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Text for those who don't do the bird site: A candle produces roughly the same amount of energy as a resting human — 80 to 100 watts, also consuming about the s
by josefresco 4y ago
Text for those who don't do the bird site:
A candle produces roughly the same amount of energy as a resting human — 80 to 100 watts, also consuming about the same amount of oxygen and producing the same amount of CO2. In an enclosed area, adding candles is about like adding people from an air quality standpoint.
- dekhn 4y agoexcept that candles don't just produce CO2, they produce soot and many other molecules which have been clearly associated with negative health outcomes.
- LinuxBender 4y agothey produce soot As my bathroom walls can attest to. It took a long time to clean that up. I don't use candles for scent any more. Now I just keep them as one of many sources of emergency light and heat.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoThe chemical alternatives don't exactly give me confidence (though who really knows what's in a modern candle?). At least candles are a known-known even if non-optimal.
- idopmstuff 4y agoI have something like this: https://www.amazon.com/ElusiaKa-Ceramic-Electric-Fragrance-Aromatherapy/dp/B09BVR2Q9N/ https://www.amazon.com/ElusiaKa-Ceramic-Electric-Fragrance-A... Melts the wax and gives you that lovely smell without any fire. The wax also lasts much longer in one of these than in candle form.
- LinuxBender 4y agoI may try one of those. My local grocery store has a few of them. Are they hard to clean?
- tylergetsay 4y agoIf it's purely ceramic and not painted, plop it in the freezer for a little bit then all the old wax comes out as a puck; no cleaning needed
- LinuxBender 4y agoThat is perfect. I will look for the ceramic non painted ones.
- themitigating 4y agoElectric light bulbs
- rsynnott 4y agoI mean, cooking with wood fires is a known-known and we've been doing it forever... but it's the biggest cause of death by air pollution.
- tnorthcutt 4y agoEven bigger than pollution from e.g. burning coal/oil/etc.?
- rsynnott 4y agoSurprisingly, yes, by many metrics. Per the WHO, 3.2 million people/year, mostly poorly ventilated wood or other biomass, mostly poor countries: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-a... _Overall_, outdoor air pollution (coal/oil/industrial effluent/etc) kills more (about 4.2 million) but in terms of single worst cause, cooking with biomass seems to be it. Even in many rich countries, wood (generally burned for heat, not cooking, in the rich world) is one of the biggest sources of particulate air pollution, as coal is phased out and vehicles get cleaner.
- oliveshell 4y agoIf you do decide to burn a candle on occasion, in case the following wasn’t obvious: Keeping the wicked properly trimmed to ~1/4 inch makes a huge difference in keeping soot emissions down. There’s a reason store-bought candles always tell you to trim before burning! If the flame starts to jump and flicker (in calm air), the wick is too long. You can see big sooty plumes be thrown off when this happens if you look.
- LinuxBender 4y agoAll good advice. I learned this from growing up with an antique oil lamp which I still have. That is another one of my emergency heat sources.
- msla 4y ago> Keeping the wicked properly trimmed to ~1/4 inch makes a huge difference in keeping soot emissions down. I bet this was widespread cultural knowledge in the era when candles were the primary method of indoor lighting.
- prometheus76 4y agoTry beeswax candles. They're more expensive but burn much more cleanly.
- musingsole 4y agoAnd humans don't just produce CO2. They shed everything from dust to viruses. Really, humans are the health concern we should be paying more attention to.
- fastball 4y agoI don't know about you, but seems to me like we paid a lot of attention to humans as a vector for poor health over the last 3 years...
- Cyberdog 4y agoIndeed. I think we can all agree now that humans are a dangerous vector for viruses, filth, and general unpleasantness, and the world would be a safer, more pleasant place if we eradicated them entirely.
- passwordoops 4y agoAnd it was on that day a small company by the name of Skynet, who merged its LLM with a networked robotics center, loosed its AI to scan the internet for ideas on how to make the world a safer, more pleasant place
- dasv 4y agoDo you frequently have problems with CAPTCHAs?
- Cyberdog 4y agoI find them quite organic-normative.
- amelius 4y agoThis is why I only use hydrogen torches at my dinner table.
- bell-cot 4y agoUnless fully enclosed, burning hydrogen is really too dangerous for the dinner table: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=detecting%20a%20hydrogen%20flame https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=detecting%20a%20hydrog...
- tomtomistaken 4y agoIf you prefer NOx ;)
- LazyMans 4y agoI prefer oxygen candles, personally.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoMy dad was on submarines and talked about these. Do they also provide light, and if so what color and intensity?
- tofof 4y agoThey burn at 600C (1100F) so I don't think you'd want to view the reaction directly; usually they have to be deliberately contained to contain the heat to sustain the reaction. https://youtu.be/g3Ud6mHdhlQ?t=738 https://youtu.be/g3Ud6mHdhlQ?t=738 (linked to correct timestamp) shows the remains of a burned one and loading fresh ones on a submarine.
- anemoknee 4y agoDepends on what state the oxygen is in and any other friends who may react/combust with.
- dekhn 4y agothey're not visible and you almost don't feel it when it burns you...
- passwordoops 4y agoI'm disappointed by the lack of a methane emissions joke
- steveylang 4y agoThey left an opening for you, carpe diem!
- singularity2001 4y ago"they produce soot and many other molecules" welcome to my family Also s/produce/release/g
- red-iron-pine 4y agoUnderrated response. Not only a subtle fart joke but also pedantic about words.
- dekhn 4y agoNo, candles "produce" not "release", because the soot doesn't exist before the chemical reaction.
- cjmcqueen 4y agoAlmost the exact same thread and thoughts shared on the tweet are here too... Interesting stuff. I wouldn't think Twitter and HN would be so closely aligned.
- recuter 4y agoI am insulted and feel personally attacked by your reductionist sentiment. We are nothing like those people!
- doublerabbit 4y agoTwitter to HN. HN to SlashDot. SlashDot to Reddit. Reddit to Twitter only to arrive back on HN. The perpetual internet carousel
- RGamma 4y agoTurns out the "HN is turning into reddit" jokes only had the platform wrong.
- padobson 4y agoI would bet the factors that lead to following John Carmack highly correlate with the factors that lead to opening an HN account.
- bawolff 4y agoHN is really only a unique place when it comes to computer topics. For everything else its basically the same as any other website.
- warinukraine 4y ago> Text for those who don't do the bird site: Having the text here instead of linking to an appallingly bad website should always have been the norm. But nooo, we had to wait for Elon Musk to buy the thing.
- tzs 4y ago> Text for those who don't do the bird site OT: speaking of the bird site...how does it decide what to recommend in the "More Tweets" section? I'm kind of baffled by the stark differences between its recommendations on two recent visits. Yesterday I followed a link to a Paul Graham tweet. Then I scrolled down to see what else Twitter recommended. It was full of right wing conspiracy theories, climate change denial, anti-vaccine stuff, one about Bill Gates' plan to depopulate the world, and of course something about the Jewish bankers that control the world. There was almost nothing that wasn't similar to the above. Today I go there to view this John Carmack tweet, and what Twitter is recommending is a tweet from Joe Biden, a Greta Thunberg tweet, a tweet about the Formosan clouded leopard being declared extinct in 2014 after no sightings for 40 years but then was spotted in 2019, an Edward Snowdon tweet, a tweet from the National Park Service, various humor tweets, a tweet about a lecture on how to build GPT from scratch, and a couple about business acquisition. There were a couple of right wing political tweets (from Scott Adams and Glenn Beck) but they were mild and about Musk so I assume that's why they are there. There was also one from Andrew Tate that was a pretty good inspirational statement and did not mention Musk at all. Oh and this great but best not read if you going to sleep soon tweet "16 of the creepiest paintings ever made" [1]. Is this difference because of Twitter's inferences about the kind of people that read Paul Graham and read John Carmack? I'd guess Graham is more to the right than Carmack but from what I've seen not anywhere enough that reading Graham is any kind of signal that you would be interested in the kind of conspiracy theories and such that it was recommending yesterday. [1] https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1615648152983572480 https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1615648152983572480
- yreg 4y agoMy "More tweets" section under that tweet is ~70% same as yours. Including 16 of the creepiest paintings ever made.
- steveylang 4y agoI normally only get tweets leaning towards one side of the political spectrum. I read an article and liked a tweet, and suddenly found myself in a mirror-image alternative universe. The echo chamber is real. For all its potential, Twitter is no way to learn about the world. But the same goes for any web site with algorithmically served content.
- CamperBob2 4y agoHe's off by at least an order of magnitude. Otherwise, lighting 10 candles would be like firing up a 1000-watt space heater, which is obviously not the case.
- nicholsonpk 4y agoOr the space heater is more efficient because it's not producing light.
- CamperBob2 4y agoSafe to say it's a fraction of a watt at most. Some sources found via a quick Google search indicate that the light output from a 70-watt incandescent light bulb is equivalent to about 100 standard candles. Sounds truthy enough.
- voisin 4y agoThere’s some excellent discussion in the book Burn: The new science of metabolism about this.