Vocabulary Lesson :)

This blog seems to be quite popular ... with spambots!

I've been getting a lot of blog comments with the following attributes: totally irrelevant, containing a link, and often in very poor English. Some comments sound like they were written in English, translated to another language and then translated back to English. How else do you explain: "I have recently bought a in use accustomed to laptop that is old." How else does "used" turn into "accustomed to"?

But what does that have to do with physics? Well, try this one: One comment wants to link me to a site that will increase my page rank in "Search Motor Results." Yup, not search engine, but search motor.

So this is a vocabulary lesson in thermodynamics, for my good friend the spambot.

Motor (Etymology: Latin, from movēre to move) is any machine that causes motion.
Engine colloquially can have the same meaning, but in physics, an engine is a machine which converts heat to work (in a cycle).

So is a motor an engine? Is an engine a motor? The answer: sometimes. For example, the engine in your car burns fuel to make heat, that heat is converted to work, which in turn causes your car to move. So it is not only an engine, but also a motor.

Unless you have an all-electric car, of course. Then your car's motor causes motion, but the energy for that motion comes from chemical energy stored in a battery, not from heat. An electric car has a motor, but it's not an engine.

Oh, and here's one more good line from a spambot friend: "I paucity to remove windows xp." Paucity? No one says paucity. I used it in my PhD thesis and haven't used it since. But it does mean "want" in the sense of not having a lot of something. Weird. Keep it coming, friend spambot, I'm enjoying this!