between which item moved in order to create current. I'm wondering now if I missed out on a great joke. But the level of measuring and precision in this floors me. I have a very general understanding of what an electromagnetic field is. You wind a bunch of wire in a coil shape, turn on the juice, and voila, electromagnet. Make it strong enough, by putting the coil around a core of magnetizable metal, and you can pick up car engines and other heavy things. Wikipedia link here. I could be missing all kinds of things in that definition. Is a wire in a coil, which to me means curved, straight or not? Why declare them of infinite length if you are going to define the measurement in a specific length of it? I guess this is one of those cases where I know just enough to be amazed and not enough to have a real understanding of how this works and why it is used. If there are any engineers out there who want to educate me on this I'd be glad to read anything you care to share in a comment.

Now abampere has too many letters to be very useful in Scrabble, but not abamp. :-) Or ampere.

Progress on the apartment is continuing apace. I've gotten some furniture rearranged to increase comfort and traffic flow in the living area. Three loads of laundry done last night. Lots of old magazines and catalogs are now trash. I'm planning on boxing up books I've read and also the winter clothes. And I'm going to get rid of the old 2 sizes to large clothes in the closet. I hope to never get that large again and could really use the closet space.

On the Internet TV side, I've watched Wolverine: Origins and most of Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. I've also discovered ReGenesis and Mental. ReGenesis is 3 seasons old and like CSI only medical research instead of criminal. Kind of cool. Mental is brand new on Fox and only has 2 episodes out. Enjoy!