<story><title>Why Three Prongs? (1996)</title><url>http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;100V, 240V, if 15 amps runs through you, you’re having a really bad day either way. That’s another way of saying, “it ain’t the volts, it’s the amperage.”</text></item><item><author>GuB-42</author><text>- Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world. At least when it comes to electrocution. I suppose that it is also the reason why in Europe, where the standard voltage goes up to 240V, electrical safety is much more strict.&lt;p&gt;- As it is already mentioned, Japan is backwards in several domains and that may just be one of these. That&amp;#x27;s despite their technological advance in others.&lt;p&gt;- I have a feeling that there are more &amp;quot;perfect electricians&amp;quot; in Japan than anywhere else, because of their culture.&lt;p&gt;- Some 2-prong devices are perfectly safe because they are double insulated. This is also called Class II and the symbol for it is a square inside another square.</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>The obvious follow up question, then, is: why does Japan use 2-prong outlets even today?  Are Japanese people dying from electrical shock at a much higher rate than the rest of the world?  Is Japan full of only Perfect Electricians?  Or is this not actually the significant problem that this myth (in the etiological sense, not the fictional sense) would lead us to believe?&lt;p&gt;The only 2-prong device I own is a (Japanese-made, of course) rice cooker.  You&amp;#x27;d think that if any device warranted 3-prong safety, it&amp;#x27;d be a metal container which combines water and mains electricity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwallin</author><text>I = V&amp;#x2F;R&lt;p&gt;So given relatively constant resistance, voltage is linearly proportional to amperage. Double the volts, double the amps.&lt;p&gt;The resistance of the human body can vary, for instance, if you&amp;#x27;re sweating, your resistance drops, therefore the amperage increases. Dry skin has high resistance, so if you stab electrodes through your skin and into your flesh, the low resistance of your mostly salt water body will carry a high amperage. But with all environmental factors being equal, if one person gets zapped by 100V and another person gets zapped by 240V, the person zapped by 240V will have 2.4x the amps running through them, and their day will be roughly 2.4x worse.&lt;p&gt;In other words, sure, guns don&amp;#x27;t kill people, bullets kill people. But you&amp;#x27;ll find that whenever a bullet kills sometime, there was probably a gun involved.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Three Prongs? (1996)</title><url>http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;100V, 240V, if 15 amps runs through you, you’re having a really bad day either way. That’s another way of saying, “it ain’t the volts, it’s the amperage.”</text></item><item><author>GuB-42</author><text>- Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world. At least when it comes to electrocution. I suppose that it is also the reason why in Europe, where the standard voltage goes up to 240V, electrical safety is much more strict.&lt;p&gt;- As it is already mentioned, Japan is backwards in several domains and that may just be one of these. That&amp;#x27;s despite their technological advance in others.&lt;p&gt;- I have a feeling that there are more &amp;quot;perfect electricians&amp;quot; in Japan than anywhere else, because of their culture.&lt;p&gt;- Some 2-prong devices are perfectly safe because they are double insulated. This is also called Class II and the symbol for it is a square inside another square.</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>The obvious follow up question, then, is: why does Japan use 2-prong outlets even today?  Are Japanese people dying from electrical shock at a much higher rate than the rest of the world?  Is Japan full of only Perfect Electricians?  Or is this not actually the significant problem that this myth (in the etiological sense, not the fictional sense) would lead us to believe?&lt;p&gt;The only 2-prong device I own is a (Japanese-made, of course) rice cooker.  You&amp;#x27;d think that if any device warranted 3-prong safety, it&amp;#x27;d be a metal container which combines water and mains electricity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>Path (through the body) and frequency also matter.  See generally:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hypertextbook.com&amp;#x2F;facts&amp;#x2F;2000&amp;#x2F;JackHsu.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hypertextbook.com&amp;#x2F;facts&amp;#x2F;2000&amp;#x2F;JackHsu.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I recall a story, late 1990&amp;#x27;s to early oughts, of a solo researcher found dead in his lab of apparent heart failure whilst working with very low voltage- and amperage currents, but at critical frequencies.  I cannot find an online reference presently.</text></comment>