Practical things you just don’t understand

I understand everything and can do anything as both my videos and username prove.

Okay, perhaps I am not totally clear on the limits of my ability, bit other than that…

I know that there are words like ‘amps’, ‘watts’, and ‘volts’,

Elec-trickery

Great, why do I need to know the ‘pressure’ of electricity in this thing but not the amps or the ohms? It all boggles my mind.

Did you ever get into photography?  You have aperture, ISO and exposure time.  If you change one, something else has to change to keep it all in ‘balance.’  It’s kind of a similar idea.  The current (Amps) goes up as the voltage increases and down as resistance (Ohms) increases.

The total power (Watts) available is a multiplication of current and voltage, so (for example) your 2A phone charger supplying 12V will be rated as 24W.

[NB: This is for DC, AC is a whole other barrel of whelks.]

+1 for gardening.

Embarrassing as I work in a  garden centre.  I hate everyday of my working life now.

Last year i worked in customer services. Now I’m expected to know about plants. It is crap.

Embarrassing as I work in a  garden centre.  I hate everyday of my working life now.

I imagine with jobs like that, the staff must go one of two ways.  Like, say you work at Hotel Chocolat, you must either really love chocolate and come home with mad cravings, or you wind up being sick of the sight of the stuff and it’s the absolute last thing you’d want to snack on.

Pooters, mental innit all that jiggery pokery in microwotsits and RAMS and internet’s and that and out comes boobies. Mazin’.

Electricity is magic lighting that lives inside walls. Electricians are wizards that can harness said magical lighting. Simple innit!

Wallpapering

I don’t understand wallpaper as a concept. Just paint the wall.

i think the problem for most of us with electricity is the fact that it can kill you if you get it wrong.  ok we understand the water/plumbing analogy, and too small a diameter of pipe will produce less water etc etc, but….. get that wrong with electrics and you get a zap.

if you get the wrong voltage/ampage/ohms, why cant your telly just ‘run a bit slow’ instead of blowing up?  take 3 hrs to boil a kettle and give you a few minutes to work out what you did wrong?

wire a plug up wrong, why cant it just ‘not work’ until youve scratched your head to check everythings right, instead of blowing up?

drill through a cable, why cant it just ‘leak a bit of electricity’ into the ether until youve walked slowly to consumer unit and switched supply off, instead of blowing you up? 😀

the devil’s work!

Derailleur adjustment. It’s a black art that I’ve never mastered…if I do manage to “dial the gears in” it’s either a completely fortuitous accident or it’s taken me several hours of swearing

I can kick a ball, climb and code but electricity more advanced than very basic wiring baffles me. Two/three way lighting diagrams make sense until I unscrew the light switch or rose and look at it, then it just becomes lethal spaghetti.

Also possessive apostrophes, as well as verbs and adjectives. I must have missed that bit of school and now I have to look them up every time I need to know them.

bowline knot. just cannot retain the knowledge to tie one.

Knots of any kind are just something I just instantly forget – it’s just completely un-retainable information. Had a notion during a job that had long quiet spells to practice tying one or two useful, simple knots in the hope of them becoming a bit more second-nature. The problem with that is I can’t even retain the information long enough to tie the same knot twice in a row, let alone repeatedly.

Its not just tying them – I can’t remember the names of them or recognise one knot from another, so now I don’t even know what knots I was trying to learn.

I might have mentioned that when I attended school in Canada, we had annual science fairs, of the sort you might see on The Simpsons or other American shows.

One year, a classmate of mine did her project on electricity, and had, as her demonstration, a grapefruit and a bulb with wires attached. She plunged the wires into the grapefruit and we marvelled as the bulb lit up. I still don’t understand it.

What I do understand, though, is what happened when I thought no one else was about. I had a tin of ‘Orange Crush’ which, according to the labelling, contained 10% real juice. So I thought, ‘why not? I’ll just give it a try.’

I picked up the girl’s light bulb, and plugged the wires into my tin. I then learnt that aluminium can actually burn, that lightbulbs can explode, and that I was an idiot.

She plunged the wires into the grapefruit and we marvelled as the bulb lit up. I still don’t understand it.

Presumably had she simply connected a battery you would have said “so what” when the bulb lit up?  In fact the electricity wasn’t the marvellous bit it was the chemistry!  What she did by putting two dissimilar metal contacts into the grapefruit was create a really crude battery.

if you get the wrong voltage/ampage/ohms, why cant your telly just ‘run a bit slow’ instead of blowing up?

actually many appliances will cope fine if you put the wrong voltage in.  I think TVs will even cope fine if you put the wrong frequency in these days.  Realistically though for the scary voltages (ie mains) YOU don’t control the volts.  In any normal domestic situation – the volts are what the power company provides – so you control the resistance (ohms).  And the amps are automatic from those two.

take 3 hrs to boil a kettle and give you a few minutes to work out what you did wrong?

if you put the wrong volts in a kettle it will just take longer to boil (or heat up so quick you melt something – but that’s analogous to putting too much water pressure in and bursting your hose).

wire a plug up wrong, why cant it just ‘not work’ until youve scratched your head to check everythings right, instead of blowing up?

it depends what you wire up wrong.  With a British plug you’ve got a finite number of options.  One right one, one dodgy one that depending what you’ve wired may go unnoticed but could be bad, and the other are likely to affirmatively tell you you are an idiot when you try it!

drill through a cable, why cant it just ‘leak a bit of electricity’ into the ether until youve walked slowly to consumer unit and switched supply off, instead of blowing you up? 😀

maybe better to think of it as some really toxic acid!  If you drill the cable it will at least be bad for the drill, possible painful, potentially lethal.

Time management. I can do it, with constant effort, but seeing others doing it as if it’s nothing it might as well be bloody wizardry.

many appliances will cope fine if you put the wrong voltage in.

“Switching power supplies” are a relatively recent thing.

I used to have a Japanese Playstation which ran at 110V.  A mate plugged it in with a regular mains cable, there was a loud bang and a considerable amount of smoke.

Say you work at Hotel Chocolat, …you wind up being sick of the sight of the stuff and it’s the absolute last thing you’d want to snack on

i used to work at a Trebor factory- you could take as much as you want off the line to eat (not allowed to take it home tho). After a few days initially gorging  most people gave up eating the stuff.

bowline knot. just cannot retain the knowledge to tie one.

Watch someone tiring a bowline one handed- that’ll blow your mind!

My advice on electrics. Let the professionals deal with it!

you can’t see it!

you can’t smell it!

but you can effing well feel it!

If you can understand plumbing you can understand basic electricity

Exactly. Plumbing is about keeping the water inside the pipes. Electrickery is about keeping the smoke inside the wires.

I think TVs will even cope fine if you put the wrong frequency in these days.

My Macbook has been subject to 415V and 115V/400Hz at various times and still works.

Never found electrical stuff complicated.

Radio and speakers. Someone talks into a microphone hundreds of miles away from you, that sound gets fired out of an aerial and picked up by other aerials and sent again until your little radio aerial receives it then powers a magnet on and off really quickly which moves a cone of material and the exact voice sound comes out

i used to work at a Trebor factory- you could take as much as you want off the line to eat (not allowed to take it home tho). After a few days initially gorging  most people gave up eating the stuff.

When i was a kid my Dad worked at the offices at Trebor. He used to bring plenty home (was there a factory shop maybe?) We had a sweet jar as well as a biscuit tin. Then he moved to Philip Morris… where he used to get through 7 packs of Raffles a day.

A mate worked at Cadbury in Hobart where they could eat as much chocolate as they like. He definitely can’t stand it now.

Reading manuals for anything especially if it’s in 30 different languages and you have to flick back and forward

Building drawings with too many instructions that if you didn’t know you shouldn’t be taking on the work. It’s easy for whoever does the drawing all computerized, old school with a t square and 45° with just the design and sizes, plan, front elevation , end elevation and section through at important bits

Christ, where do I even begin… 🤷🏼

Gardening is just outdoor housework.

No, it really isn’t. Sometimes it’s a bit of a chore, if things get a bit out of hand, but planting things in pots, getting them to grow and flower and thrive is pleasing. I ‘inherited’ a number of plants from my late partner, and most I’ve not only kept growing, but in one particular case it’s thrived, and I’ve taken cuttings which have also grown and I’ve given to friends. I’ve currently got three cuttings which are doing well, and which I’ll be giving to her mum and her daughters, which gives me great satisfaction and joy. Another had about half broken off when a garden parasol got blown down on it, I managed to get the broken piece to root, I’ve potted it and it’s got new growth.

My big Acer has had some of its seeds grow in random places, which I’ve dug up, potted, and some I’ve also given to friends as presents, which they’ve been very happy with – mine’s a specimen tree, Acer Palmatum ‘Osakazuki’, it’s the most glorious red in the autumn, and the seedlings inherited the characteristics from the parent tree. I’ve got three more potted in the garden, and at least one is already worth £30-40, according to a local garden centre.
That’s not outdoor housework, that’s very satisfying indeed.

This is the parent tree:

and here are the three that I’ve grown from seedlings that had seeded themselves in various pots.

Architecture. I understand joining materials together, and how you can stack various joined materials together into boxes. But how you take everything required to build big, interesting buildings and, well, build a big interesting building that people can use and enjoy. Baffles.

Rebound (and compression) damping settings.

I know if I don’t want my fork or shock to return from compression as quickly, I need slower rebound. And when a manufacturer is helpful enough to put a hare and a tortoise next to the dial I’m golden.

But +/- symbols or referring in the guides as open or closed my brain says nope. I read up, I get it, I start setting things up and that falls out my head again. It’s not helped by many guides changing terms while talking.

Ice.

How, if it is the solid state of water, a liquid, it takes up more space.

Fridges. Energy goes in, cold comes out.
Defies physics.
im sure there’s a simple explanation.

but then you have heat pumps. Which helpfully, are described as ‘like a fridge running in reverse”

Ice, hydrogen bonds.

Imagine you’re in a crowd and everyone is moving quickly, so quickly you can’t fend them off and they keep bumping into you. That’s water.

Slow everybody down to a slow walk and you can fend them off with your hands giving yourself more space. That’s water as it expands to freezing.

Have everyone stand still with arms up so they have space between them.  Ice.

As I tell my S1 class. No such thing as cold only lack of heat (no such thing as dark only lack of light). Fridges works by moving the heat from inside to outside.

I imagine with jobs like that, the staff must go one of two ways.  Like, say you work at Hotel Chocolat, you must either really love chocolate and come home with mad cravings, or you wind up being sick of the sight of the stuff and it’s the absolute last thing you’d want to snack on.

I worked at Domino’s Pizza in uni. Never got sick of pizza, always took some home, it’s still my favourite food (pizza in general not Domino’s).

Knitting.

My girlfriend starts with balls of wool and somehow she makes sweaters appear.

Pretty much alchemy, as far as I can see.

Gardening. I understand broadly how to do it, I just don’t understand how anyone derives any pleasure from doing it.  Outdoor housework.

100% this. Yet I spent all day yesterday working on a trail. Rebuilt a berm with drainage, cleared a fallen tree, raked great lengths of it, pruned back all the branches along it. it’s a lovely bit of woodland, I even planted up some of the berms when we built it so they’d disappear from view from the path below (which worked really well)

yet I find cutting back the climbers or weeding in my tiny yard back garden is as much fun as cleaning a toilet

can’t tie knots, do anything involving balls (throwing, catching, hitting), and foreign languages are completely beyond me  (you remember another word for everything? And you need to remember that every object has an arbitrary gender? Wtf? How?)

In the past I’ve drunk copious amounts of alcohol, all sorts, some civilised, some dubious, some downright lethal.

Why, if I’ve drunk too much of one thing I end up being sick, ill, “I’m never touching that again!” Some drinks I can drink again. Beer, cider, lagers, wine, rum, gin, vodka, loads of other things. Why can’t I even smell whiskey, brandy, bourbon, without wanting to throw up?

🤷‍♂️

As I tell my S1 class. No such thing as cold only lack of heat (no such thing as dark only lack of light). Fridges works by moving the heat from inside to outside.

yes but how?

Mountain biking – been doing it for years, and still don’t understand how people in videos can float over rocks and roots at speed as if they’re levitating!

That plumbing analogy worked out well 🙂

Heat moves from a hot thing to a colder thing..

Fridges have pipes in them that carry refrigerant – this can either be a liquid or a gas, depending on where in the fridge it is.

Theres a part in the pipework where the refrigerant turns from a liquid into a gas – this process makes the refrigerant get very cold. this cold refridgerant is pumped around the insode of your fridge, ‘taking the heat’ from inside the fridge’. The pipes then lead outside the fridge, and the gas is then compressed (you may have heard of a fridge having a compressor) back into a liquid. This heats it up. There’s then pipework OUTSIDE of the fridge (it’s actually a radiator, essentially) that the HOT refrigerant passes through, and the kitchen air is cooler than the refrigerant, so this ‘takes the heat’ from the refrigerant.

Then, the process continues – the liquid becomes a gas again (gets COLD)…passes through the fridge and ‘takes the heat’.. passes outside the fridge and gets turned back into a liquid (gets HOT again)..passes the heat into the room… becomes a gas again (gets COLD)…pasees through the fridge..

DrP

 Like ok, this thing is 50volts.  Great, why do I need to know the ‘pressure’ of electricity in this thing but not the amps or the ohms? It all boggles my mind.

Too much “pressure” on Mr Faraday’s Elastic Trickery will melt the wirse through which it flows – that’s why you can use a really thin cable for loudspeakers, and e.g. something a bit bigger for a mobile phone, but need a really thick one for an oven etc