Loopy, I agree, but disagree, "But engineers seem to often think that they can rescue the 3rd world with high technology while people in such places as outer Mongolia or the Tibetian plateau have adapted to living in a fashion that has worked for many centuries."
The role of outsiders is always open to question and is a subject of incessant discussion in both comfortable board rooms and not so comfortable outlands.
Outer Mongolia: The capital Ulaanbaatar is one of the most polluted cities on earth. It sits in a basin up against the mountains and collects smog from not only congested traffic but also hundreds of thousands of coal and biomass fueled heating and cooking stoves. Hundreds of thousands of people live in an inner city of ger (aka yurt), and they have to keep warm through the bitter winter. Hundreds of thousands more live in soviet era apartment houses that have electricity from coal fired power plants. Google "air pollution in ulaanbaatar".
Outside the big city, the steppes are vast open spaces swept by wind, and while people there do not have a pall of smog hanging over them, they do have to keep their dwelling, ger, cabin, house, apartment, sealed tight against the cold in winter, so air exchange rates and proper ventilation become an issue when it involves indoor combustion.
In the 13th century, the silk road city of Karakorum was thought to have something in the neighborhood of 50000 people, and a large number of those, including perhaps the Khan himself, preferred the traditional (or grandiose) ger. The city included famous iron smelters for the iron wheels of the Mongolian carts, and armaments. How did a city like that heat itself? The Mongols were famous for bringing in outside craftspeople and engineers (many by conscription from their conquests.) A case in point is the wondrous silver tree fountain supposedly built in the Khan's palace by the French silversmith/engineer Guilliame Bouchier. My point is that the tradition of centuries is never as simple as it might seem.
In my humble opinion it is better to complicate and automate something than let it just simply and reliably work. How can we else learn and enjoy new stuff ; ) So, I maintain that I would like to find some way to auto-ignite a stove. I have a CBS in my cabin. Waking up in a nice and warm room would better than waking up to fridge temperature, which is the case now. On the other hand, if everything in life gets comfortable we will all become wimps.
There's a guy around here who wrote a small book just for fun - about chopping, drying, and burning firewood - and it became a bestseller. Right now it is being translated into lots of foreign languages. Maybe we should get him into the forum.
Auto-ignite a wood stove? I had a female room-mate that believed gasoline was the solution. Don't... DON'T ever do that.
Henry David Thoreau wrote a wonderful book called "Walking". You can download it for free at the Gutenberg Project.
Besides, the economy isn't really being driven by what the latest technology is. It is driven by what the consumer spontaneously wants to buy. Fifteen years ago is was Nike basketball shoes, about forty-five years ago it was wood stoves and self-composting toilets. There was even a time when it was thought that Howard Stern would save radio.
Maybe it is time for more walking shoes, down comforters, home grown coffee, and homemade sour dough bread. I'm trying real hard to ignore Facebook and pop up advertising.
I like your post. Have you ever tried driving a recent model Volkswage Passat? It forces you to be a dumb, scared, non-competent driver, with all it's safety interlocks and microsoft-style 'help'. E.g. try to flash the direction lights only once (to say 'thank you'), and it will do 3 flashes minimum. Why??
Do worry: soon walking boots will have a safety feature (non-overridable) which prevents you from walking until you have safely tied your laces. Sorry, guess this came out too bitter. But I do hate push-marketing too, and don't get me started about Facebook.
Well, here's a smile still
I like your post. Have you ever tried driving a recent model Volkswage Passat? It forces you to be a dumb, scared, non-competent driver, with all it's safety interlocks and microsoft-style 'help'. E.g. try to flash the direction lights only once (to say 'thank you'), and it will do 3 flashes minimum. Why??
Do worry: soon walking boots will have a safety feature (non-overridable) which prevents you from walking until you have safely tied your laces. Sorry, guess this came out too bitter. But I do hate push-marketing too, and don't get me started about Facebook.
Well, here's a smile still
Definitely agree that safety interlocks and such things have gone too far. My pet peeve in this area is "traction control", which seems to do exactly the opposite of what you would expect. If you are going up a slippery slope and a wheel hits an icy spot it applies the brake to that wheel and drops the throttle to idle, killing any forward momentum and ensuring you get stuck. I can only wonder what the idiot designers were thinking.
As for facebook and similar social media sites, I avoid them like the plague they really are. Their main function is to gather your personal information and preferences for push marketing regardless of what promises they make to the contrary.
I am beginning to think that the days of a globalized world are over.
Instead the future will be a world divided into regions dedicated to extreme wealthy, technocrats, the religious, the consumer, and the primitive. (Maybe I've forgotten a few).
If you want to live simply, you may have to join a Laotian hill tribe or a Shaker community in the US.
I suspect that setting aside all the digital technology and just working on improving Shaker woodworking might be very rewarding. And you might even come up with an excellent wood stove. One can build one out of stone and clay with just a steel liner and steel door. But I do fear that we might burn far more wood than we can grow.
In sum, what a world we live in! Very diverse, and it is likely to remain diverse. Why so? Nobody buys everything advertised. We might try a lot of it, but we also reject the majority of what we try.
When I lived with only wood heat, I wore long underwear for about half the year and two pairs of socks. There are refinements that are not so obvious.. oil your boots everyday. You will be standing in the rain chopping wood quite a bit.
The reason I enjoy Parallax and the devices they sell is that I can use my mind, like joining a good chess club. There are people here that think deeper and faster than I do.
But my car is a 1999 model Citroen Berlingo. No thrills(1.4L Injection engine... ) and very little frills.
(The oversized ragtop type sunroof probably count as a frill... When it works... )
No ABS, no parking help, no lane-change warnings(I wonder how that works on a snow-covered road, anyway), no traction-control.
It has airbags, though, headlight washers and heated wing mirrors...
(The 2012 VW Caddy I drive at the office is supposed to have 'all the frills', but no headlight washers or heated wing mirrors)
Guess which car I feel safer driving in the winter...
My brother used to drive 4WDs for a living(delivering newspapers in the area around Oslo... ) and he wouldn't touch a car if it wasn't possible to disable the ABS or traction control. (He'd wear out a Suzuki 413 in 4 or 5 years. )
Back to topic...
Automatic start of a stove;
There's a couple of reasons that this is a bad idea.
1. You'd have to put out the fire in the evening so that you can prepare it for start next morning. You DO NOT lay in kindling and whatever 'helpers' you use while the stove is hot.
2. If startup fails, there's a big risk of CO gas. Sure, it's supposedly not that bad a way to go, but...
If somebody wants an automatic firestarter, why not just have a multi-purposed stove? Wood and/or gas. Then a thermostate might even just do the trick.
When you are out of firewood, or too lazy to go get some.. just select the 'auto' mode and do as you wish.
My favorite vehicles of all time were the 1951 through 1953 Chevy Pickup Trucks I owned. I bought a series of them for about $150USD each and never did manage to get one worth restoring. But they were rugged and simple.
I feel pretty much the same way about wood heat. I want a good stove, so I can bed the coals and sleep through the night. But I want the ritual as much as the heat. And with wood heat, there are quite a few aspects to ritual.
When you own an old Chevy Pickup Truck, you just have to know how to adjust the valves to get the windshield wipers to operate regularly. That's part of its charm.
I had a lovely VW bug as well, that got 53 mpg when properly tuned. But adjusting valves outside on a wet and windy day just wasn't something I would welcome into my life on a long-term basis. With the Chevy Pickup, you could just about climb inside the engine well and stay out of the rain.
IOW, don't let your love of high-tech, ruin your appreciation of the simpler ways. Spice up your life with variety.
Heck, I even think the BS1 is still an excellent little device.
-hey, you are a member of a tribe already. Those few who followed the slush and fog northwards as the ice receided after the last ice age, are the founders of this tribe. The other ones, who partied in the grass along the mediterranian, are now the Europeans.
@Loopy
Gas burner is actually a brilliant idea. Ignite the gas burner (automatically) in the morning (all wood is burnt out after a long night) and let it heat up the stove - and the room. Down the first cup of coffee, and then you're ready to light up the fire for real - which will be much easier since the stove and the flue are already warm. I might actually work on this. (Of course it would be dead simple to have a gas stove for this, but really-)
-hey, you are a member of a tribe already. Those few who followed the slush and fog northwards as the ice receided after the last ice age, are the founders of this tribe. The other ones, who partied in the grass along the mediterranian, are now the Europeans.
Actually, they followed the retreating ice because that's where the hunting was best.
Now, I wonder what that says about the people who stayed behind?
A duo-fuelled stove makes sense, but the gas/oil/propane/whatever part needs to be able to heat the metal and stone of the wood-burning part for maximum efficiency. It really helps if they use the same chimney, also. That way the wood-burning can go almost directly to the high-efficiency stage.
Well, I am still fond of 'off-the-grid' cabins.
Obviously, if you have gas, oil, or whatever... you have to connect to the outside world.
I'd just like to build a log cabin on a 160 acres surrounded by national forest, take water from a spring, catch trout from a stream, and grow a few vegetables. But I do admit that I'd get very little done without a chain saw. And I might have to shoot a deer occasionally. So a rifle and ammunition would be needed. Or at least a bow and arrows. Maybe I would need to live some place that has a coal seam poking out of the ground.
You can go back to before technology, but people just didn't live as long.
We like to sit around a wood stove, brew a cup of coffee, and vicariously dream of older days. At least we don't want to go back to before Prometheus stole fire from the Gods.
Well, I am still fond of 'off-the-grid' cabins
....
We like to sit around a wood stove, brew a cup of coffee, and vicariously dream of older days. At least we don't want to go back to before Prometheus stole fire from the Gods.
Actually, they followed the retreating ice because that's where the hunting was best.
Now, I wonder what that says about the people who stayed behind?.....
They invented agriculture and then writing. And with writing came bureaucracy and taxes.
Taxes. Ugg.
Man, I need to find me a melting glacier to chase.
You know the 'agricultural revolution' that happened in France(more specific, Normandie) during the viking age?
That was the vikings returning and taking over.
They killed off the competition(bandits) and tarted taxing the locals.
The locals got protection and could work larger fields, further from their home. They could even work more efficiently since they could group up for difficult tasks.
Never say that a barbarian horde never did anyone any good...
Anyway, everyone know it was 'Fingers Mazda' who stole fire from the gods.
They invented agriculture and then writing. And with writing came bureaucracy and taxes.
Taxes. Ugg.
Man, I need to find me a melting glacier to chase.
With the accellerating climate change these days, a melting glacier should not be hard to find...
With the accellerating climate change these days, a melting glacier should not be hard to find...
Having relocated to the sub-tropical island of Taiwan, I am must more interesting in solar air conditioning and solar ice making these days. We need more trees more than we need wood heat. Humankind consumes more wood than termites. Sadly the majority of it is for paper. And an absurd amount goes into a Fed-Ex packet for no good reason at all.
I've updated the links in the first post. The Alliance for Green Heat is better organized now. The magazine Popular Mechanics is a sponsor and has new content, blurbs on the contestants and on the history of stoves, and a blog. (nowhere even close to the philosophical depth you can read here!:-)
The US EPA has interesting material on "burnwise".
Thanks Tracy... It is a bit embarrassing to admit, but I never realized how much I am devoted to traditions when it comes to wood heating.
I'd much rather find a big old nickle plated farm stove out of the mid-west with a built in hot water heater or a good tight cast iron pot belly with a long history of success and in good condition.
But I am sure there are others that love the idea of a new 'next generation'.
Even though the EPA strongly recommends starting fires with newspaper, the actual availability of newspaper is rapidly disappearing. Consider a good stockpile of excellent kindling of cedar, pine, or such.
Ocean drift wood contains salt. The salt converts to hydrochloric acid in a gas form during buring - hard on stoves and dangerous to people.
Newspaper is SH!TTY for lighting a stove.
If you crunch and wad it up in a ball, it burns too fast and produces a lot of smoke and ash.
If you roll it up, it burns slowly and produces more smoke and ash.
The soot ends up sticking to the inside of the chimney, and like the soot from burning wet wood, is a fire hazard!
How the EPA can recommend it is completely beyond me.
Splinters of pine wood is good. Cotton pads with a dab of Vazeline is good. Commercial 'fire starters' (usually brown cubes, but the white stuff also works) is good...
Yes, I have tried using newspapers... Both times my alarm supplier called me to check why my smoke alarm had activated...
I don't think the EPA really expects to successfully regulate wood heat in America. There are just too many legacy devices that people will not part with.
What would you do if the EPA sent you a registered letter and demanded you remove or upgrade the fireplace in your living room and buy only EPA approved fuels?
Fire starting is an art.
One guy can do very well with newspaper, another guy will not. You cannot merely depend on newspaper to set a log on fire. The newspaper is supposed to light kindling that lights larger pieces of wood in a progression and so on.. until you have a stable fire. I just suspect they want people to NOT use stove oil, aka kerosene. So they mention newspaper. Since they dislike cardboard, and had to mention something... newspaper was chosen.
Rolled up newspaper actually does very well in an established fire, but is likely to be too dense for starting. And I doubt that anyone can resist using some sort of hydrocarbon for a fire starter on a 'bad day'. Sometimes the wood is wet, or the kindling is used up, or you are just too cold to think clearly.
On a related subject, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has a conference going on this week in Phnom Penh Cambodia.
The introductory address was given by the prof. who is our group leader here at UC Berkeley. Whoever did the camera for the youtube video feed should have remembered that the content is mostly in the slides and graphs, not in the mug shot of the speaker. A lot of the monitoring and assessment of health effects that he talks about from our own research group came from instruments that use either BASIC Stamps or Propellers.
-hey, you are a member of a tribe already. Those few who followed the slush and fog northwards as the ice receided after the last ice age, are the founders of this tribe. The other ones, who partied in the grass along the mediterranian, are now the Europeans.
................
Well, that explains why I have not been much of a party goer, not that I didn't party hearty to the few I did go to when in the mood. Now why on earth did our tribe go do something so silly?
Although Gadgetman has the same blood in his vein, I am not sure we should grant him unlimited cred. Why do I have this incurable urge to go on an expedition to Mars? Why did Amundsen eat dogs just to get first to the South Pole? Why did our ancestors decide to follow the ice? These are existential questions that can never be answered.
Yes indeed, why does anybody in their right mind follow ice? Most Alaskans dream of retiring to Hawaii. I happen to be about 1 degree north of Hawaii and quite a bit to the west. The only ice here is in Taiwanese bubble iced tea.
Not unlimited cred?
But... I've been around since this community was a mailing list...
I programmed BS2p with the DOS-based editor running on a IBM PC XT emulator running on my StrongARM based PDA...
I've split and stacked unmentionable amounts of wood...
I installed my woodstove by myself, and to code!
I go fishing on the world's most beautiful road...
(Atlantic Ocean Road. Just mentioning it to cause a bit of envy)
Comments
It also contains link directly to the program in question...
Oops. Looks like I am barking up the same tree.
But do you stack bark up or down?
Bark? Must be a Norsk thing. Where I live, it's this or rubber tires.
"But engineers seem to often think that they can rescue the 3rd world with high technology while people in such places as outer Mongolia or the Tibetian plateau have adapted to living in a fashion that has worked for many centuries."
The role of outsiders is always open to question and is a subject of incessant discussion in both comfortable board rooms and not so comfortable outlands.
Outer Mongolia: The capital Ulaanbaatar is one of the most polluted cities on earth. It sits in a basin up against the mountains and collects smog from not only congested traffic but also hundreds of thousands of coal and biomass fueled heating and cooking stoves. Hundreds of thousands of people live in an inner city of ger (aka yurt), and they have to keep warm through the bitter winter. Hundreds of thousands more live in soviet era apartment houses that have electricity from coal fired power plants. Google "air pollution in ulaanbaatar".
Outside the big city, the steppes are vast open spaces swept by wind, and while people there do not have a pall of smog hanging over them, they do have to keep their dwelling, ger, cabin, house, apartment, sealed tight against the cold in winter, so air exchange rates and proper ventilation become an issue when it involves indoor combustion.
In the 13th century, the silk road city of Karakorum was thought to have something in the neighborhood of 50000 people, and a large number of those, including perhaps the Khan himself, preferred the traditional (or grandiose) ger. The city included famous iron smelters for the iron wheels of the Mongolian carts, and armaments. How did a city like that heat itself? The Mongols were famous for bringing in outside craftspeople and engineers (many by conscription from their conquests.) A case in point is the wondrous silver tree fountain supposedly built in the Khan's palace by the French silversmith/engineer Guilliame Bouchier. My point is that the tradition of centuries is never as simple as it might seem.
There's a guy around here who wrote a small book just for fun - about chopping, drying, and burning firewood - and it became a bestseller. Right now it is being translated into lots of foreign languages. Maybe we should get him into the forum.
Erlend
Henry David Thoreau wrote a wonderful book called "Walking". You can download it for free at the Gutenberg Project.
Besides, the economy isn't really being driven by what the latest technology is. It is driven by what the consumer spontaneously wants to buy. Fifteen years ago is was Nike basketball shoes, about forty-five years ago it was wood stoves and self-composting toilets. There was even a time when it was thought that Howard Stern would save radio.
Maybe it is time for more walking shoes, down comforters, home grown coffee, and homemade sour dough bread. I'm trying real hard to ignore Facebook and pop up advertising.
I like your post. Have you ever tried driving a recent model Volkswage Passat? It forces you to be a dumb, scared, non-competent driver, with all it's safety interlocks and microsoft-style 'help'. E.g. try to flash the direction lights only once (to say 'thank you'), and it will do 3 flashes minimum. Why??
Do worry: soon walking boots will have a safety feature (non-overridable) which prevents you from walking until you have safely tied your laces. Sorry, guess this came out too bitter. But I do hate push-marketing too, and don't get me started about Facebook.
Well, here's a smile still
Definitely agree that safety interlocks and such things have gone too far. My pet peeve in this area is "traction control", which seems to do exactly the opposite of what you would expect. If you are going up a slippery slope and a wheel hits an icy spot it applies the brake to that wheel and drops the throttle to idle, killing any forward momentum and ensuring you get stuck. I can only wonder what the idiot designers were thinking.
As for facebook and similar social media sites, I avoid them like the plague they really are. Their main function is to gather your personal information and preferences for push marketing regardless of what promises they make to the contrary.
Instead the future will be a world divided into regions dedicated to extreme wealthy, technocrats, the religious, the consumer, and the primitive. (Maybe I've forgotten a few).
If you want to live simply, you may have to join a Laotian hill tribe or a Shaker community in the US.
I suspect that setting aside all the digital technology and just working on improving Shaker woodworking might be very rewarding. And you might even come up with an excellent wood stove. One can build one out of stone and clay with just a steel liner and steel door. But I do fear that we might burn far more wood than we can grow.
In sum, what a world we live in! Very diverse, and it is likely to remain diverse. Why so? Nobody buys everything advertised. We might try a lot of it, but we also reject the majority of what we try.
When I lived with only wood heat, I wore long underwear for about half the year and two pairs of socks. There are refinements that are not so obvious.. oil your boots everyday. You will be standing in the rain chopping wood quite a bit.
The reason I enjoy Parallax and the devices they sell is that I can use my mind, like joining a good chess club. There are people here that think deeper and faster than I do.
But my car is a 1999 model Citroen Berlingo. No thrills(1.4L Injection engine... ) and very little frills.
(The oversized ragtop type sunroof probably count as a frill... When it works... )
No ABS, no parking help, no lane-change warnings(I wonder how that works on a snow-covered road, anyway), no traction-control.
It has airbags, though, headlight washers and heated wing mirrors...
(The 2012 VW Caddy I drive at the office is supposed to have 'all the frills', but no headlight washers or heated wing mirrors)
Guess which car I feel safer driving in the winter...
My brother used to drive 4WDs for a living(delivering newspapers in the area around Oslo... ) and he wouldn't touch a car if it wasn't possible to disable the ABS or traction control. (He'd wear out a Suzuki 413 in 4 or 5 years. )
Back to topic...
Automatic start of a stove;
There's a couple of reasons that this is a bad idea.
1. You'd have to put out the fire in the evening so that you can prepare it for start next morning. You DO NOT lay in kindling and whatever 'helpers' you use while the stove is hot.
2. If startup fails, there's a big risk of CO gas. Sure, it's supposedly not that bad a way to go, but...
When you are out of firewood, or too lazy to go get some.. just select the 'auto' mode and do as you wish.
My favorite vehicles of all time were the 1951 through 1953 Chevy Pickup Trucks I owned. I bought a series of them for about $150USD each and never did manage to get one worth restoring. But they were rugged and simple.
I feel pretty much the same way about wood heat. I want a good stove, so I can bed the coals and sleep through the night. But I want the ritual as much as the heat. And with wood heat, there are quite a few aspects to ritual.
When you own an old Chevy Pickup Truck, you just have to know how to adjust the valves to get the windshield wipers to operate regularly. That's part of its charm.
I had a lovely VW bug as well, that got 53 mpg when properly tuned. But adjusting valves outside on a wet and windy day just wasn't something I would welcome into my life on a long-term basis. With the Chevy Pickup, you could just about climb inside the engine well and stay out of the rain.
IOW, don't let your love of high-tech, ruin your appreciation of the simpler ways. Spice up your life with variety.
Heck, I even think the BS1 is still an excellent little device.
@Loopy
Gas burner is actually a brilliant idea. Ignite the gas burner (automatically) in the morning (all wood is burnt out after a long night) and let it heat up the stove - and the room. Down the first cup of coffee, and then you're ready to light up the fire for real - which will be much easier since the stove and the flue are already warm. I might actually work on this. (Of course it would be dead simple to have a gas stove for this, but really-)
Actually, they followed the retreating ice because that's where the hunting was best.
Now, I wonder what that says about the people who stayed behind?
A duo-fuelled stove makes sense, but the gas/oil/propane/whatever part needs to be able to heat the metal and stone of the wood-burning part for maximum efficiency. It really helps if they use the same chimney, also. That way the wood-burning can go almost directly to the high-efficiency stage.
Obviously, if you have gas, oil, or whatever... you have to connect to the outside world.
I'd just like to build a log cabin on a 160 acres surrounded by national forest, take water from a spring, catch trout from a stream, and grow a few vegetables. But I do admit that I'd get very little done without a chain saw. And I might have to shoot a deer occasionally. So a rifle and ammunition would be needed. Or at least a bow and arrows. Maybe I would need to live some place that has a coal seam poking out of the ground.
You can go back to before technology, but people just didn't live as long.
We like to sit around a wood stove, brew a cup of coffee, and vicariously dream of older days. At least we don't want to go back to before Prometheus stole fire from the Gods.
Early Bronze Age, that was a good time.
They invented agriculture and then writing. And with writing came bureaucracy and taxes.
Taxes. Ugg.
Man, I need to find me a melting glacier to chase.
That was the vikings returning and taking over.
They killed off the competition(bandits) and tarted taxing the locals.
The locals got protection and could work larger fields, further from their home. They could even work more efficiently since they could group up for difficult tasks.
Never say that a barbarian horde never did anyone any good...
Anyway, everyone know it was 'Fingers Mazda' who stole fire from the gods.
With the accellerating climate change these days, a melting glacier should not be hard to find...
Having relocated to the sub-tropical island of Taiwan, I am must more interesting in solar air conditioning and solar ice making these days. We need more trees more than we need wood heat. Humankind consumes more wood than termites. Sadly the majority of it is for paper. And an absurd amount goes into a Fed-Ex packet for no good reason at all.
The US EPA has interesting material on "burnwise".
I'd much rather find a big old nickle plated farm stove out of the mid-west with a built in hot water heater or a good tight cast iron pot belly with a long history of success and in good condition.
But I am sure there are others that love the idea of a new 'next generation'.
Even though the EPA strongly recommends starting fires with newspaper, the actual availability of newspaper is rapidly disappearing. Consider a good stockpile of excellent kindling of cedar, pine, or such.
Ocean drift wood contains salt. The salt converts to hydrochloric acid in a gas form during buring - hard on stoves and dangerous to people.
If you crunch and wad it up in a ball, it burns too fast and produces a lot of smoke and ash.
If you roll it up, it burns slowly and produces more smoke and ash.
The soot ends up sticking to the inside of the chimney, and like the soot from burning wet wood, is a fire hazard!
How the EPA can recommend it is completely beyond me.
Splinters of pine wood is good. Cotton pads with a dab of Vazeline is good. Commercial 'fire starters' (usually brown cubes, but the white stuff also works) is good...
Yes, I have tried using newspapers... Both times my alarm supplier called me to check why my smoke alarm had activated...
What would you do if the EPA sent you a registered letter and demanded you remove or upgrade the fireplace in your living room and buy only EPA approved fuels?
Fire starting is an art.
One guy can do very well with newspaper, another guy will not. You cannot merely depend on newspaper to set a log on fire. The newspaper is supposed to light kindling that lights larger pieces of wood in a progression and so on.. until you have a stable fire. I just suspect they want people to NOT use stove oil, aka kerosene. So they mention newspaper. Since they dislike cardboard, and had to mention something... newspaper was chosen.
Rolled up newspaper actually does very well in an established fire, but is likely to be too dense for starting. And I doubt that anyone can resist using some sort of hydrocarbon for a fire starter on a 'bad day'. Sometimes the wood is wet, or the kindling is used up, or you are just too cold to think clearly.
The introductory address was given by the prof. who is our group leader here at UC Berkeley. Whoever did the camera for the youtube video feed should have remembered that the content is mostly in the slides and graphs, not in the mug shot of the speaker. A lot of the monitoring and assessment of health effects that he talks about from our own research group came from instruments that use either BASIC Stamps or Propellers.
Well, that explains why I have not been much of a party goer, not that I didn't party hearty to the few I did go to when in the mood. Now why on earth did our tribe go do something so silly?
Oh, I see Gadgetman answered that question
But... I've been around since this community was a mailing list...
I programmed BS2p with the DOS-based editor running on a IBM PC XT emulator running on my StrongARM based PDA...
I've split and stacked unmentionable amounts of wood...
I installed my woodstove by myself, and to code!
I go fishing on the world's most beautiful road...
(Atlantic Ocean Road. Just mentioning it to cause a bit of envy)
Bubble tea?
No, peach-flavoured iced tea!