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Do Your $20 Bills Explode In the Microwave?
msaulters writes "After repeatedly setting off RFID scanners in a truck stop, the author discovered the culprit was a wad of $20's in his back pocket. In a paranoid attempt to keep the government from tracking him, he attempted to fry the embedded chips in his microwave, with interesting results." Alex Jones has interesting theories about a number of things, but evidently a lot of readers were interested in this one.
I tried it... it didnt work.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Nothing like a Slashdot post to jump to a conclusion.
Clearly, there's something funny going on with the microwaved bills... but stores don't have RFID scanners at the exits yet. They have an acousto-magnetic sensor that gets deactivated by a pad at the cash register so that paying customers aren't supposed to set them off. Big difference here is that the tags in a store system don't yet emit an identifying signal... they all emit the same reply. The store doesn't know what a shoplifter did to trip the alarm, just that they did trip it. There's not quite proof that each bill is emitting its serial number yet.
Also, having microwaved everything in a stack makes things a bit unclear. Did every eye burn on its own, or did just one or two bills in the middle of the stack catch flame which in turn burned all of the bills above and below in varying degrees. Notice that the top and bottom bills were unharmed. Could one bill alone be microwaved safely?
And, BTW, if you so much as put slightly crumpled tin foil in your microwave, you get a similar effect. Could there just be a small metal content in the bill designed so that somebody who has $1000 worth of $20 bills (rather than simply 10 $100's) in their wallet is sure to set off an airport security alarm until they show their wallet to make sure they get an extra security questions?
It's interesting, but I think more research needs to be done. Microwave carefully, people.
Why should it be illegal?
A $20 bank note is your receipt for lending $20 to the government with no interest.
If you'd like to lend $20 to the government and then not claim it back later, I'm sure that the government will be very happy.
Now, you should go look at Alex Jones' apparent infiltration of Bohemian Grove, an annual meeting of powerful people -- now that's intriguing.
A couple more quick points I just thought of:
1) Even if the money was designed to set off anti-theft systems (which would be dumb, for the reason I parenthetically enumerated above) it could only deliver one bit of data: on or off, yes or no, it was or was not tagged with a theft prevention device.
2) Even being able to track money at all is not new. Why d'ya think mobsters need to launder it?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I used to set off these anti theft systems in some stores, but not every store. Couldn't figure out what was going on. Finally at one store, an employee told me it was my wallet. I had bought a new wallet about 9 months before, but never thought it was the cause because I left the store I bought it at without setting off the alarm. He deactivated my wallet and I've never had this happen again.
My guess is this guy had the same problem, but because of a bit of paranoia, he blamed his cash. Microwave money long enough and I bet it starts to burn near the center. And if you have a stack of them, I bet you might get a little explosion like they wrote about.
I think he needs to loosen his tin foil hat, it's starting to cut off circulation.
Just a quick run-down on Alex Jones and his Infowars.com site.
This guy is viewed as a Class-A crackpot in Austin, Texas. He has a cable access show twice a week in which he rants about conspiracy theories of all kinds of varieties. He has run numerous shows on how the government literally has black helicopters following him around South Austin. He was predicting armageddon when the Y2K bug was supposed to hit. He fully espouses the notion that Bush not only had previous-knowledge of 9/11 but planned it. He did a special where he claims that all presidents past and present meet at Bohemiam Grove, worship an owl god, and sacrifice children. He also believes the United Nations is preparing to occupy the United States any day now (according to him it has been for at least the last ten years). A quick look at his shop will give you a pretty good indication of his beliefs.
Keep this in mind when judging the validity of this article
Did he try passing his wallet through the detector without the money?
I have a Kastanza wallet - I put everything in there, and it's waaay too big. The wallet I had was falling apart, and eventually my girlfriend pretty much forced me into buying a new one. Which I did, at the retail store she works at.
It just so happens that after this, I could no longer get through the metal detector at airport security. The wallet would set off the wand, and the TSA agent would spend a good 3-5 minutes examining the wallet, but couldn't find anything amiss and would eventually let me through.
The *FOURTH* time I went through security an agent finally managed to find the source of my problem: An anti-theft tag placed in some obscure fold of the wallet.
As it turns out, the guy at the store responsible for putting the anti-theft tags in things has a reputation for being able to hide them very well.
So I'd be willing to bet something similar is afoot here.
As for the money burning all in the same spot, it's pretty obvious why: Metal heats up in the microwave, and paper has low thermal conductivity. Put one bill in the microwave, the heat escapes from both sides of the bill fast enough that you don't get enough heat to initiate combustion. Stack 50 of them on top of each other, and now you've got a buncha metal in the middle of a buncha paper, the heat builds up in the center, and now your bills combust. The bills didn't all burn in the same spot - one bill started burning, and then the other bills - all stacked neatly on top of each other - burned in the same spot as the fire spread up and down the stack.
A conpiracy theorist needs to be smart enough to connect a bunch of unrelated facts, but not smart enough to realize that they're unrelated.
paintball
well... my first clue that they had no idea what they were talking about was when I looked at the picture. The article clearly said that it was over $1000 in cash. There's only $600 in the pic. It also said that it was burned uniformly... it clearly isn't.
in response to the tracking of money... people even do it voluntarily... Where's George
this isn't interesting, insightful, or anything else... I just wanted to point it out
Jeremy Logan's Website.
Steve Wozniak has an interesting story about how he uses sheets of $2 bills on his site. I got a kick out of reading this a few weeks ago:
He ended up raising the suspicions of a casion manager in Las Vegas, who called in the Secret Service because he thought the bills were counterfeit...
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Have you ever actually tried it? This really doesn't work. The first time I blew up an egg in a microwave I thought of this and set a heavyish plastic jug over the egg. One minute later and the force of the explosion blew the door of the microwave open and slammed the jug against the opposite kitchen wall. Seriously, there's a lot of power in these things.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
What happens is the lack of anything to absorb the microwaves causes all the energy to be re-absorbed back into the magnetron, heating it up. Fortunately, the designers of microwave ovens put heat fuses on the magnetrons so they stop working (hopefully) before the tube itself dies. You can heat lots of unusual items relatively safely by putting a mug of cold water in the oven to absorb the excess energy.
Once upon a time I was employed to actually do microwave oven research, and the duties involved microwaving all kinds of odd things to see what would happen. (Wood pencils are my favorite since they exhibit burn marks at a nice half-wavelength intervals, or about 6cm. Put one in your oven with a small mug of water with the turntable off and see). The research was done in a jury-rigged "oven" that had no safety interlocks or heat fuses.
When a magnetron is overheated to excess it doesn't explode. The ceramic permanent magnets can crack badly, but I've never seen one explode. It simply doesn't heat up fast enough.
Most things are unexciting when microwaved. In general, metals just get hot. Tinfoil and neon bulbs were both fun. (foil sparks, bulbs flash.) The only thing I tested that actually exploded was chicken wire wrapped in aluminum foil, and even then it's not a movie-style explosion but simply a nice capactitive buildup until finally the resulting arc rips the foil apart rather dramatically.
It does make a really nice bang when it goes.
A far more dramatic explosion could be had by simply heating a thick 1L bottle half-full of water until the steam pressure built up enough for an explosion.