Since Orac is confessing to a stupid thing, I thought I’d repeat my own public admission of stupidity.
Public Service Announcement: Things Not to Do
Don’t carry batteries in your pocket.
This evening, I was stretched out on my recliner, enjoying a little light reading, when I smelled something odd—an odor of burning, and a faint chemical reek. I looked around and saw nothing, but the odor was getting stronger. I set my book aside, looked down, and saw something no man likes to see: tendrils of smoke rising from my fly. Then, I felt searing pain from my thigh. I jumped up and danced around (to the amusement of my daughter), and frantically tried to fish all the loose change out of my pocket. The coins were flaming hot. I was caught in the dilemma of letting my leg burn, or burning my hands trying to get these things out. I ended up throwing sizzling bits of money around the room.
I had tossed a couple of spare NiMH AA batteries in my pocket earlier, when I was out doing some photography. A pair of them had apparently jostled into exactly the right configuration to short out against the coins in my pocket, leading to the surprisingly rapid and intense generation of heat.
I don’t think I’ll carry batteries that way anymore. I now have the imprint of a pair of quarters scorched into my palm, and feel a bit like Belzig, the fat sadistic Nazi from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. And my kids are laughing at me for dancing around with my pants on fire.
And now I tell you this cautionary tale, O Gentle Reader, to spare you the humiliation of repeating my error. See how much I care?
Whether I’m admitting this to make Orac feel a little less alone, or whether it’s because I have reason to worry that he might be about to do the same thing and needs a warning, is left to the interpretations of the reader. You may also argue among yourselves which of us is more foolish.
I posted that about two years ago, and I’m pleased to say that I haven’t carried batteries in my pockets since. See? I can still learn! It’s so much more sensible and safer to stick them up your nose.
Been there, done that. A combination of batteries and keys is quite painful.
Once did something close to that. Not fun when you’re mostly copper like me.
oh for the love of–!
the movie is called: Raiders of The Lost Ark.
yes, that nutjob george lucas, in his continuing efforts to re-write history, has lately changed the name for the DVDs, but can’t we all agree to ignore his megalomania? for the sake of the children?!
Well, at least they where not some sort of Lithium batteries, you both might have spontaniously combusted. Seems that in those there are a) a lithium section which is **highly** flammable and prone to chernobal style thermal overruns (or what ever they called it in the article), b) a reactant on the other end to help make the electricity and c) a non-flexible semi-permiable “barrier” between them, to help prevent the battery from going into meltdown. Sometimes they don’t get all the lithium off the barrier, sometimes it cracks, sometimes some moron shorts the battery and heat from the result fractures the barrier. All very bad things. lol
Interestingly, a new design is going to use a flexible “gel” under development instead, which supposedly won’t have most of those issues. In any case, a NiMH is practically an icebox compared to the mess you get with lithium. lol
Oh, couple of other interesting things. 1) due to the demands of modern electronics, they only “work” when supplied with a fixed voltage, so a battery, even when “dead” still has 80% of its charge, just not enough to run anything with it. Also, NiMH are not used as much now because they not only don’t hold as much “usable” power, but worse, they have a “charge memory”. If you fail to fully charge them the first time, they somehow structurally “remember” the charge they previously had and will never charge past it.
But, as a rule, batteries in the same pocket as your change = bad idea. lol
I ordered some batteries from Thomas Distributing a few years ago and they sent some free 2 battery plastic cases which work good…now it looks like they send cases that hold 4 batteries, which would be hard to fit in your pocket. The ones I have are still available here…
http://www.thomas-distributing.com/at-bh-1.htm
Well, yours is certainly the more hazardous kind of stupidity. I’d stay away from lovely electronic things like computers and flyback transformers if I were you. :)
That said, I remember trying something similar as a little kid. Batteries and a paper clip. I wanted to see if it got hot. It did. Rapidly.
“A pair of them had apparently jostled into exactly the right configuration to short out against the coins in my pocket,”
Does that mean your pants have a high degree of complex specified information?
Ironically, if you made a recording of your dance and a recording of the people in the churge I grew up in speaking in tongues, it’d probably be difficult to see the difference.
I wasn’t lucky enough to grow up in a churge, so I don’t have any experience with tongue-speaking.
I did not then, nor do I now, consider myself as lucky for that aspect. When you reach the age of 16, and haven’t experienced the Holy Spirit you are considered a pariah. At least, that was my experience.
From the It Could Have Been Worse Department:
“I was caught in the dilemma of letting my leg burn, or burning my hands trying to get these things out.”
Of course, with your daughter sitting there laughing at you, I can see why you wouldn’t even consider the third option; rapidly shucking off your pants. Too funny. Get well soon, PZ.
> Ironically, if you made a recording of your dance
If you had a recording of it you could submit it to America’s Funniest Home Videos and you might have won $100,000.
The character in question with the headpiece of the staff of Ra burned into his hand is Toht.
I have no clue where he pulled out the name Belzig.
Toht’s boss was Bellock (?sp) – that’s kind of close to Belzig.
Stupid battery stories:
I seem to have permanently destroyed my laptop battery the other day because I (stupidly) assumed that whoever set up our lab back in the day had bothered to ground the table on which it was sitting.
High voltages, floating metal tables and laptop batteries are not a good combination. I am now the proud owner of a laptop with very limited portability (about five feet from a given outlet).
It wouldn’t be as entertaining to children and other onlookers but now I’m trying to remember if I have ever carried batteries in my purse. I think that I have, fortunately they never came in contact with keys.
Well, I for one appreciate your pubic surface announcement.
“Of course, with your daughter sitting there laughing at you, I can see why you wouldn’t even consider the third option; rapidly shucking off your pants.”
Funny, that’s what I was thinking. Because that’s just what I did. Except, of course, that in my case the source of the searing, red-hot, upper-inner-thigh pain wasn’t electricity but venom. Apparently, my Stupid Human Trick was to invite a large hunting spider into my trousers.
Also, FWIW, NiMH batteries do NOT have a “memory effect.” They may have the potential to develop voltage depression, though apparently that’s uncertain:
http://www.dansdata.com/gz011.htm
And as long as I’m griping about batteries, lithium-ions have more problems than spontaneously combusing if Sony made them…they also gradually devour themselves regardless of usage patterns, becoming useless in a few years.
Siamang: “I have no clue where he pulled out the name Belzig.”
According to Wikipedia, Belzig was the name of the Toht character in the original screenplay. Maybe it ended up in the novelization, too, or else Orac is trying to score extremely obscure geek points.
Were you lying earlier? Because that probably explains it.
Related stories, but much older, the first about 1958.
Back then my mom was a smoker. She had taken me shopping to get some school clothes. We had a little english ford to climb into when ready to leave. She had a cigarette in her mouth as she got behind the wheel, but it was gone as she came to rest there. She got back out and started looking around her seat and the floor for the butt and suddenly she started dancing and slapping her breast. It had fallen into a breast pocket and the heat took 20 seconds or so to get to her flesh.
Around 1974 my then teenage daughter was sitting in front of the fireplace doing some sewing project and concentrating mightily. Living in the country and all, she was wearing what we called shit kickers, high steel toed work boots, laced a fancy way to show off to her buddies at school. I was in the other room doing the dishes. I heard screaming, then running and then there she was, pushing me out of the way as she lifted her leg up to slam her foot into the sink and start running cold water on her boot. A log had rolled off the fire and onto her toe, but between the steel toe and her sewing, she never perceived it. By the time it got hot enough to feel, the accumulated heat in that steel was considerable. It took about 5 minutes to get the shoe off, and after some valiant attempts at home first aid, we hit the emergency room. Her big toe was a real mess and the next two pretty bad. She was unhappy for weeks, but laughs these days thinking back on it.
Maybe next time I’ll tell the one about me and the muffler, the blow torch and too much beer………
up your nose
I feel a Cheech and Chong skit coming on. “Lissen, doctor…”
Happened to me circa ’96. Was in a library and for some reason I had some alkaline batteries on me. All of a sudden my leg started feeling really warm. It’s was the batteries shorting on me.
That happened to me once, except I was driving at the time. Nine-volts are particularly bad in this regard, with the terminals being right next to each other.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Bisquick.
Bisquick who?
Bisquick, your pants are on fire!
This same thing also happened to me just a month ago.
I did manage to avoid dancing around like a fool, though; I guess there was only a partial short from the change, because I managed to notice and remove the battery before it got too hot.
Oh, stupid things.
I have done Orac’s thing, not noticing the well cut plastic protector on my first PAD for about a day. Of course, the return of that come later when a girlfriend showed her first mobile phone and I could peel the strip off while looking totally professional. We guys like that.
Oh, stupid things.
I have done Orac’s thing, not noticing the well cut plastic protector on my first PAD for about a day. Of course, the return of that come later when a girlfriend showed her first mobile phone and I could peel the strip off while looking totally professional. We guys like that.
My cable went out one day. Well, it didn’t completely go out, I still had sound and there were “ghost” images on the screen. I turned it off and went to bed with a book. The next day, I turned on the TV and got the same thing. So, I called the cable company and after about 10 minutes on the phone with the woman from Technical Support, she asks me, “Is you television on channel 3?” Problem solved. Damn, that dog’s tail.
Bah! Screw the children.
…let me rephrase that…
(Comments like that figure prominently in MY list of stupid things I’ve done.)
Changing the name was probably the least bad thing he’s done since Last Crusade…
me: sitting around a coffee shop a while ago (not very long ago, unfortunately) i had one of those disposable cameras, and all the film was rolled up. so smart me, i decide i’ll take the thing apart.
i got it almost all the way to pieces and cleverly grabbed the capacitator that powers the flash, resulting in everyone i’m sitting with pointing and laughing at me for a good ten minutes. they still do from time to time.
Gah; I know between being in underwear in front of my daughter (even if she were a teenager) and being severely burned, it’s an easy choice, embarrassment or no. And if she laughed too loudly at me I’d just threaten to tell her friends embarrassing stories from her childhood. ^.^
Things I’ve done include…um, repeatedly assuming that the people around me had the slightest idea what they were doing, continuing to wear a certain couple of pairs of jeans in spite of being aware that the zipper slips down about 3/4 of an inch every time I sit down and get up, not backing up the files I was storing on a certain USB memory stick, and the email I used to write, circa age 12, to Yahoo (our home page)’s tech support department to complain about the behavior of my internet connection (the adults around me weren’t real big on explaining things unless asked, for some odd reason).
Oh, right. THAT’s what I was trying to remember; the specifically electrical stupid thing I did. I wound up putting 120 volts through my hand once. I was working on the (*cringe*) 1.0 model of the machine I built to pump hot gas into and out of the company‘s sample bags to purge them of hydrocarbons, and it was plugged in but I’d disengaged the circuit breaker, which effectively works as an off switch. At least, it does unless the way you interpret your coworker’s vague directions about how to connect the Line and Neutral wires relative to the prongs on the power plug happens to be backwards. The result, unfortunately, was that SSR was electrified when my palm shorted it to the case. The experience was decidedly unpleasant. It was kind of like holding a vibrating cell phone, except about two orders of magnitude stronger, and left sort of a vague achy-numby feeling there for a few days. :(
The *cringe* earlier was due to the other stupid thing I did in connection with the bag purger 1.0, namely building it in a too-small case with inadequate cooling. Though it was certainly a surprise to everyone at the company when the heater managed to melt the fiberglass insulation I was using.
I haven’t had the battery combustion problem, but a similar unplanned combustion.
Waiting for a train, I started to smell smoke. It seems that the magnifying side of a makeup-mirror tossed on the floor was at exactly the right distance to perfectly focus the sunlight on the passenger car door. I ended up only with a cigarette-type burn on the door, but I guess the whole car could have gone up if it was parked and no one was around to notice.
The Costco pack of 9V batteries that my wife bought because they are cheaper that way, intrigued my 9 year old. She slid a few out and noticed that you can connect a pair together. She had all 4 pairs nicely cooking away on the kitchen table when I happened past. Fortunately alkaline cells have high enough internal resistance that they were just becoming very warm. A day or two later most of them were showing bulging bottoms.
We would have saved a lot more if we had bought them one at a time.
You keep your batteries up your nose now PZ?
Rookie error my friend. Depending on the size of battery (and bearing in mind I have seen your hooter first hand) I’m going with a minimum of 2 batteries, and a maximum of about 10.
I’ve been using a different storage orifice for a while now and at a push I can get 10 D cells stowed away. There are some unfortunate side effects. Certain things glow in the dark and my wife keep asking me to install a vibe unit, but apart from that it does make travlling through airports fun.
Louis
All stored/potential energy is dangerous in proportion to the amount of energy stored. Springs can kill you. Gunpowder. Gasoline. A loose brick high on a building’s facade. Water behind a dam. A pressurized aerosol can. And, of course, batteries. Always be aware that stored energy may be lurking evilly nearby.
This story would make for a good true confession.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TRAVEL/12/06/plane.passing.gas.ap/index.html
Infidel! If God didn’t want us to carry batteries and coins together in our pockets, the Bible would say so.
And we would have been created without pockets!
Wasn’t me, fortunately, but I did watch a nice battery mishap back in junior high school. The kid across from me took a dare about contacting his braces with a 9-volt. Not a bad jolt from that; probably just a bit more widespread than the old standard of touching it to your tongue.
That is, until he somehow hooked it to the braces in such a way that it wouldn’t come off. Given that he was more than a bit of a jerk, I declined to help in favor of laughter. I think someone finally managed to pull it off for him.
As for my own electrical follies, the best involved my father handing me two wires from and old hand-crank telephone and saying, “Let’s see what happens when . . . ”
After the third time, I learned not to trust my father about things like that. He did, however, hand me the box and say, “Now go get your friends.”
Interesting that so many people have experienced the same or similar events involving batteries. For me, it took two AA batteries, loose change, and a bluetooth headset that no longer works to learn the same lesson…
I WAS A CANDIDATE FOR THE DARWIN AWARD WHEN I WAS 3!
No shit!
At age 3, I had the curiosity of a future physicist, and confidence born of never having suffered painful consequences from leaping, literally, to a conclusion. (Maybe I was primarily utilizing the right hemisphere of my brain.)
At any rate, I figured that if my tricycle were going as fast as possible, I’d be able to leap a chasm (and this was before TV or Evel Knievel or SUPER DAVE Osborne or “Jackass”). I pedaled as fast as I could on the downhill sidewalk in the back of my grandma’s house in Wilmington, Ohio, straight for the chasm . . .
Hmmm, perhaps my mistake was to discount the fact that the chasm was a set of 3 steps leading to the house down from the sidewalk . . . and the other side of said chasm was a 90-degree right turn to the rough surface of a stone retaining wall which was nearly level with the sidewalk.
Duh Bumpity Bump Bump . . . I toppled over like that little guy in the yellow rain suit on the old Laugh-In Show. I busted my clavicle. Nobody mentioned anything about Darwin. After all – this was in Wilmington, Ohio – in 1945!
Not a battery story, but one night in the dorm back in good old Altered State, I discovered that telephones operate on on a lot more than a few VDC by touching the wire to my tongue.
That was a nominal -48V you got, the loop current battery. It would have been much more instructive if the ringing voltage were being applied at that moment. Likely some kind of temporary lisp would have resulted
Thats about 100VAC at 20Hz. Just taking that across the knuckles will cause most people to resolve never again.
It certainly isn’t always lethal to get hit by ringing voltage, as many telco employees can attest, but almost none of the survivors were holding the wire in their mouths.