I can save everyone a bunch of time and money. Any time someone wants to know if there is any X in Y the answer is always yes, there is.

Do what you want, its your money.

Is the diacetyl in high enough concetrantion to be worrisome? That’s a strange bit of information to omit.

To you or I, that would be lost time. To Doug, its another column.

The risk scales up with the voltage. The higher the voltage, the more demands we place on insulators. Insulators break down over time, in ways that are not always obvious.

Yes, and also the slowest. And the middlest. Impossible, you say? No, just highly improbable.

When Niven suggested his in ringworld, some nerds set about trying to figure out how strong the ring material had to be. Turned out it was on the order of the forces holding the atoms together, rather than to each other.

It is a fantastic book, but those aren’t structures, they are weird alien force fields (whose origin is explored at length in the second trilogy which I recommend). The strutcture is the generator, that is by no means small, but roughly moon sized.

One thing for sure, it must really suck to be the iraqi government.

The current thru your body, sure. Which is determined by a combination of your bodies resistance and the voltage of the power supply, as long as the power supply can sustain the current, which a car charger certainly can.

You’re right in that the system can certainly be designed in a way that it wont electrocute anyone unless its damaged. However, your description of the required damage is a tad off. At high voltages you don’t need to lick the contacts, you don’t even need to touch them, just getting close is enough. The insulator…

Yes, the internal resistance of the power supply. The high voltage is only there as long as the terminals are open. You haven’t actually experienced it.

Tube TV’s have killed people in spectacular fassion who went messing with them without first discharging the capacitors.

Electric fences, and other low current high voltage capacitors can only produce that high voltage across an open gap. As soon as the ciruit closes, their internal resistance needs to be considered, and the output across the terminals drops way down.

Wasnt there some relationship between voltage and current they teach in laser engineering school. Some ohm guy had something to do with it.

Exactly. The only way high voltage doesn’t lead to high current is if the supply is unable to deliver it, in which case the voltage actually drops.

I was wondering who would get that reference. The internet never dissapoints.

A car charger is a high current source. It has to be.

Hey, no matter what the propulsion method, it take a great deal of power to accelerate a 3,000lbs car to highway speeds and keep it going to its destination, and no matter how you store that power, there is a danger that it will be released in an unintended way.

Good thing no people have ever been killed by the result of little nifty explosions of gasoline.