Australian Rules Kettle.

Although I live in Montreal, I use an Australian kettle. While visiting that country many years ago I fell in love with the fact that they have 240V (I gather its recently been reduced to 230V, but most Aussie equipment will still accept 240) electrical outlets. This means a kettle boils a pot of water in a tiny fraction of the time it usually takes here with our 120V outlets.

As you probably know, in North America, large industrial appliances (stoves, dryers) run off of 240V, so there is a ready supply of the right voltage, if you can handle the problem of A) already having something using the plug and B) mismatching plug types.

My Dad solved both these problems for me ages ago by wiring a standard Australian wall outlet onto the side of my stove (right near the existing North American outlet) and I've been happily boiling water in a fraction of the usual time, ever since.

Well, my Aussie kettle has been on its last legs for some time, and today the decision was made to retire it, as its lid was dropped and the handle came off.

Now somewhere in this house we have a brand new Australian kettle that my folks gave me after my Dads last trip to Oz. If I'm remembering correctly, its still in its box. The trouble is, we can't find it anywhere. That's not such a big shock. The house is an incredible mess and I probably put it away for safekeeping somewhere. There's a fair chance its packed away in a box in the basement as thats a likely place for me to have stored it, and everything got packed up as a result of our flood last year.

I did find two perfectly good North American kettles while looking for my Aussie one, so its not like I can't boil water, but I'll be happier when its found.

Hopefully that will be soon. taxlady has finally decided upon a layout for the furniture in the basement, and we can start putting everything in place and emptying boxes. We'd probably both be doing that right now if I didn't have to leave shortly to attend my Warhammer game.

So, with any luck, sometime in the next week or so the basement will be reassembled and the kettle will be found, and I'll be back to fast boiling again. In the meantime I guess we'll use the nicer of the two local kettles I found.

Future of Electronics: MetaNanoCircuits?

Here's a fascinating look at what the future may hold for electronics: metananocircuits. The basic idea is that its theoretically possible to build nanoparticles that have optical properties directly analogous to those of modern electronic parts. Thus, in principal, one can design an electronic circuit and then directly implement it as an optical circuit and have it function.

There's a slight problem that some of the needed material properties of the nanoparticles are unknown in nature, but it seems likely that they can be fabricated using new metamaterial techniques. There's also the question of how this would ever interface to our modern electronic circuits. Its alright to say that a new 10th generation IPod (for example) will have optical control circuitry, but I think real electricity will be needed to power the speakers so you can hear anything...