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Date:         Fri, 8 Mar 2013 15:56:40 -0500
Reply-To:     David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject:      Re: Friday - my favorite electronics teacher has new video
Comments: To: Alistair Bell <albell@SHAW.CA>
In-Reply-To:  <24E7CA21-DCB5-4B55-80A1-61B1439EE4F7@shaw.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 10:45 AM 3/8/2013, Alistair Bell wrote: >Mehdi Sadaghdar must be responsible for thousands of coffee spit >takes. His latest "tutorial" vid is about the question; what hurts >most? AC or DC?

Wow! The man is a glutton for pain. Not just in that video, in all of them. Is he a Vancouver local? What's his day job?

From my own experience of a misspent life his results are about right, but I wouldn't willingly go as high as 9 VDC continuous, just a quick dab. But he's willing to stick 25 VDC on his tongue and pretend it was an accident.

He took some "static" over at EE (Electronic Engineering) Times over his ESD demonstration video, see http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4404785/How-NOT-to-make-a-training-video , and he responds in the comments. I think he glosses over (by implication anyway) how dangerous some of the stuff in those videos really is. The high-current stuff, not the high-voltage. What he's doing to his tongue isn't dangerous -- unless he lets those power supply terminals touch each other. But when he starts swinging wrenches around car batteries it's a different story, as is any high voltage that has a capacitor associated with it.

I wonder how much prep/calibration/persistence/blind luck it took to get the cap in the blinker circuit to blow off at the right moment. Back at Analogic, in the Bad Old Days before they started embossing the tops of electrolytic caps so they'd peel open instead of blow the can off, every once in a while someone would intentionally or otherwise install one of the big caps in backwards in the remote weighing device (universal load cell amplifier/readout, eight digits or better IIRC) my group was building on the swing shift in the otherwise deserted Data Precision factory in Danvers Massachusetts (D-P only ran one shift). A while later everyone would jump -- we'd hear a Pop-CLANG from the burn-in line as the can went rocketing away and bounced off the steel roof, and the offending system would have a bird's nest of capacitor innards littering the case.

Gee...Eudora thinks I should have my keyboard washed out with soap because I said "his tongue" twice. That caught me by surprise. Eudora has an even saucier mind than I do. Perhaps if I said "his lingual member"? Yup, that's completely inoffensive and not subject to misinterpretation. Uh huh...

Yrs, d


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