Quote Originally Posted by Poconos
Wow, what an interesting thread. Funny too in a way. In the electronics world we don't consider concrete a conductor but yes...you can get shocked bad given the right conditions. Cracks me up sometimes when I go into an electrical supply store and they start rattling off 100 amp wire etc.....I know what I want...Ohms law tells me that. Not criticizing Electricians or the professon but there are those that just follow codes and those that understand the theory. Never read the full NEC but some of the rules don't make sense.
An interesting exercise for those in an urban or suburban location is to take a clamp-on ampmeter and measure currents on water pipe entrances, ground lines off power poles, phone grounds, and anything else you can find. You can totally disconnect your house by dumping the two hots and still find potential differences and currents. BIG difference in rural areas with large distances between sources and many fewer problems.
Someone commented about degrees....from what I've observed in the industry, an engineer is degreed. we all know the definitions:
BS -- Bull ****
MS -- More ****
PhD -- Piled Higher and Deeper.

I'm full of Bull from the place voted the ugliest campus in the U.S. on a Princeton survey per the national news in the last couple days.

I needed some humor today.
Al
I graduated from "Durvee Tech" as we used to call it, in 1974....the first of 3 degrees. Back then we used slide rules instead of calculators for trig functions because the 4 banger calculators wouldn't do sin, cos, tan etc, and besides.......the instructors (correctly, I feel) thought that doing the powers of 10 in your head left less room for error. You actually had to THINK about the (im)probability of your numbers. My dad had a this huge Tektronix storage o'scope that did a paper strip chart of 30 seconds worth of 1 channel data. I used it to get myself hired as a TV tech to put myself through school.

FF to now......I can't do math anymore because I lost my HP in the RV at the river. And I can't read the tiny printing (because of multiple language instruction manuals) of my other calculator, so I just use it as a four banger. Everything else is software.

The Tektronix is a family "heirloom", permanently awaiting long-discontinued tubes, while my Fluke DSO (that can be held with one hand while talking on a cell phone at the same time) has a hall-effect DC current clamp accessory that will run a 24 hour strip chart and let me see an AC+DC waveform and display peak and "lo" RMS or instantaneous transient values. Like you mentioned (Al) it's suprising how durable today's gadgets are, given the vagaries of local power utilities and their aging infrastructure. Our line freqs aren't even constant out here. (Tx hill country)

Everything has changed except the time it takes to get finished with work.The only thing I can think of that is pretty much the same, then as now, is the fun of going swimming.

STS