The magic of hamsters

Mr Westerman was not a God,
In fact he even denied he was slightly odd,
But often the kids did hear,
As they leant to the door with an ear
'Bring the Hamster suit now, Rod'

Introduction

You never forget a good teacher, so ran the advertising campaign, true, but also you never forget a strange teacher. It is based on this that to honour a teacher, to protect the innocent we shall call him Mr Dave Godfrey Westerman, (you see that's his name, and by calling him it no confusion is made with the innocent...), anyway, by the process of some very dubious logic and a strange sense of humour, my friends and I (well, if I recall correctly, I had little to do with it), decided that he, when alone would attach electrodes to his person, put on a hamster suit, and then run around in a hamster wheel... we often got bored of chemistry lessons in the classroom next to it. Because of this, I have created this page...

But as to what is on it, ahhh, that is interesting, you see, a friend (<Shaun> ) found a list of 33 ways to get electricity from a hamster, and so he sent it to us (Matt, Simon and I) as a bit of light relief. Then we, er, added a few more, the list is reproduced below...

I will add explanations for some of the more bizarre ones at a later stage.

Original...

1. Stick copper and zinc electrode-needles in opposite ends of hamster. Use in series for higher voltage.
2. Shove them back and forth in Richard Gere's butt. Creates static electricity.
3. Go to Radio Chack and offer them the hamster in exchange for two AAA batteries.
4. Attach the hamster to a hand-crank generator and then drop it onto a trampoline.
5. Ignite in large numbers. Use heat released to drive steam turbine.
6. Kidnap and threaten to torture. Extort ransom from animal-rights activists and other anti-cruelty types: demand payment in the form of electric current.
7. Drop hamsters from great heights. Use water-mill like turbine to generate electricity.
8. Drop large numbers of hamsters into tar pit, wait a few million years, drill for crude oil at same location to run electric turbine.
9. Convince hamsters they're really lemmings. Show cliff to hamsters. Install turbine halfway down cliff.
10. Densely pack hamsters into flywheel shape. Spin rapidly. Attach generator.
11. Put hamster on electricity-generating treadmill. Feed back small portion of generated electricity into hamster brain pleasure center. Watch him generate his little heart out!
12. Seal large quantity of hamsters in air tight holding tanks. Add water. Allow suitable time to pass for decomposition. Collect methane gas resulting. Put gas in fuel cells.
13. Skin hamster. Melt animal fat into tallow and then form candles. Heat steam turbine.
14. Switch hamsters for P6 chips coming of Intel assembly lines. Saved electricity will be enormous. Cover performance loss by releasing new version of Windows NT at the same time.
15. Have hamster steal one of kube's magic cards. Leech power from resulting nuclear strike.
16. Accumulate enough hamsters that the self-gravitational force causes the mass to shrink and heat up. Use thermocouples to generate energy.
17. Raid PG&E corporate headquarters. Threaten to drop hamster down CEO's pants unless he gives you a power plant.
18. (This is, undoubtedly, the way to get the most power from them) Combine the hamster with an equal mass of antimatter -- a anti-hamster if you will. Then harness the massive energy release for power...
19. Have the Emperor warp and twist a hamster clone into an evil Anti-Hamster, Darth Hamster. This should be good for 4-6 sequels. Install tension to electricity converters into theatre.
20. 1. Find a good genetic engineer.
    2. Splice appropriate genes from electric eels into hamsters, because they're smaller and cuter and, well, hamsters.
    3. Feed the hamsters.
    4. Surgically install appropriate electrodes.
    5. Periodically drain off the voltage.
    Unfortunately, this only gets you DC current. P.S. How could I have been so blind? Splice in genes from blue-green algae, and you don't even have to feed the hamsters! (Well, maybe some phosphorous and iron and stuff)
21. Mail the electric company a dead hamster every day until they give you power for free.
22. Crossbreed hamster with Mothra and use resulting giant mutant lightning-breathing hamster as power source.
23. Give the hamster to Scotty, he'll find some way to yeild 20% more power from the dilithium crystals.
24. Take thousands of hamsters into orbit -- when the orbit decays, they will heat up the atmosphere. With enough hamsters, you could raise the planets temperature as much as you want.
25. Emmass (sic) enormous quantities of hamsters until it reaches enough mass to begin hamsterfusion in the core. Use solar cells to convert radiation to electricity.
26. Throw in more hamsters to previous (above) until the hamsterstar goes supernova... you couldn't want any more energy than that...
27. Repeat previous with another mass of hamsters... spin the resulting neutron-hamsters around each other in a binary orbit... use gravity waves to rotate hydro-turbine.
28. Give them little magnetic collars, and run them through a maze of coiled wires.
29. Reduce hamster to their component atoms. Compress the resulting plasma until it fuses. Transfer the released energy via heat/engine or energy conversion scheme of your choice.
30. Take two hamsters, run one through a klein bottle to convert it to anti- matter. Combine the first hamster with the anti-hamster. Harness the resultant massive burst of energy as per 29 above.
31. Drop hamster into black hole. Use photovoltaics to release the radiated energy.
32. It is a well-known result of quantum field theory that all fields are symmetric under the combined action of time-reversal, charge-conjugation and parity-inversion operators: the familiar TCP symmetry. It is trivial to show that time reversal and charge conjugation both take fermions into their anti-particles. Use this to show that plucking hamsters from mirrors will produce beaucoup electromagnetic radiation. (Hint: Do you need to pull the hamsters out of the mirror _going_backwards_in_time_?) Ref: J. J. Sakurai, _Adv. Quan. Mech._
33. Put female hamster scent on glass rod. Release male hamster. He will try to rub his furry coat against glass rod. Drawback: only creates static electricty.

Matt's addition

34. Give the hamster to Mr. Westerman, for his further "research" supposedly with electricity, but certainly involving electrodes and explosions (the verbal kind)...
35. Have Cadria release the PE of the hamsters by dropping them on specially made apparatus on the floor. Well, maybe that won't work...
36. Give the hamster to Mr. Currington. The hamster will, of course, be chemically expended, but exactly 43,667 Joules will be released and the room will be filled with fresh scent of various esters.
37. Try to give a hamster on an electrified treadmill to Mr. Beavin. Capture the energy as the poor creature tries to run away...
38. Give it to Diana who will use a microwave to try to crudely to release the poor hamster's internal energy in the form of steam.
39. Tillbrook will MAKE him give off constructive energy...
40. Attach a large number of hamsters in series, attach electrodes directly their cerebrum, and have Mr. Lockyear walk directly in front of their field of vision. The sum of the resulting tiny seizures should result in an appreciable current.
41. Give the Hamster to Nicole. Enough said...

Simon's additions

42. Force the hamster to wear trousers in summer and watch it release heat energy as it cooks, due to hot weather.
43. Obtain kinetic (motion) energy by placing hamster in close proximity to Carl Younges loins. Kinetic energy will be converted, in spurts, to heat and sound energy after a few minutes...
44. Hamster suggests it will become a life guard...resulting laughing energy should power a small engine for ten years.
45. Hamster suggests it is cold and wants to die...before it can say anymore potential energy has been converted to kinetic as a hand is brought down on it with frightening velocity. Bwaa-bwaa-bwaa is heard as sound energy...
46. Hamster innocently asks Currington what all the fuss is about chemistry, after all its only applied physics...!!!!!! ..."hmmmmm".... ...resulting sound, light and kinetic energy should power twenty power stations for the next million years...

My additions

47. Sit Hamster in Calculus exam after doing no revision, his brain will soon overload and explode
48. Hamster asks Mr Horne for more paper, when Mr H replies 'more, but you had some last week' the laughter caused by this joke can be harnessed.
49. Get Hamster to ask Chez Chez (to borrow Diana's name) for an explanation of any chemical theory, before hand attaching a dynamo to aforementioned non-chemistry teacher, when she gets exuberant in her definitions, (drawing smiley faces on molecules) you notice she starts to jump around... this energy can thus be harnessed...
50. Same as before, but attach electrodes to Hamster, aforementioned hamster will soon be confused and the brain's energy trying to understand should be harnessed...
51. Get Hamster to perform a complex physics problem (such as efficiency of a power station that is off-line), given it's maths inability it will quickly make a mistake, and get answer above 0....
52. Attach Hamster to bungee cord, fixed to a solid object (Mount Everest say), then, get it to observe it's position EXACTLY, due to Heisenberg his momentum will force him away very fast, the tension in the cord should now be harnessed for electricity...
53. Create a Chemical half cell using Hamster and Hamster sulphate...
54. It is a little known fact that Hamsters are NOT super-conductors, this is so well unknown, that if you tell scientists they may believe you, thus stopping all experimental work on aforementioned super conductors, and thus saving millions of kWh of electricity for experiments and silly screen-saver on computers they never use...
55. Take Hamster to black hole (check AA maps for nearest one...) Build a solid rig around black hole, and dangle the Hamster in to it, it will constantly be attracted and energy can be harnessed...
56. Actually HARNESS a hamster, and use it instead of a horse or car... by not using car you are saving electricity in battery

What more can be said...

Page last updated on 12th November 1998

Maintained by Julian Fletcher (julian@innocent.com)