Magnetron!

I share a room with another RIT student whose name is Bobby Brown. Bobby is studying microelectronic engineering, and is in the process of growing a pretty awesome beard. He has short hair the color of black shoe-polish, and round gold-rimmed glasses. When I run into Bobby around campus, I usually hear him before I see him.

"Hey Evan! Evan! Over Here!!" he shouts, while waving his arm enthusiastically from his shoulder all the way through the tip of his fingers. If Bobby spots you from across a room, hallway, or even across a parking lot, he makes sure you know that he sees you right then and there.

I told Bobby about this blog and explained that I was going to be posting some doodles from my classnotes and talking about attention span. Yesterday he stormed into our room and proclaimed "I have an AMAZING doodle for your blog-thingy!"

He pulled out a three-subject notebook and flipped through the pages until he found the one he was looking for. "Behold, the Magnetron!" he announced, as he showed me this:

When I asked Bobby about the origins of his Magnetron doodle, he said it was a case of word association.

"I was sitting in my Thin Films class, and my professor was talking about ways to create sputtering systems. He said one way was to use a magnetron. Immediately I thought to myself 'Magnetron?! That sounds like some sort of awesome robot!' I spent the next five minutes of class completing my masterpiece and not paying attention."

It really is a great sketch. It looks like some sort of rejected misfit Pokemon.

Before Bobby explained what caused him to lose focus in his class, I hadn't thought of word association as a possible cause for a lapse in attention. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, word association can reveal information about a persons subconscious thoughts. Perhaps the association that Bobby saw with the word Magnetron and robots was so strong it pulled him away from his class.

Or perhaps Bobby just thinks about robots far too much. For those of you who are interested, a real magnetron is pictured below.

Go HERE for more information on magnetrons.