Does the voltage matter?
I have no idea of this, but my grandfather's maxim was "Volts jolt, but mills [i.e. milliamps] kill". Was that bollocks, then?
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 19:16,
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Yes
Your nervous system is basically an electric circuit. Putting too much current through it will burn it out, bit like if you accidentally plugged your house into 25KV it'd catch fire. That is why electric fences, tazers etc give out several thousand volts. The current is almost non-existant, so it isn't fatal.
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Greenbat, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 22:52,
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The analogy my old man gave me was this:
Say you're standing in front of a water pipe. The voltage is the speed of the water rushing from the pipe and striking you. Whether slow or fast, it's unlikely to kill, though it's going to give you a pretty nasty sting at higher voltages.
The current is the circumfrence of the pipe. Once that starts increasing, all of a sudden the sheer volume of water becomes overwhelming whether voltage is high or not, and it can be pretty damn deadly.
That's not word for word what he told me years ago, but I hear that as an analogy goes it's not inaccurate.
(, Fri 18 Sep 2009, 19:05, Share, Reply)
Not sure I completely agree
A volt is a Joule per coulomb (i.e. charge carrying bucket). An Amp is a Coulomb per second (i.e. number of charge carrying buckets per second, so this is the water speed in the analogy). The charge per bucket is the width of the pipe. Regardless, a lot of either Volts or Amps is a bad thing as VxA = Watts, i.e. power.
www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2003/12/29/amps_vs_volts/
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gingerbenji wrote a book http://goo.gl/8UiGjd, Fri 18 Sep 2009, 23:01,
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