At 10kV, a random stick would be all it takes to start an arc. He knows what he’s doing.
True, True… Hay who thought it was safe to run 10,000V Wire through a flammable overgrown jungle?
I invite you to touch an electric fence with a stick then.
You’re describing my pre-internet childhood.
(It wasn’t a 10k volt t-rex fence though)
I’ve installed a few, and you do have to test them somehow.
Best way is a long piece of grass, hold it about 30cm down and touch the other end to the fence. Most you get is a little tingle
With your stick?
Yeah that’s people with PhDs in my experience
Yeah, in this case it’s so high voltage that the resistance of the dry stick wont mean as much.
I don’t remember the scene, but personally I’d test an electric fence with a nonconductor. You’ll probably get some sparks but won’t die. You do you, ppl in this thread.
Yep. Very domain specific knowledge but couldn’t pour piss outta a boot with the instructions on the heel.
The first film paints a different picture.
The whole point of his story in that film was his growth and development, started saying “kids smell” and ended holding two of them safe.
He was the one throughout who kept his head, stayed competent in the face of fear and dealing with chaos.
I always thought that was a piece of fence.
As a PhD who has tried doing home improvement projects, it’s the most believable thing in the film.
Some pleeb shouted at me, “I thought you were an engineer!” And I shouted back, “A software engineer!” while I hammer a nail with my shoe.
Ah, a C programmer.
I’m a regular engineer and yeah I pull such shit. Listen, there’s a reason I tell everyone not to do what I do.
The difference between a regular idiot doing a dangerous job and an engineer doing a dangerous job is the engineer knows which parts of the job he’s risking imminent death on. There may often be no other difference.
Actually some of the most naïve people I’ve ever met were theretofore academically successful.
My fiancee has a couple degrees while I just graduated high school. She’s incredibly smart but I’m definitely more street savvy. She grew up a bit sheltered.
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Really?
Genuinely asking, I’m just an engineer… with very very bad grades. Passed was enough for me.
Once a professor asked me if I wanted to take the exam again because it was clear that I knew more than what I showed on the exam (a lot of 2 + 2 = 5 mistakes, I was fairly good at that and owe most of my low grades to that). I asked him if I passed, he said yes. Fuck that shit, I’m taking that grade and parading it across town, wooohoo 🥳.
As they say, a PhD is about learning more and more about less and less. Some of the smartest people at conferences I’ve attended legitimately risk death crossing the street.
Lol 😂, reminds me of some of the professors at uni 😂.
Wet wood from the ground is probably a better conductor than dinosaur scales
Did dinosaurs have scales?
They couldn’t even read music at all 😞
They sold a lot of coke though
They did in Jurassic Park
I dont think so, bananas are a relatively new thing iirc.
Mmmmmh, nom nom nom nom.
That’s exactly the right amount of dopamine hit I’m scrolling for. Now I can turn off my phone and roll over to sleep. Thanks bud 👌
Obviously: how would they weight themselves otherwise?
Why would they? Dinosaurs were notoriously body positive
Literal lol
A high voltage electric fence. At some point even standing in front of the thing is enough.
Air only has so much resistance itself. High enough voltage and the closest path to ground is where the charge will go.
Just like with Lightning
My arm once got pulled into an electric fence when I was a kid and I couldn’t stop getting shocked until someone physically pulled me away. It was more of a self-control issue than accidentally bridging the gap.
That was the day I learned that some pain can be pleasant. The owner of the property didn’t seem as pleased with my discovery as I did. He had to shut off the fence and yanked my arm away and then told me to go explore my perversions somewhere else. I was too young to understand the word “perversion,” and I’m now eternally grateful to that poor unprepared rancher.
This paints a funny picture and caused a chuckle
You find it enjoyable? I regularly touch electric fences, but not because I want to but because I’m too stupid to think of another way to figure out if the thing is working. I find it to be the opposite of pleasant.
Oh. Here’s your fix:
A longish piece of green grass. Hold it by one end, then slide it on the fence wire like the grass was a violin bow, getting your fingers closer and closer to the fence. At some point you notice a pinging, or your fingers are touching the fence.
You can use this to gauge, very roughly, how powerful the charge is at that point.
I never said it was pleasant. But sometimes some types of pain are the right kind of pain.
Example of the opposite: when I’m swapping a switch in my old-ass house, sometimes I’m too lazy to turn off the breaker. When I inevitably shock myself, I say “dammit” because I’m trying to concentrate, not discover my preteen proclivities.
Edit: well slap me silly and call me a liar, I literally said the words “some pain can be pleasant.” I blame this error on undeserved confidence and complacency.
For more fun form a chain with other people and be the furthest from the person touching the fence.
At approx 3kV/mm, you would have to be pretty close to a 10kV fence.
Humidity plays a big role as does the frequency that the fence is running on. But you would be pretty safe standing a meter away, on that dry sunny day in the picture.
Also above a point, the high voltage causes the conductors to buzz.
Dry? It was a carribean island, right? Probably humid as fuck.
Yes, but it isn’t hosing down with rain…
That buzzing sound is terrifying, by the way, if you’re close enough to a very high voltage.
In some way it is comforting, you know the power is where it is supposed to be… Walking around a 11kV switchyard that buzz is good.
10/3 millimeters away, to be precise.
With enough voltage, everything is a conductor.
I have a 10KV electric fence. 5KV to 15KV is typical electric fence voltage in a farm or bear prevention fence. Can’t feel a thing unless you actually touch it.
They are also not lethal. Very low current, just very high voltage. So it only hurts like fuck, but won’t kill a human, cow, or any other mammal that touches it.
They can kill an animal (including a mammal) if they become entangled and give up out of suffering, though.
This is pretty rare, but can happen.
It’s virtually zero risk to a human, though, who can cognize things like getting their hand disentangled from a string (even in a panic situation), or to most mammals, which tend to jerk backwards on contact.
They can’t kill you, but I know from experience that they can knock you out for a bit if you get shocked through your head.
This is why you should never try to remove a tree from a power line yourself.
Electricity always takes the path of least resistance back to the source. A tree, and possibly your body, may end up being the “path of least resistance”.
You won’t know if YOU are the path of least resistance or it the line is even energized until it’s too late.
Yup, this is why I shoot fallen tree limbs with a shotgun.
Off of power lines, right?
Yup, nothin’ like a little buckshot in the mornin’.
Yeah for when the little plants and leaves and dandelion wisps fall near my deck I got some anti vermin shot rounds for the .38
Also, a high voltage electric fence with indicator lights that he already knew were off.
Clearly his PhD is not in electrical engineering or biology
It’s actually a PhD in trombone. Someone misheard it one time, and nobody has ever thought to follow up.
“Oh, Alan? Yeah, he has a doctorate in bones or something.”
His job is beach
IIRC, he was messing with the kids and knew it was off because the lights were off. He proceeded to put his hands on it and convulse wildly as a joke.
He was messing with the kids when he grabbed the wires, not when he threw the stick.
Selling the bit is important too
I always saw it as being part of messing with the kids, he looks at the warning lights on top of the fence first. And for my headcannon at least, Grant is savvy enough to know that’s no way to test if the fence is live or not, lol.
Just because you’re very good at one thing doesn’t mean you’re good at another. Sometimes the further you go down one path, the less you know about everything else.
He must be a real good paleontologist to forget that wood is a bad conductor.
He was so good that John Hammond sought him out to invite him to the park to check it out before it opened.
Hammond didn’t pick him, the insurance company did. The company insisted on only him, likely because he was a notorious skeptic who would be able to look past the sensationalism of the dinosaurs to let them know a realistic risk assessment. The dinner scene where he and Ellie criticize Hammond is exactly why they wanted him there.
Point being, no indication is actually given that he was smarter or more published than the others in his field, because that isn’t really what the insurance was after.
I could be wrong but I remember Hammond choosing Grant, not the insurance company
No it’s the insurance company. It’s that scene the very beginning where the lawyer is going to visit the the guy digging for Amber. He’s the lawyer for the insurance company, he mentions that he’s going to get Grant. Then the other archaeologist says he won’t get Grant cuz Grant’s a digger. Which now I think about it I guess means that Hammond is interfering with the impartiality of the evaluators by bribing them.
They didn’t have electric fences in the jurassic era, duh. /jk
Even throwing a metal pipe against it won’t do anything. Electric fences have one electrode in the ground, and that’s how your body makes the circuit. If they had run and jumped onto the fence, then jumped off on the other side they would have been fine with the fences still active.
Source: I’ve set up an electric fence and been shocked multiple times, once through my head.
You’re assuming the dinosaur fence operates on the same principal as a regular livestock electric fence. I put it to you that the Dino enclosures use alternating positive and negative stringer wires, where touching one won’t do anything, but touching two will make a short circuit.
That would make a lot of sense, but as we can see the stringers are connected together, meaning they’d just short out if they were alternate polarities. To me this indicates that it’s like a standard livestock fence, with an electrode in the ground somewhere and the circuit completing through the animal.
However, considering my 16’x48’ pig enclosure required a three-foot rod to be grounded, a system large enough for a sauropod would need a lot of grounding. Considering this, the fact that they used a circuit-through-animal design indicates it probably wasn’t the best way to do it.
Spared no expense…
Maybe the stringer spacers are polymer though. Like those separation bars you see on residential power lines
Maybe they’re polymer but they look pretty metallic and there’s an awful lot of them. Plus if the stringers are under enough tension for a full grown man to climb them they wouldn’t need separators.
Yet Tim gets shocked when hanging on the fence when it turns on while he’s climbing down. I trust movie science far more than your acquired knowledge. Your ignorance is probably what’s holding you back from full blown deity.
Ever seen birds standing on powerlines?
uhm, I’ve seen (touched, oops) electric fences (low power tho) with both conductors in the wire, uncovered but not touching.
Oh yeah everyone knows electricity
.It looks so easy, and it is easy, but then it kills you.
Anything conducts electricity if there is enough of it.
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The higher the voltage, the less the electricity cares how good a conductor something is. Air is a shitty conductor, and yet, lightning doesn’t give a shit.
How good of a conductor wood is depends on its state. If it is very dry and not salty, this should be safe (although he could have taken the piece of wood more at the end to increase the distance between him and the fence and the length=isolation through the piece of wood). If it is wet and salty, it might be dangerous.
There was a major storm just a few hours before this, so the wood is likely wet. However, he threw it against the fence; he wasn’t touching it when it made contact with the wires.
Yeah. Therefore the wood won’t do anything.
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