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Erm, I'm pretty sure clinging to "current is the killer" is the semantics here...

http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_3/4.html

Neatly summed up:

Harm to the body is a function of the amount of shock current. Higher voltage allows for the production of higher, more dangerous currents. Resistance opposes current, making high resistance a good protective measure against shock.

The video is literally and 100% true, not semantics.

I always liked the comparison with a hot water pipe : voltage is the water temperature, current is the water flow.

(wire is the pipe, ahem)

Your video, Which is the Killer, Current or Voltage?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Yup - the title was hard to translate - "spenning på skitur" - lit. "excitement while skiing", where the Norwegian word for "excitement" also means "voltage". So - pun intended.

There are plenty of high voltage wires and wire towers criss crossing the forests of Norway - and there's obviously one here. But - they're usually not supposed to do this.

Friend of mine had a loose wire or cold solder joint in his zapper. Every time you pulled the trigger, I guess the diode lost voltage momentarily, and if you pointed at a white piece of paper, you would kill everything on duck hunt (win), and everyone on hogan's alley (lose).

It was cool for about 20 minutes, then he sent it in for warranty repair.

What Taylor built though was a fusor though, not a breeder reactor. A fusor is basically a vacuum chamber with a high voltage wire run into the center and a place to puff in a bunch of fuel gas. With a fusor you get a short term burst of radiation, but nothing before or after is contaminated. With a breeder reactor you start with a bunch of dirty material and make more even dirtier material.

Had to read up on it: http://www.skepdic.com/skeptimedia/skeptimedia105.html

A response to the article mentions this insight:
"He has some kind of odd skin deformation - his skin sample was clinically tested at VMA (Military Medical Center) in Belgrade and was found to have two skin layers less than a normal person. He also has no sweat glands (as you noted in your article) and also no hair, eyelashes, eyebrows, and so on.

His skin is very dry and its electrical resistance is extremely high, which enables him to hold wires under high voltage with practically no current flowing through his body. [Note: current = voltage/resistance. "Under dry conditions, the resistance offered by the human body may be as high as 100,000 Ohms."* ]

There are also some side effects of lacking sweat glands: when it is hot outside, he can not go for a walk without a wet t-shirt or some other cooling tool, otherwise his life would be threatened.

I also saw the video demonstration linked in your article, and I have to say that it is more sensational than truthful - the current is NOT coming "straight through his body" but through the electric wires straight from the electrical outlet, clearly visible on the video. His body is just a good insulator which mechanically holds conductors (forks) and nothing more than that. The reason for this misunderstanding is certainly the ignorance of Ohm's law and the relation between electrical current and voltage. Everybody can do the same thing if he has rubber gloves - or Biba's skin, which is the same.

There are also claims that he can direct electrical current through his body as he wishes, generate electrical current, switch on and off a nearby electrical appliance by his mind, and so on, but there is no evidence for those claims. "

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Man, electricity, voltage, battery' to 'Man, electricity, voltage, battery, Slavisa Pajkic' - edited by chingalera

This guys points are very valid.
I'd be happy to see a modular standard (like ATX) for notebooks/laptops, but there is none.

Truth is - for portable devices consumers demand them to be smaller, cheaper, and have better battery life. PhoneBloks would be larger, more expensive, and more power hungry than the highly-integrated designs for portable electronics nowadays.

I think a practical starting point would be a standard "socket" for an SoC, which could be upgradeable. The part you keep would be the screen, pcb, antennas, etc. The SoC could itself be an MCM, with multiple stacked layers. You would have to upgrade this "base" once in a while too, but only with release of new wireless standards that work at different frequencies.

Having a standard size & voltage lithium battery for phones would be nice too. Could anyone imagine how much it would suck if AA and AAA batteries didn't exist for other electronics?

I also vote microSDXC as standard for flash storage.

They seem to be fairly naive about how things work. It's true that most everything is a separate component, but their "base" would be nearly impossible to make. Every connection would have to be able to switch from being various bus types (CPU, Memory, Storage, Device), to a power type that can feed to various parts in multiple voltages.

Looks like complete BS. If anyone constantly had high voltage running through them, I bet their face would look just like that.

I'm an electrician, so I can tell you what he did could have caused an arc flash. They are very dangerous and can cause damage on that scale easily. I have experienced one first hand (on a higher voltage) and ended up taking an ambulance to the hospital to be treated for first degree burns to my face, neck and hands

It's all about potential difference. Electricity will normally arc about 1cm for every 1000 volts of potential difference (ground vs live). Usually the lines running to your house would be 220v (or 110v in some places), and insulated, so the critter is quite safe as long as he doesn't actually chew through the wire while standing somewhere grounded.

High voltage transmission lines are quite safe for birds to sit on, because although they might be 10,000v or 100,000 volts potential with respect to the ground, the bird is sitting on the wire and has a potential of 0 with respect to that wire.

So, back to these guys. Their outfits are protective, containing conductive material so the electricity will flow around and not through the worker, but as you can hear they were still getting quite hot. Usually line inspectors would have a conductive hook to throw over the line to bring their bucket up to the same potential as the line, the fact that they haven't done so is most likely precisely so they can make these arcs.

From the length of the arcs, perhaps this was a 33kV transmission line? I doubt they would have been quite so cavalier with a 110kV one.