What is Digg?65 Comments
- fatcat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+45if some one invited me into a truck to listen to thier potatoe speakers, i would just walk a way.
- flizzoyd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25Sounds like the beginning of a serial killer novel. The potatoes are just placeholders until he gets enough heads.
- dandyhighwayman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23The zinc from the electrodes (nails) leeches into the potato. So, unless you have a zinc deficiency, stay away from those spuds!
- swanny89, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24Oregon? I expected Idaho.
- lane.montgomery, on 10/12/2007, -1/+23This just in, local man arrested for what appeared to be a gigantic potato bomb in the back of a uhaul truck.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17lol, cache'd :
webserver is running off potatoes too? less than 100 diggz - Blah_Blah_Blah, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13more like, what song did he play?
- rebz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13brucebeh: you're a troll, if you wanna see a site, and someone's nice enough to give their bandwidth for it, you better well damn take what you can get
- lordsandwich, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11"Don't eat potatoes after using them for a battery."
Am I missing a punch line or is there really something wrong with de-juiced potatoes? - bsoric, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Make the potatos power the gun. A spud-powered spud-gun.
Now *that's* a science fair project. - dandyhighwayman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Great job. I did a lemon battery for a class recently. A whole bag of lemons (cut in half) could barely light up an LED!
- ynggrsshppr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Provided the animals don't get to your "battery" first.
- jkdrum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6He didn't need to use whole potatoes. He could have just cut the potatoes in slices and sandwiched in the copper and zinc to create a cell then sandwich the cells together. Of course that would not be as dramatic. It would be more fun to make batteries out of aluminum foil a salty wet paper towel and activated charcoal. This makes an Aluminum-air battery.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12Mirrored:
http://www.epicconstructions.com/mirror/potatobat/ - swhite1987, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5More like how much did that cost?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5You guys are being too scientific
It's becuase if you ate 500lbs of potatos you'd be more potato than man - trogdor282, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5sishgupta. the size of a battery doesn't determine the voltage. it's the number of cells in series times the voltage per cell. cell voltage is a fixed constant determined by the kind of chemicals in the battery. check out a little 9v battery versus a bigger 1.5 volt 'D' cell or a bigass 6v lantern battery. larger batteries can just put out more amps for longer.
you could thinly slice a single potato and make a 100 volt battery out of it. just expect it to go dead FAST. - burke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I still don't understand why they don't add a secondary link for each frontpage story for the coralized version,
- AngryPenguin47, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4you have completely missed the point of this article...no one here thinks this is practical, but that doesn't detract from the point that its still cool.
Digg. - csimpkins, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4But how long did it last?
- tidu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Potatoes are the new lollipops. I hear the kids love 'em.
- jeremy66158, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4google cache:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:bXNDvLNnLHYJ:latteier.com/potato/+%22500+pounds+of+potatoes%22&hl=en&g - RobotCitizen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Some people find a certain challenge and exhileration in reinventing the potatochip.
- jcmaco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's not the potatoes nor the lemons that provide power, it's the different materials that you put in your "electrolyte" that makes the battery. In this case, he used copper and zinc (or maybe steel). Theses two materials only provide about 1,1 V in an ideal electrolyte. In fact, this whole experiment could have been a lot better if he sliced the potatoes and stacked strips of nickel and copper.
- s14sh3r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3cool! Didn't I see the professor do something like this on giligans island? Maybe it was with coconuts...
As for the song...maybe "mashed potatoes" by the Kingsmen? lol - camintmier, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Looks like that'd make excelent spud-gun ammo.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"I installed the battery and sound system in the back of a U-Haul truck and drove it around town inviting people to enter the truck and take a listen."
If you:
a) were dispensing candy
and
b) have a mustache,
I'm reporting you to the authorities. : ) - Pignanelli, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Maybe he has a farm, but where I live, that's $150 in potatoes (10lb bags)... (He might have bought them cheaper in bulk tho)
- Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I think you'd get better efficiency if you burned the potatoes and used the heat to drive a Stirling engine.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2But if he'd done that then people would have said 'why did he bother slicing up that many potatos...he could have just stick the copper and zinc in whole potatos'
- RobotCitizen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Copper and zinc are considered trace minerals in nutrition because we only have and need them in trace amounts. Copper toxicity is very rare outside of Wilson's Disease, but it can occur from using copper cookware or copper plumbing. Some household chemicals contain copper which spells trouble if those chemicals are ingested by a baby or a suicidal adult. Low toxicity means nausea, vomitting, diarrhea. High toxicity means possible liver failure, kidney failure, death. In India there's a thing called Indian childhood cirrhossis which is probably caused by feeding kids milk that was boiled or stored in copper pots.
Zinc toxicity can cause gastrointestinal upset, or in worse cases, some neurological damage (like the "metal fume fever" or "zinc shakes" in people working in old-time brass foundries).
Deficiency in these minerals is more common. - MSIGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Too much of anything is bad to you, and really, would you want to eat a potato with a zinc nail through it?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1why cant you eat them... *thinks back to chemistry*
ok so copper and zinc ions should be floating around inside the potatoes.... im not a doctor, but I know you can get copper poisening, but I would think you would need to shoot up copper like a heroin addict to do it. Is zinc bad for you? - xeroskill, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4thats just crazy, thats taking a science fair project to the next level.
- Daychilde, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Awesome.
- RobotCitizen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yup, it's all about the surface area.
- sahaskatta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Coral Cache Link
http://latteier.com.nyud.net:8080/potato/ - leboff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1photobucket pics:
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v233/xur17/potatobat/install.jpg
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v233/xur17/potatobat/detail.jpg
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v233/xur17/potatobat/detail2.jpg - dubski, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I didn't see any ads?? Oh thats right I'm using Firefox with AdBlock. I miss ads...not. :-P
- sishgupta, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Im no expert, but from grade 11 computer engineering I remember that the average LED used like 2v.
This potato experiment got 5v from 500lbs of potatoes. You would have needed 200lbs of potatoes for an LED.
I wonder how lemons would be different from potatoes when used as a battery.
You could have used something else instead of an LED to illustrate the idea behind your project. There are some super super low power LCD clocks out there that would have worked with just 1 lemon. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Maybe they were off / chucked out / surplus / etc etc
- speedmaster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There's a Matrix joke in here somewhere. ;-)
- AngryPenguin47, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yet another misses the point...
- TomP, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.red76.com - Very bad nav
- naturalcauses, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1someone has to much time on their hands
- kc7gr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes, but does it make Julienne fries? ;-)
- fruitllama, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0More about Potatoes
http://www.bigsiteofamazingfacts.com/history-of-potatoes - Migdilio, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1At the very least, it's practical.
- seannicholls, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I love this crazy science, keep it up
- jeremy66158, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Goog cache:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:bXNDvLNnLHYJ:latteier.com/potato/+%22500+pounds+of+potatoes%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a -
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