Voltage hack
Naich
The Wife has got a nice woollen-type coat which she likes to wear on cold
days. The trouble with it is that she builds up several thousand volts of
static on the journey home from work, which gets discharged through our
lips when I give her a welcome home kiss. After a few of these we started
equalising our voltages by touching fingers, but that still gives an
unpleasant shock. Not having any resistors to limit the current lying
around, we needed something else. So we tried a pencil. I held it,
touching the inner graphite core with my finger and Jen touched the tip.
And it worked a treat. It's got enough resistance to stop us feeling a
shock while equalising our voltages. We've not had another zap since.
Naich.
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Eli the Bearded
> The Wife has got a nice woollen-type coat which she likes to wear on cold
> days. The trouble with it is that she builds up several thousand volts of
> static on the journey home from work, which gets discharged through our
> lips when I give her a welcome home kiss. After a few of these we started
> equalising our voltages by touching fingers, but that still gives an
> unpleasant shock. Not having any resistors to limit the current lying
> around, we needed something else. So we tried a pencil. I held it,
> touching the inner graphite core with my finger and Jen touched the tip.
> And it worked a treat. It's got enough resistance to stop us feeling a
> shock while equalising our voltages. We've not had another zap since.
This is rich in potential for jokes. Posted in the panix.* groups, I
could see thirty or fourty cascading puns from this. But it is a clever
and unexpected use of an everyday object.
Very small ObHack:
Last weekend I was tidying the basement/garage of the house. One of the
things to be moved was the potter's wheel. This is a home-built, foot
powered model made by an engineer for his daughter which we got second
hand. It has an aluminum and wood frame plus a giant kick-to-spin iron
flywheel. The flywheel, as is appropriate for flywheels, weighs an
awful lot. Carrying the whole set-up is difficult for one person and
awkward for two. But it can be tilted on its side, and balanced on the
edge of the flywheel. Then it rolls easily, since the only really heavy
bit is no longer being lifted.
Elijah
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an inch-think three-foot-wide iron disk weighs how much?