| phil chastney 2006-05-19, 3:56 am |
| Stefano "WildHeart" Lanzavecchia wrote:
>
>
> Lovely. And to stay on the topic: I have a master in Physics and I used to
> ask people what colour they thought the electric field (normally called "E"
> in textbook and advanced books) was. Strangely enough, when I was a student,
> most of my friends at the university and I agreed that it had to be green.
> And that "D" (electric induction) was orange, "H" (magnetic field) was
> grey...
Seymour Papert used to ask children what colours they associated
with the numbers up to 10, and where they were positioned in space
-- I believe that the children had no problem answering these
questions, although there was no general agreement in their reply
-- I'm not sure if this stuff is in his Turing Award lecture
there has recently been some correspondence in Computing
(the UK w ly) about the taste of electricity, which varies
with voltage, it would seem -- I'm sorry I can't reproduce it
here, because the back copies have been recycled, but one
engineer claimed he could identify the voltage by flicking
a wet finger over one end of the cable -- his workmates
discovered some massive industrial capacitors going spare,
so they charged these up, and got some extra thick cable,
and asked him what 50,000 volts tasted like -- his first
answer was (I think) "ice cream", but before he passed out
his final words were "chocolate peaches"
don't try this at home . . . /phil
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