The Gimcrack Miscellany

I can’t help it, I am intrigued by things that may seem pointless or boring to you. For instance I love telling people that there are more possible chess game outcomes than atoms in the universe. I usually get one of two responses to that:

1. “Your life saddens me.”
2. “That’s impossible. Your life saddens me.”

It only follows that this video intrigued me. It’s another video about the relative size of things, specifically using the power of 10 scale. If you liked my previous posts regarding this sort of thing (Big Ol’ Numbers and Our Sun Is Tiny) then you will undoubtedly enjoy this video. If not, here is the web page you should be reading instead.

BONUS VIDEOS!

Here’s my way of saying thanks to you for somehow having enough of an attention span to still be reading this scatter-brained blog. I like to sprinkle a little miscellany everywhere I can, especially if it’s gimcrack miscellany. If you read Digg everyday you’ve already seen these. Sorry.

Lightning strike right on the beach! (Audio is NSFW)

Chuck Norris in training! BOOM HEADSHOT

I have been inspired by the 4th of July to post about fire-related phenomena, seeing as how millions of (probably drunk) people are about to shoot dangerous bombs into the sky. Remember the movie Backdraft? Can you believe that came out 17 years ago?!? I was pretty into that movie back in the 90s and I felt like revisiting the subject today.

Backdrafts were featured in the film by the same name. We all know what a backdraft is by now. All the oxygen is consumed and there are no longer flames but everything is still so hot that any new oxygen introduced to the fire will rapidly expand and splode real big. Lets turn to the video evidence.

I thought that was pretty cool. But then I learned of flashovers, which are indeed cooler - or hotter, depending on your preferred level of literalness. What happens is, in an enclosed room (similar conditions to a backdraft) a fire gives off hot smoke which radiates heat onto all the surfaces in the room. Once all of these surfaces get to around 1000 degrees, they expel flammable gases which ignite, along with every surface in the room. All at the same time. That’s tight.

Read more about flashovers and then feast on these yummy youtubez.

The flashover in this one happens at 1:15:

This one happens right away and the rest of the video is garbage:

But wait, let’s take it one step further. What happens when a flashover occurs OUTDOORS? An eff’n firestorm. That’s right. A storm made out of: fire. Is fire even a thing to be made out of? I’m starting to get confused and overwhelmed and scared.

Firestorms are rare as a dang two-headed kid. They happen usually in nature during wildfires. But we have managed to set buildings and stuff on fire in the past that are capable of producing them too. I want you to visit teh wicky on firestorms and think about them for a minute. Here is the first sentence: “A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system.”

!!!!!!!!11!!1!1one

Here are some firestorms that resulted from fires us humans made: The Great London Fire (1666), The Great Chicago Fire (1871), The Oakland Firestorm (1991), and the one created by the atomic bomb in Heroshima.

So we have this comparison: backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls -WAIT wha??? Fire whirls?!?

Yes, fire whirls. They exist. And they are coming to get you. According to Wikipedia, a fire whirl is a phenomenon in which a fire acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. You may wonder how this happens. Me too, but I figured it out on my own: Lucifer.

Just listen to the following sentence and then I’m done with my tirade on fire whirls:

“An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo.”

When you go to bed tonight I want you to think of “a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in 15 minutes” and I guarantee you will have dreams about fire, featuring scenes with Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland.

I believe that was recorded in Mordor.

Wow, that looked really windy. And fiery angered evil.

So our final tally is backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls < flame hurricanes - WAIT, wha?!?

I know they exist. I have seen them with my mind.