Internet penny auctions (how they work)

I'm sure you've heard commercials for internet penny auctions like Beezid on television and on the radio.  "NEW MERCHANDISE, Cameras for $10, Cars sold for $300!"  Did you ever wonder how these sites can afford to sell these seemingly expensive items at such a cheap price?

The way these sites work is as follows.  An item goes on auction for an incredibly low price, for instance a digital camera will begin at $0.50.  Once the item gets put up for auction a timer begins to count down usually from somewhere around 20 seconds.  Each time a user bids on an item, the price goes up by $0.01 and the timer is reset.  If the timer runs out, the item is sold to the last person to bid on it.

The basic principal of any online auction site is to make it seem like you are getting an amazing deal.  In order to explain how these sites work we will walk through an example of an auction.  Our auction item will be a television which would typically cost $600.00 at any given electronics store.  We begin the bidding at $1.00.  You may think that this is an outrageous starting price for a television, 0.166% of the value we bought it for.  On top of that, each bid will only raise the price by $0.01.  If you do the math, it would take 59,000 bids for us to break even on the auction of the television.

So how do these sites make money?  The trick is, each time a user bids on an item they pay $1.00 to the site.  Let’s say there are 100 people bidding on our television, which seems like a reasonable number of people who would want to try to win a television for a cheap price.  If each person bids 10 times (1000 bids total) the television will be sold to the winner for $11.  The person who just won the television thinks he/she just cheated us out of $589.  The other 99 bidders are a little upset that they just lost $10, but think it would have been worth it had they won.  How do we come out of all of this?  We make $1,000 from the bids and $11 from the television, giving us a 168.5% return on our investment!

I hope you learned something from this post and you will be smart about your internet bidding!

The Peace Symbol

You've probably seen the peace symbol your whole life and associate with anti-war protesters and hippies.  Did you ever wonder where the symbol came from?  Compared to a lot of widely recognized symbols, the peace symbol is fairly young.  The symbol was designed by Gerald Holtom in 1958 for the British nuclear disarmament movement.  The symbol is actualy derived from the letters N (nuclear) and D (disarmament) in the semaphore flag system.

N

D

The symbol was made specifically for a march London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England in April 1958, which was supported by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).  Afterwards, the symbol became the badge of the CND and later became the symbol of the anti-war movement.  The symbol is un-patented and is used for a wide range of anti-war and peace related causes. In order to spread peace over the internet, the symbol made its way to Unicode and is represented by U+262E ☮.  

I hope this was an enlightening post and you now have a little more background knowledge about the peace symbol.  Even though it is not very important to know the origin of this symbol to understand its meaning, it interesting to know the origins of an internationally recognized symbol.

How to find an extrasolar planet

An extrasolar planet is a planet that revolves around a star other than our sun.  Because scientists have not found life on any planet yet in our solar system they began to look for other planets in other solar systems in our galaxy.  The problem with finding planets outside of our galaxy is (a) that they are very small compared to stars and (b) planets do not emit their own light, they only block and reflect light from other stars so general when looking through a telescope they are out-shined by the star they revolve around.  Astronomers are using a few different techniques to find extrasolar planets.  In order to understand these techniques you first must understand a few basic concepts.

Some matter in the universe emits or reflect light.  It may be visible and it may not, but all matter that we currently know about in the universe today react with light, all other matter we call dark matter.  For now, we will only be concerned with matter other than dark matter.  When an object is moving away from us or towards us, the light that is coming off of it is redshifted meaning that if the object is moving away the wavelengths will be longer and shifted more towards red  and if it is moving towards us then the wavelengths will be shorter and shifted more away from red.

star "wobble"

Another concept that astronomers use is a variation of a concept that most people learn as very young children.  Most people learn that the planets in a solar system revolve around their star, however this is not completely true.  In fact the planets in a solar system actually revolve around the center of mass of the entire solar system.  In addition, the central star of a solar system also revolves around the central mass of the solar system.  This was difficult to discover because the sun is very close to the center of mass of the solar system (about 1 of its own diameters away).  The sun will rotate around the central point at the same rate that the next largest mass, which in our solar system is Jupiter.  Jupiter is about 1/1000 the mass of the sun which means that the sun's orbital radius will be about 1/1000 that of Jupiter's.  A star will only revolve around the center of mass of its solar system if it has other masses orbiting it, when a star revolves it is called a "wobble".

Because the central star of a solar system is rotating about the center of mass of the system and all systems are moving away from us, this means that at some points in time the star will be moving away from us at a faster rate than other times.  Thus the light coming from the star will be redshifted more during half of its orbit and less during the other half.  The speed that a typical star wobbles is only about 50mph, however the typical star is also moving away from us at a speed of a few hundred thousand mph.  Because such a small difference in speed needs to be detected, scientists had to develop new methods of detecting differences in redshift.  This is the key to finding extrasolar planets and is one method used by astronomers.

First Post

This is the first post and I am testing how this will work.  This will be an awesome blog and you should send me ideas of things that I should write about.  I am pretty smart and I can learn a lot of stuff and I will write about it.  Trevor is laughing at me now, but I don't care because he doesn't have a blog and therefore nobody will read his blog!  So if you want to read something REALLY interesting then you should read this.