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Where does a candle go when it burns?
- LukeLambert 6y agoI had no idea Randall Munroe of XKCD has had a column at NYT since 2019. His illustration style is so distinct.
- shagie 6y agoFor a while, he was dabbling with long form (rather than pure comic) writing. https://what-if.xkcd.com https://what-if.xkcd.com Its more than a dabble - there are 157 of them, but that's the type of thing that a paper looking for original content and writing would like. The last what-if was published in May of 2018.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoThere have been occasional grumblings for a couple of years now that the humour of the XKCD webcomic has declined, Munroe just doesn’t seem to have his mind on the job now that he is doing these other projects. However, the what-if and pop-science explanatory stuff is generally of very good quality, so on balance one can’t really complain.
- vardump 6y agoWell, he certainly has already contributed his fair share, and most of it totally free, not even banner ads.
- ctdonath 6y agoThose were compiled into a physical book. The online content stopped shortly after; pity.
- shagie 6y agoThe book was published in '14 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_If%3F_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_If%3F_(book) ) . The what if long form continued on for another four years.
- gmuslera 6y agoAfter watching the first illustration went up and confirmed that was Randall Munroe the one that wrote it. I've been missing for too long his what-if posts. Still, would be nice to have his typical mouseover messages.
- smegger001 6y agoI was wondering what happened to those I figured he was just writting book of them now so he wasn't going to post them for free.
- yesenadam 6y agoMy favourite part of the book xkcd: volume 0 is the beginning of the introduction: Hi! This book is a collection of strips from xkcd, a free webcomic. I want to get that out of the way so you don't feel betrayed later when you realize you paid for a book of things that you could get for free on the Internet. I like books a lot, so I've put this one together from my webcomic (and added some annotations and other tidbits), but that's really no excuse for poor economic sense on your part. Still, if you've purchased this book, I suppose it's too late for regrets. Let's gloss over this incident and move on to the story of xkcd.
- ce4 6y agoSame here. I was intrigued by both writing style and then the way the diagram was drawn. Scrolled up and sure enough i found it's from Randall Munroe, as expected :)
- k__ 6y agoFun fact, this is also where fat goes when your body burns it: Into the air.
- 49531 6y agoA good demonstration of this by Ruben Meerman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuIlsN32WaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuIlsN32WaE
- datavirtue 6y agoExcept the fat goes out of your body and the candle is going into your body.
- datavirtue 6y agoI saw a study showing correlation between cognitive impairment and sub-micron particles in the air. They used candles for the study but coal factories are the large scale concern.
- rurp 6y agoRelated to this, I've seen research showing that by the time a room feels stuffy there is enough CO2 to measurably affect cognitive performance. Now I'm much better about remembering to open a window when I'm coding and starting to drag.
- withinboredom 6y agoHighly recommend getting a cheap CO2 meter. We have a couple around the house. It’s amazing how fast a room fills with CO2 when cooking or having people over (pre-COVID). You can become more attuned to it — I have a pretty good idea what 800PPM feels like compared to 500PPM compared to 1000PPM. Weird party trick too.
- gubby 6y agoWhat do they feel like for you? I’ve had a CO2 sensor in my office for a long time, and don’t think I can tell the difference between 500 and 1500ppm.
- niij 6y agoPaywall bypass: https://archive.is/9IOgm https://archive.is/9IOgm
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- js2 6y ago> Wax is made of hydrogen and carbon. Too bad he doesn't explain where the energy in the wax came from like Feynman does when explaining fire: https://youtu.be/N1pIYI5JQLE https://youtu.be/N1pIYI5JQLE Paraffin wax is derived from petroleum, so like the wood in Feynman's explanation, the energy is from the sun via ancient photosynthesis.
- throwawaysea 6y agoAll fossil fuels are solar power in that sense?
- 542458 6y agoOnly in the most pendantic of senses - a bit like arguing that my car is fusion powered because it runs on gas that was originally given energy from the sun. I suppose in a sense everything in the universe is powered by whatever triggered the Big Bang.
- hyperman1 6y agoMost of them. There are also the nuclear reactions in the earth's core.
- kgwgk 6y agoI know that there are organisms that thrive in geotermally heated environments, but do they really produce fossil fuels?
- purple_ferret 6y agoOr more recent photosynthesis. You can make candle wax out of soy, beeswax, crisco, etc.
- kgwgk 6y agoAlso from animal fat.
- cableclasper 6y agoThere's a hell of a lot more. Michael Faraday's "Chemical History of a Candle" is a very readable masterpiece on the subject, despite its age. The Engineering Guy has done much to revive Faraday's work: http://www.engineerguy.com/faraday/ http://www.engineerguy.com/faraday/
- jbay808 6y agoOne of my favourite books, especially for his demonstration of how they know what's going on at each point of the chemical reaction. Also, he explains clearly what fire is, which is something that many people puzzle about for all their lives.
- jedimastert 6y agoHe also did a full video series. "Chemical History of a Candle" was originally a series of lectures given by Faraday; he recreated the lectures and the demonstrations. Definitely worth a watch, especially if you don't have a conceptual understanding of fire
- yesenadam 6y agoAwesome, thank you! "a series of six lectures on the chemistry and physics of flames given by Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution in 1848, as part of the series of Christmas lectures for young people founded by Faraday in 1825 and still given there every year." First video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W0MHZ4jb4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W0MHZ4jb4A And indeed the Royal Institution seems to be still pumping out popular lectures, now available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution/videos
- gnicholas 6y agoThis is interesting, but why does he speak archaically? I understand it fine, but I'll have to stop the video every 5 seconds to translate for my kid. Is it part of his style in general?
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- daoxid 6y agoReading another article in this series, "Can You Boil an Egg Too Long?" [1] really made me smile. Apparently no one knows exactly what happens if you boil an egg for multiple months or years. This seems such a trivial thing compared to all the other stuff humans have discovered. On the other hand this also means almost anyone can expand the limits of human knowledge: you just need an egg, a reliable source of heat and water, and lots of patience. Granted, the knowledge gained may not change the world, but you will still be the first who is in possession of that knowledge! [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/science/randall-munroe-question-eggs.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/science/randall-munroe-qu...
- gizmo686 6y ago> but you will still be the first who is in possession of that knowledge! Are you sure about that? How do you know that no one has done that experiment. Expanding the limits of human knowledge is not just about learning something new, but also sharing it in such a way that makes it part of humanities general knowledge base (even if still restricted to a relativly small group of people). Most people do not have the means to establish human knowledge in this way; and those that do are generally limited to a scope that does not contain hard-boiling eggs.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoYou'd probably have to make do with a blog post rather than a journal publication.
- lostgame 6y agoOkay, I got way more of a kick than necessary from the image of a map which depicts 'you' traversing from 'the land of normal eggs' to '?'. Also - and more relevant to HN - this is the first time I noticed Randall Munroe of xkcd fame has written for the New York Times. Good job on him for landing that gig! :D
- hellbannedguy 6y agoJulia Child's tip on cooking a poached egg: 1. Poke a small hole with a pin in one side of egg. 2. Put the whole egg in boiling water for 10 seconds. 3. Remove egg, and run under cold water. (So you can handle it.) 4. Crack the egg back into the boiling water, and cook. 5. The poached egg comes out more uniform, and whole.
- kazinator 6y agoIf the products of incomplete combustion make up just 0.1%, how come if you pass your fingertip through the flame, too quickly to feel any pain, you get a solid black swath of soot on your skin in just that split second? The stuff is just spewing out.
- ahartmetz 6y agoThe yellow part is glowing soot particles. Where it stops being yellow, it has mostly burned up (turned into carbon dioxide). No surprise that there's a lot of soot in the flame.
- kazinator 6y agoWhere it stops being yellow, the particles have just cooled down so they don't glow. At that point, you see a black trail of smoke wafting upward. You won't see easily that by the light of the candle alone, though.
- ahartmetz 6y agoHold a spoon above the flame, it takes a long time to become black, if at all. Hold it into the flame, it becomes black instantly. You need to explain why that is so to convince me.
- celticninja 6y agoThe spoon causes more soot to be created by interfering with the combustion process.
- ajuc 6y agoPutting something relatively cold and with high thermal mass (like anything solid) to a flame drastically increases how much incomplete combustion happens near it. Basically you take the heat away before it can finish burning the fuel. That's why a clean flame will still soot anything you put over it.
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- renewiltord 6y agoWoah, particle dispersion is fucking crazy. I had no bloody idea it spreads all around the world in a year. I wonder what the minimum size of radioactive explosion would be to send a particle from say India (on the other side of the world) to me here on the West Coast and provide appreciable harm.
- oceanghost 6y agoA few months after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, the background radiation where I lived in Anaheim, CA went from like 0.08 - 0.12usv to 0.40 - 0.70usv depending on the day. I had a radiation detector because I lived in a historic home and was a little paranoid about things like lead, radiation, etc. It's of course anecdotal.
- renewiltord 6y agoFascinating. Thanks for that anecdote. I remember a story where some European nuclear plant operators all evacuated when their badges reported high radiation and on stepping out they realized the count was higher outside. Chernobyl had just failed. Might be apocryphal but I enjoyed the picture so I'm not even going to verify.
- swinglock 6y agoIt's true, the Chernobyl disaster was first detected and announced from the Forsmark plant in Sweden, while USSR was still hoping no one would notice. Over a day after, radiation was detected on a shoe of an employee about to enter. It was concluded there was no radiation inside the plant, and that it wasn't the plant leaking outside. That left winds from east as the source and that's how the world got to know.
- oceanghost 6y agoYou're welcome! I decided to look it up, and found this: "Canopy-Forming Kelps as California’s Coastal Dosimeter: 131I from Damaged Japanese Reactor Measured in Macrocystis pyrifera" https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es203598r?journalCode=esthag& https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es203598r?journalCode=e...
- 600frogs 6y ago> After about a year, atoms from your candle will have spread completely around the globe. How on earth is this provable?
- Jabbles 6y agoProbably based on data from radiation leaks.
- tzs 6y agoIt seems plausible. Earth has a radius of about 6400 km. That makes half of the circumference about 20100 km. For something you release to spread all the way around the world in a year requires it to spread out from you at about 20100 km/year. That is about 2.3 km/hr, or about 0.6 m/s or about 25 inches/second. I've never tried to measure it, but my recollection of about how long it has taken after something nearby emits a strong odor for that odor to reach my nose is that the speed is in that ballpark.
- 29athrowaway 6y agotl;dr: Into your lungs
- SigmundA 6y agoFun thing about the carbon cycle, much of the candles mass goes into the air and much the mass of a tree comes from the air.
- AmericanChopper 6y agoMy mind was blown a little bit when I realized that when you lose fat, you do so by breathing it out. Some of which will also go on to make trees as well.
- ant6n 6y agoBut there’s also water generated when buying (edit:burning) carbo hydrates.
- s0rce 6y agoI assume you mean burning, but if you drive or even walk to the store to buy the carbs that also generates water.
- VanillaCafe 6y agoThe final bit that locked it in for me (and someone please correct me if this is wrong) is that going to the bathroom (which what many people assume is where weight leaves the body) is actually the last stage of "energy input" to the body and doesn't really play a role in "energy output".
- semi-extrinsic 6y agoWell, your body does not utilize all the energy it could from the food and drink you ingest. Say if you get a condition where your digestive efficiency goes down - tapeworm, inflammation, whatever - all else equal, you're going to start losing weight fast. This is why gastric bypass surgery works.
- anm89 6y agoI don't understand what you are saying here. The physical weight of the feces does leave your body. How is that an input?
- spaetzleesser 6y agoWouldn't also some mass be converted into energy? Probably not much though
- Toutouxc 6y agoHow? What do you mean by that?
- brippalcharrid 6y agoTrace amounts of radioisotopes found in the candle will be subject to decay while the candle is burned (much as they would be while the candle isn't burning), so there would presumably be some negligible amount of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation.
- snissn 6y agovery very very little
- nostromo 6y agoNone, actually. It’s a chemical reaction which means all mass is preserved.
- dheera 6y agoNo, actually, very very little, not zero. The candle (summed with its gas emissions) loses mass equal to the relativistic mass of the photons emitted. For something like a candle it's an undetectably small amount but it's not zero.
- nostromo 6y agoGood catch, thanks.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoIs heat basically a bunch of photons?
- undebuggable 6y agoThe intermediate image of globe with particles dispersed only through the northern hemisphere is because of the Coriolis force?
- joshuamorton 6y agoThis is in some sense the conclusion of a conversation that has been going on for months on TikTok. People ask Hank Green (of Crash Course/Youtube/etc. fame) questions. Sometime last year, someone asked where the wax went in a candle when you burn it (https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/6890298762032368898 https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/6890298762032368898). Since then, hank has been in a bit of a feud with the collective of TikTok, who seem to be unwilling to understand that the wax is what burns (https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/6955202282313059590 https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/6955202282313059590), despite his many attempts to explain (https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/6945244159187897605 https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/6945244159187897605). I'm partial to this explanation by another user (https://www.tiktok.com/@tomlumperson/video/6955493435017121029 https://www.tiktok.com/@tomlumperson/video/69554934350171210...), who also has a great tiktok about bees: https://www.tiktok.com/@tomlumperson/video/6950836651685858566 https://www.tiktok.com/@tomlumperson/video/69508366516858585.... Now, nearly 6 months later, the same question has made it to the mainstream and is getting asked of Randall Munroe in the NYT.
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- im3w1l 6y agoOne thing that always amazed me is how the wick burns at just the right speed, how it keeps pace with the wax. Neither does it burn away too quickly leaving nothing to keep the flame going, nor does it burn too slowly leaving decimeters of wick when the candle is burnt out. I guess there must be some feedback process going on, which makes a long wick burn faster than a short one.
- jeffbee 6y agoThe wick is in a local negative feedback cycle with its fuel. If it were to burn “too fast” then its fuel input rate will be reduced, and it would burn more slowly. If the negative feedback mechanism didn’t exist, the candle combustion reaction would runaway and the whole thing would explode.
- smegger001 6y agoAs GOOP discovered... https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/19/experience-gwyneth-paltrows-vagina-candle-erupted-in-my-front-room https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/19/experie...
- avidiax 6y agoThere probably are some feedback loops like this, but there's also just a careful balance between the wick size, the size of the jar, the formulation of the wax, the preparation of the candle, and the use of it. Some examples of things that can go wrong: https://www.candlescience.com/wax/soy-wax-trouble-shooting-guide https://www.candlescience.com/wax/soy-wax-trouble-shooting-g...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Ericson2314 6y agoWow, the New York times has truly hired or acquired everyone.
- adamnew123456 6y agoI guess that's where the What If blog went, it hasn't been updated for a while now. No timestamps on the last post but wiki says he started writing this column for NYT late 2019, which feels about right. https://what-if.xkcd.com/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/
- fouronnes3 6y agoI had no idea Randall started writing for the nytimes. Seems like a great continuation to his what if series. I've missed it dearly. Hope he writes more!
- goro-7 6y agoIt goes where it came from
- RamblingCTO 6y agoI just skimmed the article but it seems to not talk about the fact that (what I feel like is) a majority of candles is not made from bee wax any more, but rather paraffine.