From the Seattle PI:
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About 3 p.m. Sunday, Bellevue firefighters were called to the 17100 block of Northeast Fifth Street after neighbors saw flames and smoke.
“It appears that a glass bowl, partially filled with water and elevated on a wire rack in a sunny area of the home’s deck, provided the right conditions to focus the sunlight and start a fire,” Lt. Eric Keenan said.
They should have listened to the warnings from the ants.
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
May 19th, 2009 at 10:21 am
And it’s worth remembering that astronomical optics can produce a burning image of the sun even when it’s way off axis. Instruments in space way been lost this way. It’s also why Hubble closes its aperture door during safing events – a strong suggestion from Jim Westphal, who once got a nasty burn on his arm from the rising sun bouncing off his infra-red survey telescope that was pointing at the zenith at the time…
May 19th, 2009 at 11:26 am
This happened in Edinburgh’s student town a few years ago as well.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:57 am
[...] Blogs / Cosmic Variance « When Sophomore Optics Goes Very Very Wrong [...]
May 19th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
I recently bought one of those illuminated magnifying lenses on a stalk for doing close work. It came with a little flap to cover the magnifier when not in use. What an obvious safety feature.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
My mom runs a hallmark store and had to recall these for the same reason.
One man refused to return his because he thought it was cool that his snow man could turn into a death ray.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:35 am
[...] Here is a case where a water filled glass bowl started a fire! You can probably guess [...]
May 20th, 2009 at 5:30 am
I’m told the offending goldfish pleaded amnesia…
May 25th, 2009 at 10:26 am
I remember a Dick Tracy comic strip several decades ago where Chester Gould used a bottle of fluid on a window sill to start a fire. I thought that was pretty cool at the time.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Aquarium salt is highly recommended for preventing diseases with goldfish. Plants and other decorations are up to each customer.