i have two plasma balls (the cool plastic sphere things with the purple lightning inside that goes to your hand when you touch it) and a touch lamp (turns on in three brightness stages when you touch it). when i got the first plasma ball i turned it on and noticed a couple things.

 

1. my radio became very unhappy. nothing but static, no volume control, clock counting down by minutes... very strange.

 

2. my touch lamp ceased to be a touch lamp. it is now a regular lamp only without an on off switch. when you plug it in, its on, when you unplug it, its... im gonna assume i dont have to explain that one...

 

can someone explain to me what exactly happened to cause each of these effects? prefferably in fairly simple terms.

This site talks about how they (touch lamps) work. I don't have a clue, but maybe you can use their explanations to build an idea.

 

http://home.howstuffworks.com/question42.htm

yeah, i had never actually researched it but thats what i figured after going through physics...

 

but what does that mean? i overloaded my touchlamp and fried something? what did it fry? how?

That was my guess. Plasma is a bunch of ions and free electrons. Excessive amounts of electrons from the plasma ball somehow... I don't know, rendered the activator in the lamp non-receptive?