Even in remotes where they are physically side by side, they are often electrically connected in series.

The voltage put out by a battery is determined largely by the materials used. While you can increase the available current by making it bigger (or ganging up a bunch of smaller ones in parallel), the voltage is somewhat fixed.

The standard batteries used for many years had a natural voltage of about 1.5V. But for the transistors of the time, that voltage was not optimal.

There's a hack for that. If you "stack" two batteries in series, then their voltages add up. Two 1.5V batteries will output 3V. If you stack four of them you get 6V. Which was pretty useful when the "standard" for many transistors and integrated circuits was 5V.

A lot of things have changed since those days, of course. Different battery materials are in widespread use, and integrated circuit technology has changed such that 5V is not only undesirable, it's not acceptable.

As transistors were made smaller and smaller ("shrunk"), it became necessary to reduce their supply voltages. This has gone through many phases, from 5V -> 3.6V -> 3V etc. etc. A lot of integrated circuits now are very happy to run on 1V or so. If a gizmo uses only such ICs, it can use a single battery.

But there are at least a couple of reasons to use higher voltages. One is that there are still some old technology devices around that run on a 3V standard, or use signaling busses between them that use a >1V standard. There are also some components, such as certain displays, that work on higher voltages.

It is possible to boost voltages, but a better strategy is often to use a power source that provides the highest voltage needed. For the lower voltage devices, it's relatively easy/cheap to drop the voltage down.

So you use two batteries in series and that provides a nominal voltage of 3V (actually less pretty quickly). For things that don't need that, you reduce the voltage.

Wow! Thank you for that. I had no idea about almost any of this.

Bad trips aren't a singular thing, and they don't have a singular cause.

First you have to define what a "bad trip" is. Some people describe any unpleasant experience during a trip as a bad trip. Others reserve the term "bad trip" for a much more profound, severe reaction that isn't merely unpleasant, it's horrific.

The psychedelic experience lends itself to extremes at times. An intrusive thought that would normally be discarded can be obsessed over. Confusion can lead to thought or action "loops". Interactions with other drugs (such as THC) or external events can cause anxiety/paranoia.

In most cases, there's the possibility of a feedback effect. Something is unpleasant, creating a heightened reaction, which makes things seem even more unpleasant, creating an even stronger reaction, etc. This kind of feedback can be difficult to break out of, particularly if you let it get past a certain point.

With high doses of psychedelics, the user's perception of reality can become whatever they think it is. That can be great, but it also means that if you think that horrible stuff is happening, horrible stuff effectively is happening. In extreme cases, the person having the bad trip is immune to logic or external stimuli...they are in a world of their own making. You can't reason them out of it, and they can't either. All of their senses are telling them stuff that isn't true.

Anyone who says that "there is no such thing as a bad trip" or "there's always something good that comes out of a bad trip" or "you just need to relax and go with the flow" has never experienced an extreme Bad Trip.

Reason doesn't always work on people who have lost the ability to reason correctly. Or who are reasoning correctly, but are responding to invalid input.

My wife is a CASA. You don't need to have special qualifications going in. You apply and they will interview you. If you are accepted, there is a bunch of training. They also do ongoing yearly training, but it's not too onerous.

Once you are trained and assigned a case, you'll typically be working under a more experienced CASA who you can go to for help and advice. It's not usually a huge time sink. Visits with your kids every couple of weeks, court hearings, monthly written reports. Emails and phone calls with social workers and the family and the kids' attorney. You can work around appointments. For a long trip you might need your supervisor to help out, which is part of what they are there for.

Some cases can suck up quite a bit of time, but not usually for a protracted duration. It tends to come and go. Ideally, you only work a case for a few months to a year. Rare ones can drag out longer, but with long periods of low activity.

You don't really have to navigate the judicial system; there's an attorney "ad litem" who does that. But you will get training on the applicable laws so you know what you can and can't do.

You will want to set some boundaries, as there are people in the system who will take advantage of you if allowed. Some of the family members can be obnoxious, and some of the social workers are practically useless. Some parents will get pissy with you, and even some social workers. It can be frustrating at times.

If your experience is like my wife's, the kids will love you. And you will have the chance to make an important impact on their lives. Your role is all about what is best for them, not the parents or the court or anyone else. You are the only person who is just looking out for them and is only working with one family at a time (unless a case has gone mostly dormant so you can take on a new one).

Everyone else in the system has too many concurrent cases to give any single one the proper attention. You have virtually no actual power, but for the kids you might be the most important person in the process. You are the one who needs to raise a little hell when a child's needs are not being met. The kids usually seem to understand that you are there just looking out for them.

If you have the disposition for it, it seems to be very fulfilling and important work. I'm very proud of my wife for doing it.

At least, that's how it works in Colorado. Other states might do things a bit differently.

Yes, and it has been done before.

As others noted, it's handy to have just two states, "on" and "off" (actually "mostly on" and "mostly off") because it works well with digital circuit design.

But it can be done, and in some cases (like flash memory) we sometimes use 3 or 4 states. On very rare occasions, even more. This vastly improves some things like storage density, but hurts other things such as complexity and signal to noise ratio.

One of the very good reasons to not use more than two states for most digital circuit design is power. When designing circuits where transistors are "mostly on" or "mostly off", it is possible to arrange things such that there isn't much current flow most of the time. When you add intermediate states to the transistors, it is much harder to avoid current flow and hence power consumption. This is a big deal in circuits that have millions or billions of transistors, even if each individual current path consumes little power.

You could introduce more "states" without them being represented by how much individual transistors are turned on. But that makes the circuits a lot larger, so you lose most of the potential benefit.

Of course, another reason now is legacy software. Everything is written for binary logic. While that's a problem that would be possible to get around, it would be painful. You'd need a darn good reason to do so.

Watch out for synths.

A lot of digital scales struggle with repeatability (and accuracy). As made, you might step on and off several times in a row and get somewhat different results each time.

So the scale manufacturers came up with a cheat. The scale remembers the last measurement, and if the new one is close to that, it just reports the old one. That makes it appear to have wonderful repeatability, when in fact it doesn't. This also leads people to believe that the scale must be more accurate than it actually is.

But most of them only remember the last measurement, so there's an easy way to beat them. Weigh yourself, step off and pick up a moderately heavy object (a kg is plenty). Weigh again. Now put the object down and re-weigh. You'll likely see that your 1st and 3rd measurements, which should match, don't.

Of course, with a scale like that you aren't going to get accurate measurements just by eating 421 g of chicken. Or at any time, really.

TL;DR - Your scale is crap.