this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
434 points (94.3% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
37850 readers
3922 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can short the terminals on a car battery with your body with no issue (there's a theory that that's why you see it in movies so much - if anyone actually tries it the studio isn't giving them an idea that actually works. Same with duct-tape gags and chloroform), but it might melt the hardware and set the floor on fire which would be fun! What they should really do is connect a HV source and charge up the pole. Won't cause any lasting harm, but hopefully it'll convince them they drove a screw through a live wire.
Who the hell told you you can short a car battery with your body? You absolutely can’t.
You definitely can. As in you can grab both terminals and not be injured.
Source: am high level electrical engineer.
That's not a short, by definition.
Isn't it? You're shorting the battery terminals by connecting them directly, it's just a shitty wire lol
The body is a resistor, limiting the fire of the system in the same way if a lamp would be in the circuit.
A short is a circuit with ideally no impedance, there isn't an ideal circuit and one can debate how much resistance would invalidate the term 'short circuit' so both of you might be right.
Yeah I think closing the circuit might be more accurate than shorting it in this case. That’s how we referred to it when I was training to be an electrician.
Oh yeah? What level?
Two joints
That's decently high ngl.
Just checking: Is this a semantic argument about my use of "short"?
The way you worded it makes it sound like it's very easy to short a battery with your body, not that attempting to short a battery will cause "no issue" because it won't actually work.
I'm aware - I very intentionally spared everyone the lecture on the mechanics of how this works because it is, on the whole, very boring. However if we really wanted to get into the boring technical details nobody but us cares about then yes, you are indeed shorting the battery, it's just for a ludicrously small amount of current. Ohms law (I = V/R) gives us that.
Thing is, you also called it "shorting" the battery. Usually a short is an unintended, unsustainable low resistance path.
While your body may technically close the circuit, calling it a short makes it sound like an actual electricution risk. That combined with the unclear "no issue" usage made it pretty confusing, I thought you had no idea what you were talking about until I saw your reply.
It's just the common parlance. I wouldn't have done this were it a more technical setting, but this is a shitpost community - so I'll just have to beg forgiveness for my imprecision. Fortunately, should anyone go to test this by fondling their car's terminals, no harm will befall them due to my lack of strict accuracy in the description here (though they might get rebuffed by their car if it's not in the mood).
No harm will befall them as long as they don't drop a wrench across the terminals amd catch the flying molten metal in an eye.
Oooh, because we're too dumb to understand the finer details of electrical engineering, is that it? IS THAT IT?
Because yeah I am too dumb to understand even the coarser details of electrical engineering.
Yes exactly, I cannot stand the idea of you plebs learning things. How dare you even ask about this.
Jokes on you, we CAN'T learn. Ha.
Did you mean short circuit the battery using your bare hands?
I meant contact both terminals at once with your bare hands.
But that won’t short circuit it is my point
Guys, GUYS! Calm down, you are all a bunch of nerds.
Okay, define nerd
😆
How do you mean?
A short circuit is when you provide a path for electricity to travel directly from A to B.
You can't do this by touching the battery terminals because your dry skin won't transmit the electicity. You're just touching battery terminals.
If you hold a AA battery in between your finger and thumb, you're also not short circuiting it. You're just holding it by its terminals.
But if you hold an unfolded paperclip to both sides, you are shorting it. The electricity can travel through the paperclip.
If you hold a nine volt battery against your dry palm, it's not a short circuit. But if you hold it against your tongue, it is a short circuit because the electricity can travel through your (wet) tongue. You can feel the difference.
As far as I know, there is not a large population using "short circuit" the way you were (just touching a battery terminals).
No, there is absolutely current flowing when you touch both terminals, it's just an incredibly tiny amount. You can do the math yourself and see, it's a basic application of Ohms law. The formula is (I=V/R). The reason you feel the tingles from a 9 volt you lick vs one you touch with your finger is that the resistance is much lower when licked, allowing more current to be produced - but the resistance is not infinite when you touch it with your finger, it's just high enough that you do not notice the tingling from the small amount of current that results from a circuit with such high resistance (also it travels across the surface and on a much less sensitive part of your anatomy etc. etc.)
Cool, til. I guess it is semantic then wether a short is low-resistance or any connection.
Iirc, even the air has a resistance value, so that would imply that all batteries are shorted at all times which doesn't seem useful for the English language.
A quite reasonable argument could be made that a battery simply sitting around is only connected to one circuit (itself thru the air) and thus there's not an "unintended" one it's also connected to that could be considered a short - but really, my unstated point this whole time is that this is not a usefully rigorously defined term. The definition on wikipedia is as close as we'll get, and it's extremely broad by it's nature.
Shorts are unintended low impedance paths.
Indicates you are not describing a short.
Sure, there is technically current flowing, but it is small enough to be considered an open circuit for engineering purposes. There is leakage current for every insulator, we don't call it a short.
(I'm sorry I hate doing these point by point breakdowns, it lacks narrative structure and flair, but I'm tired...)
The current flowing when you complete the circuit with with your hand is about 0.2 miliamps (measured at ~47,000Ω resistance so I rounded to 50k). If any engineer is considering that an open circuit ~~they should be driven through the streets in a waymo~~ I would very much like to see the application in which they consider that an open circuit because none is springing to mind (outside of clear outliers like some of the really weird switches used in high voltage electronics which I can't even remember the names of).
That is one type of short, yes, however if we look at the closest thing we're going to find to a broadly accepted formal definition (the one from wikipedia:)
We can see that it is not actually a requirement to have a circuit with low/no impedance; it's just a common form a short takes. The actual requirement is a circuit with lower impedance than the intended circuit. This makes sense of course: a short across a signal wire is obviously not going to dump the full potential of an entire system, only that portion which provides current to the shorting circuit. It would similarly still be considered a short if the conductor shorting the signal wire were a high-impedence resistor that was causing a false signal - so long as it's enough to trip whatever sensor is at the other end, it would be a fault caused by a short circuit. In the case of a car battery, the leakage current is part of an absurdly low current circuit (something like 30 picoamps) which you are shorting when you make contact with the terminals. The difference between a circuit with kilohms of resistance and one with near gigaohms of resistance is phenomenal.
However at the risk of still being right, let me say that this is an incredibly pointless semantic argument to be having. Yes, technically, you are shorting the battery. In a more formal setting I probably wouldn't have phrased it like that in an effort to stave off the chance of a tedious argument like we're having right now; however this is a shitpost community so I figured brevity instead of defensive technical clarity was the ideal course of action.
Misjudged that one, didn't I.
(Edit: clarity, removed horny joke. This is no joking matter.)