Pointless Questions...with Aaron Mucciolo

I’ve been thinking that this column needs theme music. If anyone would like to nominate an appropriate tune, or better yet, compose an appropriate melody, e-mail or send ’em over to the address below. While we wait, please enjoy this week’s questions.

Is there any benefit to an infrared mouse other than making my gum wrapper look pretty?
–Jenni Huelsman, OC ’01

Sure. Fewer moving parts. Your standard computer mouse has a mouse ball (say that with a straight face) that rotates against several mechanical rollers. The speed and direction of each roller is collected and translated into standard X-Y coordinates for the computer to use in displaying the pointer on the screen. The rollers can become gummed up, broken, or worn down. The ball can get scratched or worn and fail to effectively move the rollers. Optical mouses (like the ones in Biggs computer lab — they shine a red laser-like light out the bottom) are completely digital. Without going into too much technical explanation, they use a light to light up the surface, a lens to focus the light, a camera to take a series of pictures of the surface, and digital signal processor (DSP) to compare the pictures and determine distances and directions. Yeah, sounds more complicated — but at least you don’t need to keep cleaning your mouse balls.
Since they don’t have the ball and its related physical sensors, optical mouses can work on pretty much any non-reflective surface — unlike normal mouses that require a fairly uniform surface with some friction, like a mouse pad.
Oh, and the light isn’t infrared, it’s a standard red LED (light emitting diode — an explanation of what this is would take a while, so we’ll call it a really simple light bulb for now). It probably wouldn’t do too many cool things to your gum wrapper if it was — infrared light is out of our normal viewing spectrum.

Why are the bathrooms in Wilder so damn hot?
–Jacob “I’m editor of the Review and still have nothing better to do with my time then come up with questions like this” Kramer-Duffield

Wilder’s a pretty old building. It doesn’t have nice things like central heating, and has been renovated and added to countless times since it was built. Heat all throughout Wilder is problematic since there are no ‘blowers’ to move the warm air around the building. Instead, the building has a whole lot of radiators throughout, all pushing the same amount of heat into rooms of varying sizes with no real way for users to turn them off.
As for the bathrooms themselves, the only one anyone was even close to sure about was the first floor men’s bathroom. The knob that controls the heat from the radiator in that room was finally fixed, but now it appears that some people are turning up the heat — probably earlier in the morning, when it’s needed — and it just gets left on.

Questions are good. Questions are fun. So e-mail questions everybody. Send your questions to aaron.mucciolo@oberlin.edu or write to Pointless Questions, c/o The Oberlin Review, Wilder Box 90, Oberlin OH, 44074. Your name will be used only with your permission.