[jimmahoney]

I like Dave Barry's explanation of electricity (e.g. http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/Perl/Misc/electricity.txt ) including

"the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again. This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the last year any new electricity was generated was 1937."

and

"AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about unless you have carpeting."

[noonespecial]

Its actually worse than that. You keep the same electrons, the electric company just wiggles them back and forth and then bills you for it.

As my prof used to say about AC, "you don't pay for the swing, you pay for the push".

[agumonkey]

Funny Lagrangian view on natural elements property. Even the other businesses are just selling combinatorics.

ps: really nice kind of humor running in this article, love it

``` you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will attract dirt you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will attract dirt ```

[SunSparc]

Great read! Thanks for that.