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Small Change, and Other Physics Fun
fishy jew writes "Ever want an easy way to make your 'small change' even smaller? Well, Bert Hickman has it - mix a home-brewed machine, 6.5 kiloJoules, and 100,000 Amps of current! On his website, he has descriptions and pictures of his many exploits with large quantities of electricity, notably including shrinking coins, building a Tesla coil, creating Lichtenberg figures (chaotic sculpture), and more! He has extensively outlined the equipment, procedure, and results for each of his experiments, and included many pretty pictures, too. Here are Google caches for when the site gets /.'ed: Main Page, Shrinking Coins, Tesla Coil, and Lichtenberg Figures."
tesla coils are really cool. a friend and i once took a 30,000 volt capacitor bank, a homemade tesla coil and a homemade spark gap and liquified my deodorant.
his garage smelled great for a few months.
also, any time we'd point the tesla coil towards his neighbors house, they'd lose TV reception.
Electrons moving in a wire exert a magnetic force.
A lot of electrons moving in a wire exert a lot of magnetic force.
If you use coiled wires, you get a cylindrical magnetic field.
If you put a coin inside a coiled wire with a lot of electrons moving through it, it gets smooshed.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Even without the coolness factor, though, the risks are still rather slight with some attention to safety.
Electrocution actually isn't much of a risk with many HV devices - most will destroy themselves (or run up against current limiters) far before they output anywhere near the 200-250 mA needed to stop the human heart. While a shock from a tesla coil or other HV device will hurt terribly and pose a risk of burns, it probably won't kill you. Although some devices designed to deliver a high voltage and high current pulse can be extremely dangerous, keeping aware of safety at all times and never using jury-rigged solutions can mean that even a seemingly dangerous activity like playing around with Tesla coils and coincrushers is fairly safe.
As for ozone, all that you have to do to eliminate most risk is to work outside or in a ventilated area, and not stay around areas where arcing has occured. It's certainly not more dangerous than spraypaint, at least in the quantities produced by most amateur experiments. Bottom line: it's reasonably safe and a lot of fun, so why not do it?
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
For those who now can't get to the site: These coins are "shrunken" by being placed inside a wooden dowel, the dowel is then wrapped with electrical wire, and a ton of electricity is then discharged into the coil -- the resulting magnetic field deforms the coin (shrinks usually, but not always!), and causes the entire apparatus to explode :) Small shrinkings are done in blast chambers, larger ones have to be burried in a burm. Usually industrial capacitors provide power.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Magneforming is just another less-common metalworking techniques. Others include hydroforming, water jet cutting, spinning, and blowing.
Not only does it not help, it does harm, since the small site keeps getting hit for the inline images.
There is no real distinction between the slashdot effect and a DDOS; Slashdot should think itself lucky this hasn't come up in the courts yet. It will. This guy does business through his website (selling the fruits of all the electricity). One day someone will be inconvenienced and have no sense of humour about it.
A proper mirror for small sites in an upcoming story is a necessity. Slashdot should already be contacting site owners to warn them before posting a story and knowingly sending them a huge flood of visitors that they may not be able to deal with, so copyright issues could be worked out then. A standard "we'll only mirror it for 24 hours" deal would be fine with most everyone. Some story submitters are already doing this, but it's not their responsibility - it's slashdots.
This problem will eventually result in a lawsuit if it's not addressed. It stopped being funny years ago.
Looks like the US Air Force's Rome Air Development Center thinks they have a patent on it. Am I the only one who thinks "United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Air Force" should not be a valid patent assignee?
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