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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

except that candles don't just produce CO2, they produce soot and many other molecules which have been clearly associated with negative health outcomes.

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This is why I only use hydrogen torches at my dinner table.

Unless fully enclosed, burning hydrogen is really too dangerous for the dinner table:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=detecting%20a%20hydrog...

If you prefer NOx ;)

I prefer oxygen candles, personally.

My dad was on submarines and talked about these. Do they also provide light, and if so what color and intensity?

They 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 (linked to correct timestamp) shows the remains of a burned one and loading fresh ones on a submarine.

Depends on what state the oxygen is in and any other friends who may react/combust with.

they're not visible and you almost don't feel it when it burns you...

they 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.

The 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.

I have something like this: 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.

I may try one of those. My local grocery store has a few of them. Are they hard to clean?

If 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

That is perfect. I will look for the ceramic non painted ones.

Electric light bulbs

I 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.

Even bigger than pollution from e.g. burning coal/oil/etc.?

Surprisingly, 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-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.

If 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.

All 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.

> 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.

Try beeswax candles. They're more expensive but burn much more cleanly.

I'm disappointed by the lack of a methane emissions joke

They left an opening for you, carpe diem!

"they produce soot and many other molecules"

welcome to my family

Also s/produce/release/g

Underrated response. Not only a subtle fart joke but also pedantic about words.

No, candles "produce" not "release", because the soot doesn't exist before the chemical reaction.

And 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.

I 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...

Indeed. 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.

And 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

Do you frequently have problems with CAPTCHAs?

I find them quite organic-normative.

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