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Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

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Re: Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

#51

Post by oniony »

I actually did this, inadvertently, as a kid in the 1980s on my parents' four-channel television set. From what I can remember (I was quite young) it pulled the colour towards the spot where I placed the magnet and left the rest of the image in monochrome. I vaguely remember finding it interesting the way the colours moved around but my parents were less impressed for some reason.

They had it fixed though: a guy came out from the shop with a hand-held degaussing tool and it was just fine afterwards.

Re: Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

#52

Post by wruza »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #48
bnralt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell, ball lighting doesn't exist. We have lots and lots of people who think they've seen it. But there doesn't seem to be any legitimate footage, which is pretty damning considering there are cameras everywhere now.

You’d think skeptics would learn their lesson after rouge waves. Tons of eyewitness accounts going back to antiquity but no footage, considered a myth for ages. We even had a bunch of math saying they weren’t possible/probable! (Ex once in an 100M years or so) so they were quite sure of themselves. The we started to get large scale buoy data and sure enough, rouge waves! (the math was wrong). Our understanding of ear…

Could the same be said about ball lightnings? Many common things became suspiciously rare after invention of pocket cameras.

I’m not questioning gp’s credibility, because I also found myself in impossible situations like kitchen pot overheating and exploding dramatically, which supposedly should only happen in controlled lab circumstances. But I understand when people can’t believe.

Added: we also should look for easier explanations, especially when it comes to early memories. Kid’s imagination is a powerful thing.

Re: Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

#53

Post by bnralt »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #48
bnralt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell, ball lighting doesn't exist. We have lots and lots of people who think they've seen it. But there doesn't seem to be any legitimate footage, which is pretty damning considering there are cameras everywhere now.

You’d think skeptics would learn their lesson after rouge waves. Tons of eyewitness accounts going back to antiquity but no footage, considered a myth for ages. We even had a bunch of math saying they weren’t possible/probable! (Ex once in an 100M years or so) so they were quite sure of themselves. The we started to get large scale buoy data and sure enough, rouge waves! (the math was wrong). Our understanding of ear…

Rogue waves are actually a good example. They occur in places where there’s usually no recording equipment, and almost no one claims to have seen one. Yet numerous ones have been identified.

Ball lightning supposedly occurs in places where there’s recording equipment everywhere, and people all over the place claim to have seen it. Yet we don’t have any evidence for it yet.

Re: Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

#54

Post by bnralt »

sterlind wrote: post #38
bnralt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell, ball lighting doesn't exist. We have lots and lots of people who think they've seen it. But there doesn't seem to be any legitimate footage, which is pretty damning considering there are cameras everywhere now.

what about the 2014 spectrum discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning ?

Yeah, there’s one paper from a decade ago saying they think a spectrograph was showing it. That’s the same paper another response posted, and the same one that kept popping up when I searched for evidence of it. It's the same single piece of evidence that someone brought up when ball lighning was discussed previously on HN[1].

It's telling that the Wikipedia article only lists once occurrence where scientists think they might have seen it, and devotes several paragraphs to it.

I’m not going to say it’s definitively wrong, but when people are reporting it all over the place, and there’s only one scientific paper from years ago that says they might have seen it on the other side of the world a decade ago, it’s hard for me to take it as solid evidence that it exists.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552081

Re: Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

#55

Post by Kuraj »

simonblack wrote: post #19

All quality CRT TVs are automatically de-gaussed on switch-on. That's the 'toooong' you hear when they turn on. A magnet might temporarily mess up the magnetic convergence with magnetised spot areas, but that should be fixed on next switch-on. The Earth’s magnetic field can also affect the picture That's because when the convergence controls are set correctly, they also take care of the magnetic field of the earth to…

CRT computer screens would also have a "Degauss" option in the on-screen display.

Re: Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

#56

Post by chuckadams »

wholinator2 wrote: post #26
TheBigSalad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had TVs move room to room and face a different direction and need to be fixed with a degaussing coil. I'm told it's from the Earth's magnetic field. Could also be that they were next to other TVs (arcade machines in this case).

If i had to guess, i bet it's the other machines nearby. I'm sure we've all felt the static from a crt screen when it's turned off. Being in a closed room of turned on crt's would probably create a significant field of potentials around the room. I can't imagine the earth's magnetic field is so erratic as to change noticeably from room to room. I'd think any variation of that order would disrupt the functioning of co…

Aurora Borealis? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your kitchen?!

Re: Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

#57

Post by dumpsterdiver »

bnralt wrote: post #34
animal531 wrote: post #24

When I was a kid in the mid 80's we had a ball lightning incident. Some family was over visiting and the adults were sitting in the adjoining dining room with us kids in the living room by the TV. Lightning struck somewhere close by and a tennis sized ball of electricity entered the dining room through the outside wall. It crossed the room in about a second, went through the wall to enter the living room and then acc…

From what I can tell, ball lighting doesn't exist. We have lots and lots of people who think they've seen it. But there doesn't seem to be any legitimate footage, which is pretty damning considering there are cameras everywhere now.

You could close your eyes and then as far as you could tell nothing would exist. Then you could go around calling everyone a liar who claims that reality is still there even though you aren’t seeing it.

Re: Did I destroy my friend's TV with a magnet? (2022)

#59

Post by db48x »

nneonneo wrote: post #36
duskwuff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very thin piece of metal (or a grid of thin wires in certain cases) that is easily magnetized. Worse, a strong magnet (especially a modern rare-earth magnet) can bend the shadow mask, causing color distortion which can't be corrected by degaussing.

Oh my goodness, I wonder if that’s what I did to my parent’s TV as a kid? I remember clearly playing with a large hard drive magnet near the TV and causing the TV to change colours - we ended up with a purple blob in one corner that never went away even after many rounds of degaussing and power cycling.

Yup. That’s exactly what you did.
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