by Sepka » Sat Apr 08, 2006 2:01 am
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Or are you saying the gasoline explosion hypothesis of the police is reasonable and acceptable?<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>I'm not saying that there was or wasn't a gasoline explosion, but rather that, on consideration of the characteristics of such an explosion, what woke the neighbors couldn't have been a gasoline explosion, since one large enough to make that kind of noise would have blown out the restaurant's walls. If an explosion woke people in neighboring apartments, then it wasn't the gasoline.<br><br>At the same time, I'm not convinced that the explosion woke the people either. On many occasions I've been awaked unexpectedly, wondered what woke me, then found out later that say, the cat had knocked something over about that time. I tell myself after the fact that I was awakened by the cat, when in reality it may have been something else altogether. So it is here. They may have been awakened by the victim's screams, by the general commotion, or something else. They heard afterward that there was an explosion, and that "becomes" what woke them.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>IF</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> the story about the fellow pouring gasoline on himself and lighting it is true, then there probably was some sort of explosion. I'm going on the assumption that the air in the bathroom will be more or less still (ie, no wind) and that he won't have waited a very long time after pouring it out to light himself up (he'd have passed out from the fumes otherwise). Under those conditions, the atmospheric concentration of gasoline will vary as a rough inverse function of distance from his body. You can see why this is true if you think of the gasoline molecules spreading by brownian motion through the air molecules.<br><br>Think of him as surrounded in a spreading sphere of gasoline vapour, the concentration of which decreases the further away from him you get. Close to his body there's a flammable concentration. Further away, surrounding this, there's an explosive concentration. This is a special condition that arises in still air. A Buddhist monk, eg, lighting himself up in the street won't necessarily have the vapour shell around himself, since the breeze will be carrying it away as it forms.<br><br>So far as MythBusters, I'm sorry if I seemed to be giving you grief on it, but that is really just the most awfully-researched show. There's some demographic that apparently just revels in disproving urban legends, even if the 'proof' has no connection to reality. It's like an anti-informational show, that decreases the viewer's understanding of the world. A back of the envelope calculation with the ideal gas law should be enough to prove to anyone whether a gasoline explosion in a toilet bowl can launch someone through the air.<br><br>-Sepka the Space Weasel <p></p><i></i>
