Series, yes, that does make it clearer.
I've never slagged an LED, but I have a
very clear memory of all the insulation simultaneously melting off the wires (and onto my breadboard) the time we connected the power to an op-amp ... wrong.
I got a lovely square burn on the end of my finger from that little adventure -- we realized just how wrong we'd connected things when I pressed on the top of the op-amp to make sure it was seated completely (about .5 seconds before the insulation gave it up, but well after it was too late for the poor chip).
It's all about the magic smoke -- you can't let the magic smoke out of the chips!
