> On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, chris wrote:
>
> > >How cheap is it? How does it compare to Coke, in
> particular? Coke
> > >has sugar and caffiene mixed in, but also has a good deal of
> > >phosophoric acid in it. (I'm assuming, of course, plenty of water
> > >rinse
> > >afterwards.)
> >
> > Myth Busters on TV did an episode about the myths of Coke. I was
> > surprised to see that it really DID clean battery terminals
> in a car
> > better than water. It also appeared to do a better job of cleaning
> > chrome than the chrome polish they tested against (they didn't say
> > what the brand was they tried).
> >
> > However, it didn't appear to do anything for degreasing an
> engine, or
> > disolving meat or teeth :-)
>
> It *does* dissolve pennies, and it *does* eat through paint.
It also happily dissolves teeth - the standard "experiment" in
primary schools here (in the UK) is to have kids bring in teeth
(as they fall out naturally :-)) and leave them in a glass of
coke for a few days (and have a control of a tooth in a glass
of air there too). Tooth-in-coke looks pretty bad after a
few days whereas tooth-in-air does not look much worse than
when it started.
Of course, a real experiment might want to test things like
orange juice as well as coke but then we'd find that OJ is
about as bad as coke. (Although I don't think OJ does anything
for battery terminals - but then if you keep them coated
in petroleum jelly you probably won't need to clean them
in the first place).
Antonio
--
---------------
Antonio Carlini arcarlini_at_iee.org
Received on Tue Dec 02 2003 - 15:25:55 GMT