🚀 go-pugleaf

grege@gold.GVG.TEK.COM (Gregory Ebert) writes:

> Light bulbs & tubes

	I once managed to knock something into a light bulb while it was
turned off.  Shattered the glass envelope but left the fillament intact.
Figured I would see what happened if I turned it on.  Hint: There *is* a
reason why they bother going to the trouble of enclosing the fillament in
an inert gas.

> Fluorescent tubes

	I once had a temporary job when I was in high school helping out at
a tennis club changing light bulbs.  It was an indoor club, with the courts
in a very high (40-50 ft?) ceiling structure, with banks of flourescent
tubes up top.  Changing the tubes is a bitch, so they wait until a fair
percentage are out, then change them all.  We had a mobile scaffolding, on
which we climbed to take out the old tubes and put in new ones.  The surface
of the courts was that composition stuff; not what you'd call soft, but a
lot softer than concrete or even asphalt.  It's amazing what happens when
you drop a tube from that height.  The tube is fairly light for its cross
section so it reaches terminal velocity pretty fast and sort of floats down,
wobbling a bit.  It probably only takes a second or so to hit, but it seems
like a *lot* longer.  Then you hear this little *pong* and in place of the
tube there are zillions of bits of glass and a little cloud of dust.  It's
really pretty surrealistic.

> Capacitors

	Take a big electrolytic, the kind about the size of a can of
Fosters, with the big screw terminals on top.  Say 450,000 uF at 35V.  If
you don't have one handy, there are probably some in the power supply of
that 11/780 in the machine room that won't be missed. :-) Charge it up good,
to about the rated voltage.  Now you've got a couple of dozen coulumbs just
waiting to to find some conducting surface.  Like your neighbor's metal desk
top, or the wall of an elevator.  Be creative.
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"My karma ran over my dogma"