TODAY'S SCIENTIFIC QUESTION IS
What Is Electricity?
and
Where Does It Go After It Leaves The
Toaster?
Here is a simple experiment that will
teach you an important electrical
lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your
feet along a carpet, then reachyour
hand into a friend's mouth and touch
one of his dental fillings. Did you
notice how your friend twitched
violently and cried out in pain? This
teaches us that electricity can be a
very powerful force, but we must never
use it to hurt others unless we need to
learn an important electrical lesson.
It also teaches us how an electrical
circuit works. When you scuffed your
feet, you picked up batches of
"electrons", which are very small
objects that carpet manufacturers weave
into carpets so they will attract dirt.
The electrons travel through your
bloodstream and collect in your finger,
where they form a spark that leaps to
your friend's filling, then travels
down to his feet and back into the
carpet, thus completing the circuit.
Amazing electronic fact: If you
scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up
so many electrons that your finger
would explode! But this is nothing to
worry about unless you have carpeting.
Although we modern persons tend to take
our electric lights, radios, mixers,
etc. for granted, hundreds of years ago
people did not have any of these
things, which is just as well because
there was no place to plug them in.
Then along came the first electrical
pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a
kite in a lightning storm and received
a serious electrical shock. This
proved that lightning was powered by
the same force as carpets, but it also
damaged Franklin's brain so severely
that he started speaking only in
incomprehensible maxims, such as "A
penny saved is a penny earned."
Eventually he had to be given a job
running the Post Office.
After Franklin came a herd of
electrical pioneers whose names have
become part of our electrical
terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise
Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc.
These pioneers conducted many important
electrical experiments. For example,
in 1780, Luigi Galvani discovered (this
is the truth) that when he attached two
different kinds of metal to the leg of
a frog, an electrical current developed
and the frog's leg kicked, even though
it was no longer attached to the frog,
which was dead anyway. Galvani's
discovery led to enormous advances in
the field of amphibian medicine.
Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can
take a frog that has been seriously
injured or killed, implant pieces of
metal in its muscles, and watch it hop
back into the pond just like a normal
frog, except for the fact that it sinks
like a stone.
But the greatest electrical pioneer of
them all was Thomas Edison, who was a
brilliant inventor despite the fact
that he had little formal education and
lived in New Jersey. Edison's first
major invention in 1877, was the
phonograph, which could soon be found
in thousands of American homes, where
it basically sat until 1923, when the
record was invented. But Edison's
greatest achievement came in 1879, when
he invented the Electric Company.
Edison's design was a brilliant
adaptation of the simple electrical
circuit. The Electric Company sends
electricity through a wire to a
customer, then immediately gets the
electricity back through another wire,
then (this is the brilliant part) sends
it right back to the customer again.
This means that an Electric Company can
sell a customer the same batch of
electricity thousands of times a day
and never get caught, since very few
customers take the time to examine
their electricity closely. In fact,
the last year any new electricity was
generated in the United States was
1937; the Electric Companies have been
merely re-selling it ever since, which
is why they have so much free time to
apply for rate increases.
Today, thanks to men like Edison and
Franklin, and frogs like Galvani's, we
receive almost unlimited benefits from
electricity. For example, in the past
decade scientists developed the laser,
an electronic appliance so powerful
that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2,000
yards away, yet so precise that doctors
can use it to perform delicate
operations to the human eyeball,
provided they remember to change the
power setting from "vaporize bulldozer"
to "delicate."
(Article unattributed, but written in a
style suspiciously like that of the
columnist Dave Barry)
DIETING UNDER STRESS
This diet is designed to help you cope
with the stress that builds during the
day.
BREAKFAST
1 grapefruit
1 slice whole wheat toast, dry
3 oz. skim milk
LUNCH
4 oz. lean broiled chicken breast
1 cup steamed vegetables
1 cup herb tea
1 Oreo cookie
AFTERNOON SNACK
Rest of the Oreos in the package
1 quart Rocky Road ice cream
1 jar hot fudge sauce with
nuts, cherries, whipped cream
DINNER
1 loaf garlic bread with cheese
large pizza with all toppings
4 cans or 1 large pitcher of beer
3 candy bars or 1 bag of candy
LATE EVENING SNACK
entire frozen cheesecake eaten directly
from freezer
RULES FOR
THIS DIET
1. If you eat something and no one sees
you, it has no calories.
2. Drinking diet soda with any other
food cancels the calories of the food.
3. Calories don't count if you eat less
than your dinner partner.
4. Calories from medicinal foods never
count (i.e., brandy, cheesecake,
cookies).
5. If you hang around with fat people
you will look thinner.
6. Movie-related foods do not count as
they are part of the entertainment
package (i.e., Milk Duds, buttered
popcorn, Cokes, JuJus, Junior Mints).
7. Cookie pieces contain no calories.
Breaking causes calorie leakage.
8. Things licked off of knives, spoons,
or fingers have no calories, but only
when preparing something (i.e., peanut
butter, ice cream, frostings).
9. Foods of the same colour have the
same calories (i.e., spinach and
pistachio ice cream).