Just remembered When I was 4-5 and my brother 6-7, we were at the baby sitters apartment. We decided to go outside on a nice fall, windy day. We found a book of matches. At this point we decided to light a fire, cuz, hell thats what matches is for. Being that it was windy as can be, we knew we had to block the wind. What better way then to do it as close to the apartment complexes garages as we could get. Needless to say, seeing our babysitter book ass across the yard to stomp out, probably, 4 foot flames before they burnt down a garage complex was quite interesting for a young boy. To add, my dad was none to impressed when he came and picked us up probably 15 min later.
So when I was 14 or so I took the boat out right after we put it in the water for the season. It wasn't running right so I stopped and pulled the bonnet off the motor. So as I was standing in the wet well in front of the motor I noticed the spark plug wire was not on the plug. Silly me I grabbed it and when I did I was launched out of the boat for a swim about 10 feet from where I was. ID10T
I thought the jome was the neighbor had a sign saying they wanted to paint their porch and you painted the porsche!?! me.. ive done too many stupid things.. and do daily
I once lost a cricket ball in some brush behind the laundry shed (In Australia in the outback where I grew up), so we decided to light the brush on fire to burn it back a little.. it wasnt burning fast enough... so I climbed on TOP of the shed and poured about a gallon of gasoline onto the fire... can you say HIROSHIMA mushroom ball of fire... I turned, ran and somehow landed on the ground (9ft below), rolled and looked back at the fire/billow of smoke as my mum walks out the back door seeing everything!!! yeah I was about 8yrs old... never did that again...haha
my buddy used to put a paperclip in the power point during science class every other day... our outlets have an on off switch back in Australia... when it blew they would evacuate the class for 30mins or so... hence why he did it
me too... I even asked the Doctor if I owed him dinner after he spent so much time with my nuts in his hand.... cause last time someone spent that much time playing down there I ended up marrying her!!!
I've done entirely too much dumb stuff in my life, that's why I am myself. Short list off the top of my head: -paper clip into socket -flat land tricks on my bike...down a hill -damp finger got frozen to a co2 container after dumping a few hoppers of paint in a fast manor -nearly rolled wagon in a parking lot while sliding sideways (right tangled? lol) -jumped wagon into Davanni's parking lot -installed 12k/10k coilovers in wagon -played amateur paintball nationally -traded the saab for the gc8 -removed timing belt and tensioners before cracking the cam pulley bolts -frequently buy/sell with people online -art history major (so many job openings! *insert sarcasm*) -was nice to that max whatever-tard-nado about oil this is a snippet.
I was smart enough to turn the power off to install mine. Then got the bright idea to turn it on with just one of the 5 blades attached. Epic Fail
Speaking of electricity, I was trying to fix the "hey idiot, stay away from this vehicle or you will be run the **** over" light on top of a bobcat one day and must have touched a capacitor or something that still had juice in it... needless to say it was far worse than the many times I have been shocked by a 110v outlet/cord.
Ill see if I can find it but this reminds me of a you tube video of a guy trying to be "ninja" and grab something above a moving ceiling fan with his mouth.
I think it counts, I can't figure out why they still make flat blade screws in 2012 but it's probably to piss people off that have to work on anything that has them. That brings me to another batch of my idiot moments... not wearing proper gloves when taking out flat blade screws!
I could make a serious post per day in this thread, can we have a thread with the most intelligent things you have done in/with your life? I want to keep my post count low.
I had to read this thread just to remind myself of some of the dumb things I've done. Yes, of course. One time when I was younger I was trying to plug in a lamp in the dark. I could feel the outlet with my fingers, but I couldn't manage to get the prongs into the outlet. So I had the bright idea of using my fingers to guide the prongs into the outlet.
I did both rear brakes (pads and rotors) on my a4 with nothing but the widowmaker jack for putting your spare on. Well, lets just say that they call it a widowmaker for a reason. As I went to loosen some bolt or whatever, the car rocked backwards. I was in the wheelwell. I was lucky in that I only had one leg fully into the wheel well. The car came down, and the arch of the wheel well landed on my leg, just above my knee. So, for a very short time, I had the full weight of the car supported by nothing but my left leg. It buckled shortly after that, and if I would have removed the rotor, my leg would have been smashed under the frame. there was about 1/8 inch between frame and shin. Needless to say, my leg, having had a knife edge body line weighing many hundreds of pounds supported only by the tendon connecting my kneecap to my upper leg, was unhappy with me, and my knee promptly decided to swell up to about twice it's normal size. A trip to the Minneapolis VA emergency room, a prescription for percocet (whee), and three weeks of being out of it and gimping around on crutches later, the lesson and fully and truly set in. I wasn't able to participate in much of annual training for the national guard that year. Use f*cking jackstands, or you could die.
At the age of 4 or 5 years old, me and some neighborhood friends wanted to open mail. We were jealous of our parents and such. So we just started going to mailboxes and opening mail. We prop opened at least 50 envelopes in the neighborhood. I don't know how my parents found out, but I remember being put in my room and my parents speaking with the police. There was stacks of mail on our kitchen table. Man, things you got to do when your young
-I did the double oil gasket on my first self oil change. Never forget to check again but have yet to have another stick on me. -Did the finger in the night light at about 5 to find out what 120 felt like. I deal with 400v 3 phase at work and wonder what that would feel like. -Smashed a pile pop gun rolls under some dry leafs on a rock, started neighbors backyard on fire. -Neighbor kid and I are throwing rocks over his house for some reason. Threw low and hucked one right in the middle of their front picture window with his mom standing just next to where it came through. -Removing 20 year old plastic wire sheath with an xacto. Somehow decided using the other hand to feed it was working better until it split and the blade went 3/4 into the webbing between thumb and index finger. On the note of hydro-locking I do have to give props to the GM 3800. Girlfriends bonny with 260billion miles just stops running on highway and won't start. Has it towed over to my house. I try to fire it, click-thunk-nothing over and over with no change trying to jump. Throw prybar on crank pulley and cannot turn it over by hand. Pull the plugs, she cranks it while I watch, at least 2 cyl proceeded to pump a lovely black slurry out the plug holes. I determine the usual upper and lower manifold gaskets are shot. Replace everything for little money including new plastic plenum (WHO THE HELL RUNS THE EGR GAS THROUGH A PLASTIC MANIFOLD WITH COOLANT PIPES ON EITHER SIDE OF IT). Fires up right away with no issues and ran better than ever.
I deal with 400v 3 phase at work and wonder what that would feel like. I have 480 in the building that I work at. I watched an electrician pull out a 600 amp fuse that was the size of a tube of tennis balls.. No thank you.
You would be dead before you even felt it. Your body's lack of resistance and the massive voltage would drop through you like lightning. All of you talking about these mega voltage AC lines need to realize...your heart would instantly stop depending on the path. If you grabbed it,you would just wiggle a bit and be unable to let go. The real nasty is DC voltage. I got bit by 28 volt EM power on the ship I was stationed on. My arms were lcoated in sweat, and a status panel for the gun mount positioning servos swung back on my arm...all that circuitry is exposed in that door. 28 volt DC will lift your ass up off the ground and throw you. And it leaves horrific Burns. I was lucky my elbow was resting on my exposed knee, otherwise that current would have hit the heart and killed me.
that can't be as bad as the 5vdc i deal with every day, i thank the lord every day i survive after dealing with that deadly current. the d in dc stands for deadly, right? sorry i'm a noob to electrisity
The d stands for direct. Meaning the elections flow in one direction. AC is alternating current. It flows both directions but onlyp one direction at a time. In the US it changes direction 60 times per second, or 60hz.
Indeed, voltage is not the dangerous part. It's the current. IIRC it takes ~70 volts to break skin (depending on humidity and water involved in the circuit) but it only takes ~0.10 amps of current across the heart to cause cardiac arrest.
Voltage is meaningless in terms of damage to the human body. When you run around on linoleum in your socks and then touch your cat's nose, you're discharging thousands of volts. It helps to think of electricity in wires like water in pipes. E = Voltage = Pressure. I = Current = Rate of Flow R= Resistance = Blockage In the water comparison, you have a fourth measurement that helps you understand how discharge damage works. That measurement is volume. Supplied voltage circuits, like those with batteries or from your wall socket (generator) have a nearly infinite supply of electron volume. A capacitive or finite capacity power source is more like the discharge from a capacitor or static buildup on your body. That capacity has an effect on pressure. I forget what the capacity of the human body is with regards to capacity to hold a charge, but it is in the picofarads. Tiny. But at full capacity, you have a very high pressure or voltage. Somewhere in the thousands of volts if you've been rubbing balloons on your junk for an hour. While that seems high, remember, you don't have a high VOLUME of electrons to discharge, they are just very anxious to get out is all. When you discharge that voltage into your cat, or into a doorknob or whatever, it discharges in a split second. I guess a better description of this would be Time instead of Volume. But either way. There aren't enough electrons to maintain the current required to kill someone. In the equation I = E/R, current is voltage divided by resistance. The resistance of a human body is somewhere between 300 and 1000 ohms. That isn't alot. For fatter folks, your resistance will be higher. A sweaty or wet body will have even lower resistance. But lets go in between and assume 500 ohms. 50milliamps is enough current to start heart fibrillation. Using the equation: .05 A = E/500 .05x500 = E 25 = E. It takes 25 volts continuous applied to a human to flat out kill them. With DC you can get away with more because odds are, the initial push of electrons will throw you a short distance from the source. With AC, you're boned. The alternation causes your muscles to contract. You're stuck to that wire. On my ship we had what we affectionately called "Buddy Beaters" placed around the areas where electronics were being used and serviced. They were large, 1" thick, acrylic sticks with a grounding strap that you could clip to something big and metal. Their sole purpose was, if you saw someone stuck to an alternating current circuit, you used it to push them off of it. Because if you try to grab them and pull them off, you become part of the circuit, and you become locked onto them as well. I used to teach electrical safety. Just be careful around electronics. It doesn't take much to put your ass into a pine box.
I'm also bummed it was closed. I was looking for help on setting up a down stream vergence equation. If you know how to set one up that can accurately represent the intensity of the beam that is being diffused, please notify me. One way to get a very even power distribution across the beam profile while at the same time circulizing the beam is to couple the ouput into a short piece single mode fiber and use a lens to expand the fiber output. -I've just started this. If you have any info, it'd be well appreciated. Thanks.
http://www.mrcophth.com/mock/formula.html There you go, genius. It tells you all the values that are needed. Took me 10 seconds on Google. I don't really see the need for an engineer to perform basic algebraic functions related to focal length and beam convergence. But you're the smart one. Keep impressing the troglodytic masses with your big words.
