An update on the City Council recall effort in Broomfield. A liberal notices Polis' ... "clever phrasing". Lastly, the physics behind how you car knows it's moving.
An update on the recall effort in Broomfield.
I posted a bit back about the recall effort in Broomfield. Enough votes have been gathered to get one city councilor on the ballot for a recall (the other who was also up to be recalled is going to face an election at the same time she would have had a recall on the ballot so the recall is moot).
I'm not a huge fan of recalls, but I wish these folks luck. Some pushback needs to be there, some check on what I would term progressive excesses needs to be evident. Otherwise, the entire Front Range is going to look like Denver and Boulder.
More in the article below.
https://www.broomfieldenterprise.com/2023/06/07/cohen-recall-petition-deemed-sufficient-following-protest-hearing/
Well, it was nice of you to notice.
Ms. Zorino and I do not see eye to eye on politics.
Something we do see eye to eye on?
Gov Polis' career-politician's savvy about wordplay and the fact that he has not really, in a meaningful sense, saved us money.
Now, if we could just get the press to take note.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/06/19/jared-polis-inflation-opinion-zornio/
***Related:
Oh, and while we're on the topic of Gov Polis and his word play, take a bite of the word salad in the below.
Yes, that's our Guv saying (right after signing a bill that limits local governments' coordinating or working with ICE on immigration) that Colorado is in fact NOT a "sanctuary state".
Faraday’s Law and ABS—How does your car know it’s moving?
This is the last one for a few days because I'll be away from the computer for a bit. I should be back soon.
In fact, when I come back and have had time to process things, expect a surprise or two for my usual Friday "No Politics" Posts.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share something fun. If your car has anti-lock brakes (ABS), you may have wondered ...
--Why that helps?
--How does your car know that your wheels are or are not spinning?
The first one is pretty simple. Think Newton's first law. You can only accelerate (speed up, slow down, or change your car's direction) if you can apply a force to your car.
ABS helps bring you to a stop sooner because if your wheels have locked and you're skidding, you lack the traction necessary for your car's tires to apply a net force to the road and help bring you to a stop. No net force, no slowing down (or at least smaller net force, longer time to slow down).
The second one is a little more complicated, but well within the realm of understanding. Back up a step.
The whole basis in physics behind generating electrical power is Faraday's law. Put simply, if you move a magnet around a conductor (or move a conductor around a magnet), you cause the charges in the conductor to more. That is, when a magnet and a conductor are in relative motion, you will generate an electrical current.
Somewhere on the hubs (not the wheels or tires, the hub or thing that the wheel attaches to) of your car sits a magnet or series of magnets. This can be done in a variety of ways, but a common way is to have a toothed wheel magnet that mounts onto the hub so that when the hub spins, the toothed wheel does too. See screenshot 1 for a look deep inside a hub. I circled the teeth in red.
Mounted so as to be close to but not hit by these teeth is an electrical sensor with a conductor in it. See screenshot 2 for a schematic drawing. The hub is shown with its magnetic Norths and Souths, and the sensor is mounted near the magnetic ring.
This sensor can pick up tiny variations in electrical current. As the magnetized hub spins past the sensor, that moving magnet causes electrical currents in the sensing probe and those currents are sent to the car's computer control system. A sample of what the computer might see in terms of a signal is shown in screenshot 3. You get a time varying current value as the teeth go past the sensor.
If the hub is not spinning, of course, there is no relative motion between magnet and sensor and so no current is generated. The signal would be a flat line that the computer understands that to mean that the wheel has locked up and is not spinning.
So, if the computer gets a signal that any of the wheels have locked, it will release that brake and allow the wheels to regain traction only to apply the brakes again. If the wheels lock again, the computer releases the brake and again allows the wheels to regain traction before trying to slow the car. And on and on.
This pulsing you feel in the pedal is the car releasing and applying the brakes as the wheels lock up and then release, lock and release. Allowing the wheels to get traction makes you better able to apply a net force and come to a stop faster.
If you're driving an older car like yours truly you can do the same. Just remember your driver's ed: when you skid, pump the brakes.
So that's it for a bit. I'll be back when I'm back.