Fact, or F(r)iction

 Last week was fairly slow at work. In fact, it was so slow that I had time to test the theory proposed in the video by Timacious. I followed advice proposed by an article on polwig.com, and only interlocked half the phone books together. While I lacked the ropes to grab and a gage to measure the force, my co-worker and I were unable to separate the yellow paged tomes.

http://community.discovery.com 9-11-08. 10-22-12

 The Mythbusters attempted to pull their books apart with two people as well, but quickly abandoned this approach. They instead used two teams of five on opposite ends, and when this didn't work, they tried all ten on one side, with the other end anchored. They then tried cars, and when that didn't work, they moved to two tanks. The tanks made short work of the phone books, but their scale showed that it took over 8,000 pounds to do it; that's not even combined weight of the cars used earlier in the episode.

• "Discovery Mythbusters - The Phone Book Myth." YouTube.com. Timacious. Nov 29, 2007. Oct 17, 2012
• "Phonebook Friction." Mythbusters. Discovery Channel. Sept 10, 2008.
• "Phone Book Friction." polwig.com. Kids. 3-24-10. 10-22-12