In
yesterday's post about toilets, the commenter David-2 recounts a story of getting up in the middle of the night to pee when he was a little boy and not only missing the toilet, but hitting "a very badly placed electrical socket."
I still remember the fireworks show! I wasn't shocked (electrically, I mean) or hurt ... just damn surprised!
A nice thing about blogging one commenter's lifelong mystery is solved by other commenters. SJ takes the first shot, but kind of misses:
And I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why you didn't receive an electric shock... The path-of-least-resistance for electricity was from the +110V AC wire to the neutral wire, and not through the urine to you. Now, I'm no longer surprised that you weren't shocked.
That brought correction from sojerofgod:
Actually, that is not why he wasn't shocked. Water does not actually flow in a stream. The surface tension of the liquid is such that it actually forms discrete droplets that are invisible to the eye due to the "analog" nature of vision. (See: Visual persistence.) Only if the voltage had been high enough to arc from droplet to droplet would the electricity have found him. -or if the distance was very short, which would kind of blur the line between "accidentally" and "deliberately" if the boy chose the latter, well, lets just say its a weird way to light up your life...
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