Electrical outlets

This morning I was thinking about plugs: E's slightly older Dell laptop has a two-pronged plug, while my fairly new Toshiba has three prongs. How come? Here's a good explanation. Basically, the round prong/hole on the bottom grounds the appliance so that if an internal wire comes loose, you don't shock yourself, potentially fatally.

That makes me wonder what the rate is of people hurting or killing themselves in all the old apartments in New England that I and other friends rented during school and afterward. My sister lived in a 100+ year old house in Providence with sloping hardwood floors, which I'm sure had no three-prong plugs, and significantly younger buildings in Somerville and Cambridge lacked them also.

Three-pronged outlets: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timporter/189874982/
(This first, lovely set of outlets I turned up on Flickr are from the Headlands Center for the Arts, where I lived and worked during the summer of 1996. It's the only place I've encountered a ghost, that I know of. But for some reason I can't get .gifs to publish.)

I took a great class on Batteries and Bulbs in the 5th grade, but either we didn't cover that, or 1986-7 is just too freaking long ago. (Last night at a stop on the Fremont Art Walk in which our neighbor was showing photos, one of her co-exhibitors was born in 1992. Yikes.) I'm pretty sure it did explain to me how I had killed my barely-used Smurf record player two years earlier by plugging it straight into the (240-volt-current) wall when we got to Malaysia.