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An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

atlasobscura.com

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Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#91

Post by shagie »

buserror wrote: post #18
Freak_NL wrote: post #12

The same phenomenon occurs with glass spheres. If you think about it it is obvious enough (most people are familiar with how a magnifying glass concentrates the ray of the sun in a single spot), but it is something people tend to overlook when employing glass spheres as elements of your interior design — e.g., glass door knobs, large marbles, and decorative knick-knacks (which people have a tendency to place on their…

Actually one of the official 'old school' tool to measure sun exposure thru the day in meteo stations is a glass sphere with a calibrated piece of paper underneath. Needs to be changed everyday, but the burn mark is quite neatly drawn on the chart. EDIT: Found it again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%E2%80%93Stokes_record...

One of the photographers that I'm intrigued by is Michael Wesely ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wesely ) who takes ultra long exposures (a two week long exposure is "short" - his flower photographs are in that range). The museum of modern art was about two years. http://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/08/unusually-long-exposure...

You can see the tracks of the days and the cloud cover in those photographs. Note that the multiple year ones have multiple days going over a single track.

Aside from the extreme reciprocity failure in the film, its "only" about three stops from a one day exposure to a one week exposure... and another two stops to a month, and then another three and a half stops to a year.

Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#92

Post by corysama »

elliottcarlson wrote: post #65
SurrealSoul wrote: post #52

Curious how clickbaiting works now. Taking the articles title "This Ikea Bowl has been setting things on fire", the "This" is an interesting word choice that is a great reminder of the "You won't believe THIS simple trick to..." that started the whole craze. I'd be curious to see some A/B testing on semi-baiting titles vs something more descriptive like the original source 'Ikea investigates after 'bowl sets Swede's…

Where is the line between clickbait and attention grabbing headline. In the case of "You won't believe THIS simple trick to..." I'd definitely call it clickbait - but in this instance, the title reflects exactly what the article is about, and while the modified title on HN does a far better representation of the contents, I personally don't see the harm in how Atlas Obscura worded the title. Or maybe I am just really…

A major clickbait technique is to set up an "information gap". The headline almost tells you something interesting, but leaves out the most critical bit. This makes you feel uncomfortable because you almost had something but ended up deprived and are just one click away from closure.

So, the difference between "An IKEA bowl" and "This IKEA bowl" is that "a bowl" is a complete idea. "This bowl" stresses that it's talking about a specific bowl, but leaves out which bowl it is stressing.

Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#93

Post by logfromblammo »

sswaner wrote: post #45
prawn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also this parabolic solar camp stove I spotted on the REI site a few months ago. Seems like an absolute gimmick, but the few reviews are all very positive: https://www.rei.com/product/100561/gosun-sport-solar-camp-st...

The Boy Scout handbook (1980's version) had an aluminum foil solar oven design for cooking a hot dog. It was a version of that psychology test of putting marshmallows in front of kids. The patient scouts got a cooked hotdog in about 45 minutes - on a bright summer day. I ate a raw one after about 10.

Unfortunately, my kids already know from watching How It's Made that most wiener-type sausages sold in the US are fully cooked at the factory, and when you "cook" them at home, you're just heating them up. One would just eat it without bothering with the foil for even one minute, and the other doesn't eat hot dogs at any temperature.

I remember, as part of a wilderness survival challenge, being told to eat some breakfast, then they gave me one match, a juice can, a raw egg, and two uncooked pork sausage links. The "correct" solution was to build a fire, drink the juice, cut the top off the can, grease the inside of the can with cooking sausage, and then fry your egg in the greased can. Alternate solutions turned out to be a whole lot easier--left as an exercise for the reader because many of them are disgusting.

Knowing how to do this was of great comfort to me, because sausages, eggs, and juice cans actually grow on trees in the woods near me. Along with plastic tarps and alkaline batteries. It felt like the sort of thing that might give kids just enough confidence to wander off alone to die in the actual wilderness, or to miraculously return in five years speaking fluent Wolf, with plenty of helpful suggestions for the next edition of the manual--such as a primer on the intricacies of wolf pack politics.

That manual probably should have just skipped the solar oven and gone straight to starting a fire with the foil. (As though your average Boy Scout doesn't already know too many ways to set something on fire. Have you ever seen someone start a bonfire by shooting an arrow into it? That guy was probably a Boy Scout, and the secret he wouldn't tell you is that the tinder had KMnO4 in it, and the arrow popped a hidden balloon with some glycerol in it. It wasn't actually a ghost.)

Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#94

Post by gozur88 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #12

The same phenomenon occurs with glass spheres. If you think about it it is obvious enough (most people are familiar with how a magnifying glass concentrates the ray of the sun in a single spot), but it is something people tend to overlook when employing glass spheres as elements of your interior design — e.g., glass door knobs, large marbles, and decorative knick-knacks (which people have a tendency to place on their…

In my high school one of the girls left one of those magnifying makeup mirrors in the passenger footwell of her car. It was a hot day, so she cracked the windows a bit.

Hours later as we were eating lunch the sun struck the mirror at just the right angle, and as we look over at the parking lot there's smoke billowing out of the car. Luckily there was no fire, but there was a line burned across the underside of the dashboard. It looked like someone had taken an acetylene torch to it.

Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#95

Post by camiller »

shanev wrote: post #87

A similar phenomenon causes birds to spontaneously combust when flying near industrial solar power plants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICLXQN_lURk .

Hmmm.... spontaneous would be without an external source of ignition, which is the solar concentrators of the power plant. Probably more accurate to strike spontaneously and simply say "...causes birds to combust when flying near ..."

Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#96

Post by stcredzero »

burkaman wrote: post #79
elliottcarlson wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the line between clickbait and attention grabbing headline. In the case of "You won't believe THIS simple trick to..." I'd definitely call it clickbait - but in this instance, the title reflects exactly what the article is about, and while the modified title on HN does a far better representation of the contents, I personally don't see the harm in how Atlas Obscura worded the title. Or maybe I am just really…

This is a very minor example, but compare the title to just "Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire". The word "this" naturally prompts the response "which one?", just like something saying "look at this" in real life. Again it's very minor, but the extra word adds nothing except a slight suggestion that this particular example is especially interesting and you should click to see it. Compare "Florida Man Escapes…

This pronoun makes your headlines attention getting, with one weird trick!

Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#97

Post by stcredzero »

Freak_NL wrote: post #12

The same phenomenon occurs with glass spheres. If you think about it it is obvious enough (most people are familiar with how a magnifying glass concentrates the ray of the sun in a single spot), but it is something people tend to overlook when employing glass spheres as elements of your interior design — e.g., glass door knobs, large marbles, and decorative knick-knacks (which people have a tendency to place on their…

But because the risk is so low (it doesn't happen that frequently) many people are completely unaware of the phenomenon.

Also, people can't apply what they were supposed to learn in high school physics. It's not only Brazil that has this problem:

http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#98

Post by ksk »

SurrealSoul wrote: post #52

Curious how clickbaiting works now. Taking the articles title "This Ikea Bowl has been setting things on fire", the "This" is an interesting word choice that is a great reminder of the "You won't believe THIS simple trick to..." that started the whole craze. I'd be curious to see some A/B testing on semi-baiting titles vs something more descriptive like the original source 'Ikea investigates after 'bowl sets Swede's…

Well, pretty much all headlines here are click-bait. In the common case, the scope the article actually applies to, is blown out of proportion. I think its because we're hardwired to ignore one-offs. "One person used a curved metallic bowl to cause a fire" sounds kinda boring.

Another one thats on the front page - "How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists" is actually "A serious of unverified tips that might help you become somewhat familiar with a limited subset of scientific papers whose jargon you should already familiar with" Scientific papers are written for other scientists, no "guide" is going to allow a layperson, who is completely unfamilar with the topic, in understanding the paper. If you are not a physicist you simply can't grok the theory of the alternating-gradient synchotron. You might become kinda-sorta-familiar in a wikipedia sense by looking up each term and reading the paper but you're never going to be able to field questions on the topic (usually possible only for someone who understands a topic).

Re: An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

#99

Post by cr0sh »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #81
buserror wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually one of the official 'old school' tool to measure sun exposure thru the day in meteo stations is a glass sphere with a calibrated piece of paper underneath. Needs to be changed everyday, but the burn mark is quite neatly drawn on the chart. EDIT: Found it again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%E2%80%93Stokes_record...

I've never seen a glass sphere this large - it's almost surreal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%E2%80%93Stokes_record... I keep looking at it, my brain confused why I can't see through what is clearly a transparent object. It doesn't feel like I'm looking through it, though inverted; it feels like I'm seeing a weird depiction of the nature scene around me plastered on its surface.

You might be interested in this:

https://www.treehugger.com/solar-technology/solar-prototype-...

https://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/23/solar-ball-lens-improve...

Not solid glass, though (I don't know what it is, but I imagine there's an upper limit on size of solid glass spheres that can be made)...

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