8 Comments

  1. A 3 year old child with 890kΩ of resistance in series 110 volts can only reasonably expect to carry about 120µA of current. Not too big a deal, really. 20mA is pretty painful, 100mA will kill ya, they say, but really you should figure out power to know for sure.

    For example, I whack my students with upwards of 200kV worth of static electricity. If you did the math there, a 1MΩ 20 year old would carry 200mA. More than enough to kill them. But it’s fine, because amperage has a sneeky unit built into it. Amperage is Coulomb / Second. So I could zap them with a whole Coulomb of charge, which if it lasted for a whole second would constitute an Amp of current and that would kill them. But if the Joules / Coulomb (Voltage) dissipates over just a microsecond the actual current is much less.

    Power on the other hand is Joules per Second. So if you multiply the voltage times the current, the Coulombs cancel out and you end up with Joules per Second (Watts). It’s really the watts that get ya, because that’s a measurement of how fast the energy has to dissipate in your body.

  2. Seeing the modern youth of this nation makes me weep. What kind of moron puts a butter knife if the electrical socket? My generation at least knew well enough that you get much better results using a fork.

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