Will the ebook kill off the print book?”

Every time I hear that question, I think about the “paperless office.” Back in the ’80s, the rise of word processors and e-mail convinced a lot of people that paper would vanish. Why print anything when you could simply squirt documents around electronically?

We all know how that turned out. Paper use exploded; indeed, firms that adopted e-mail used 40 percent more paper. That’s because even in a world of screens, paper offers unique ways to organize and share your thoughts, as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper noted in The Myth...

Image via Nick Olejniczak (Flickr)

It seems I keep finding things to plug into this Watts Up Pro – a device that can record the power that household devices use. This particular model is nice in that you can use it with Vernier’s data acquisition stuff.

If it seems like a good idea to measure the power for a refrigerator, why not a coffee pot?

Power and Energy

Before talking about the physics, let me just show the fun stuff. Here is a plot of the power, and two temperatures. The first reading shows the temperature of the water in the coffee pot (I didn’t waste valuable coffee). The second t...