 are drawn to the points of contact, though the high-voltage device is perfectly safe.</p>
<p>That’s all techno-babble that, when broken down, means that your stoned friend from high school who drops by every couple months unannounced will love this thing. And at $10, you could outfit your lab with style.</p>
<p><a href=)
by
Matt Hickey
on
February 15, 2007
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That’s freakin’ sweeet…. I remember back in my nerdier days I had gotten a broken one from Radio Shack and replaced the flyback transformer (ups the voltage to get enough to excite the gas…. yes I also am excited by gas)…..
To do this for a $10.00 price point….
Look forward to many a low budget TV show outfitting their sets with these…
James: Good point about the TV shows. Reminds me of a story.
Back in the day, say, 1996 or so, when the X-Files was still a good TV show, my dumb friends and I would all get together, turn off the lights, and scare ourselves silly.
One night, we were at my friend Lucas’s house. The episode we’d watched had to do with aliens causing “missing time” while going about their abduction activities. There was a dark, mean storm outside, with the wind blowing hard enough to rattle the house. The power was flickering, just as it did on TV when the aliens would show up and you’d lose 4 hours.
My friend Sol and I were in Lucas’s bedroom playing with his assorted geek toys, including a Plasma Orb. They’re fun, but we’d seen them before. Sol left it on and put it on Luke’s nightstand.
Later in the night, Lucas walks into his room and we hear the screech of bloody murder! He tears out of there, white like a ghost, and says, “The clock! Look at the clock!”
We stared at his bedside clock radio as the numbers on it went wild, accelerating observed time, then reversing, then simply randomizing the numbers. Given the episode we’d just seen, and the storm, we all nearly had a universal trouser soiling.
As it turns out, the Plasma Orb was reacting with the quartz crystal in the clock, accounting for the crazy behavior of the digital display. But boy-howdy, we were scared. If you have an Orb, you can try it yourself, it apparently doesn’t hurt the clock. The moral of the story: if you buy one of these bulbs, and you put it in a lamp near your alarm clock, you might be late for work.