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Comment by Youden | Hacker News Reader

In high school science class we boiled water using standard printer paper: fold a sheet into a box, put it on a stand over a bunsen burner, fill it with water, turn up the bunsen burner.

Not only does it not burn but it retains more of its structural integrity.

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It's a classic survival tip when lost in the wild:

Fold your map into a box and cook whatever food-like things you've found before eating.

Why you're lost when you have a map is a different question.

Just because you have a map doesn’t mean you know where you are in said map. Reading the landscape and elevation changes around you and matching that to a map is a skill into itself. Even harder without a compass.

Could also be the case that in reading the map you realize you're too far in any direction for help...

Or your poor map reading skills are how you got lost in the first place

Even if you had a map, a compass, knew where you are on the map, and had a target destination on the map… it would still be hard to navigate, again a skill all by itself.

Someone who doesn't know how a map works, likely won't have much other survival skill giving him benefit from the map cooking method.

Personally, destroying my only map (or risking it) would be the last desperate method that I would consider trying.

Survival tip number one is btw not bother much with foraging or trying to boil potential poisonous plants to mess up your stomach, but find the best direction and focus on walking, if no help will come.

(One can go without food for days, but not without water)

Wait you mean there isn't an arrow on the map that automatically shows your position and heading?

Why you are even more lost after eating from the map is obvious, though... :)

When was this - are we saying that high school science teachers were aware of a fact that was not acknowledged by historians and anthropologists? Quite interesting!

You might be entertained to learn that this happens _all the time_. The spearpoint of application is often a _long way_ from the theory. So much so that they can miss obvious things.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...

(Dont' skip the comments)

Sometimes to hilarious results:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7677819/

It's not uncommon for experts in one domain to be completely clueless in other domains...

My middle school science teacher did it, and the big caveat he gave us was not to use wax or plastic-coated cups if we wanted to try at home.

that is so cool - I mean the fact that this example stuck with you so long is a single of good teaching to me

We used to do this on the camp fire in Boy Scouts with paper cups. The older boys would learn it in science class and would use it to wow the younger ones.

With direct flame on it? I guess it was removing water molecules slower than it was absorbing water. As long as it was saturated it would be fine. Great experiment.

There's also a great experiment with a normal baloon, keep a tiny bit of water in it and the you can hold the inflated balloon over a flame as long as the water doesn't boil away

In Boy Scouts, we used to boil water with direct flame on paper cups. It would burn the paper "lip" on the bottom, but not leak.

the mechanism of it is not that paper is saturated with water, but that while there is water in the container, paper doesn't get hotter than 100C and a bit, not enough to ignite.

I'm very confused how you make a watertight box with a sheet of standard printer paper - would seem like either it would very quickly be a wet mess, or you'd have to fold it so many times to have any durability that it would be too small to contain a meaningful amount of water.

Back in our school days, well before personal phones and all that, we'd often make folded paper water bombs,

eg: https://www.google.com/search?q=origami+water+bomb

returns maker videos, text instructions, etc.

paper water bombs worked very well!

In Boy Scouts we did it with plastic cups. Not the healthiest material in retrospect :-)

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