Adaptive learning

I'm a physics guy. I love reading about quarks and neutrinos and so on. I think I even "understand" that photons whiz back and forth between electrons carrying the force we call electromagnetism.

But I've never gotten the whole volt/amp/watt thing (let's not even start with metric equivalents). Everytime someone starts with "It's just like a pipe. The water can flow through the pipe at a certain velocity, which can. . ." I think "But it's not a pipe, and aren't all the little minus signs flying at the same speed?" Ohms I get - the more resistance, the more ohms.

So Europe is 240 volt, versus 110 in the U.S. But is there 2.4 times the "power?" I don't think so. Your power strip might pop and smoke and stop working. But your laptop will work. You learn to read transformers because some work just fine. But light bulbs are still in watts. Quite confusing.

We've blown the circuit breakers in the house several times. The loud and grouchy "super" stalked up, showed me that I have to switch the breakers up and down at least 15 times, not too fast, before expecting results. Then he led me to the dark basement where we found and reset the main circuit breaker for the apartment.

Then there are the prongs. Italy has scary wide ones. Our friends Becky and Gino have three different standards in their own home. England has fuses built right in. Others are different.

We adapt.