If a man's reach does not exceed his grasp, then what's a metaphor?

The other day, I was struggling to describe the difference between the frequency of S/M play this past summer with the intense but less frequent S/M play now. In welding class, it hit me: voltage and amperage.

Amperage describes the power of the electricity, and Voltage describes the amount of the electricity. Think of voltage as the amount of water flowing through a pipe, and amperage is the heat of that water. So even though you have high voltage (a very large pipe), if the amperage (water temperature) is low, you're not going to be able to make a decent cup of tea. In welding, it's all about amperage. If you have a huge voltage but at a low amperage, you're not going to be hot enough to weld. The welding machine 'converts' (in a way, volts to ampers. So at rest, the needles on the machine will read 120 volts but low amps. As you weld, the voltage goes down, and the amps increase. So the next time you hear about someone getting struck by lightning and taking 20,000 volts of electricity, ask, "But what was the amperage?"

So during the summer, it was high voltage, but low amperage. And now, because the voltage is decreased significantly, the amperage increases proportionately. So it's still the same amount of power that we're dealing with.

That is so nice.

Interesting that we're talking about 'energy' in both cases, no? Maybe it's not a metaphor at all, but just a basic property of energy, whether it be electricity or S/M energy. I wonder if it would be the same with ultraviolet radiation from sunlight? An equation involving volume and power...

Huh, maybe there's a Grand Theory of S/M Everything in this... The S/M Unified Field Theory, discovered here on Singletails!

Easy, boy.

I don't doubt that if there are any electrical engineers in my readership, they're wincing so hard that their eyebrows are peeling off. Scientists hate it when pop psychologists take scientific theories and apply them to human relations. (No, your relationship with your boyfriend is not, in fact, proof of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, because Dr. Heisenberg was talking about Quantum Mechanics, thank you very much.)

But I still like the voltage/amperage thing.

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