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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Ultimately, the credibility of that particular piece testimony does hinge on the question of whether it is possible for a meat-powered fire to generate enough heat to self-sustain once it gets started.

But let's actually do the math ourselves, instead of just parroting the arguments of ChatGPT, which is a language model which infamously has trouble telling you which of two numbers is larger unless you tell it to work through the problem step by step.

Enter the bomb calorimeter. It is a reasonably accurate way of measuring the energy content of various substances. Measurements using bomb calorimeters suggest that fat contains 38 - 39 kJ / g, proteins 15 - 18 kJ / g, and carbohydrates 22 - 25 kJ / g.

Humans are composed of approximately 62% water, 16% protein, 16% fat, 1% carbohydrates, and 6% other stuff (mostly minerals). For the cremation story to be plausible, let's say that the water would need to be raised to 100ºC (4.2 J / g / ºC) and then boiled (2260 J / g), and the inorganic compounds (call their specific heat also 4 J / g / ºC -- it's probably closer to 1, which is the specific heat of calcium carbonate, but as we'll see this doesn't really make much difference) raised to (let's say) 500ºC.

So for a 50 kg human, that's

  • 31 kg water: - 12 MJ to raise to 100ºC, 70MJ to actually boil

  • 8 kg protein - 132 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions

  • 8 kg fat - 308 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions

  • 500g carbohydrates - 12 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions

  • 3 kg other - 6 MJ to raise to 500ºC.

So that's about 450 MJ released by burning, of which about 90 MJ goes towards heating stuff and boiling water. That sure looks energy positive to me.

Sanity check -- a tea light is a 10g blob of paraffin wax, which has a very similar energy density to fat. So a tea light should release about 400 kJ of energy when burned, which means that a tea light should contain enough energy to boil off about 150 mL of water, or to raise a bit over a liter of water from room temperature to boiling, if all of the energy is absorbed in the water.

And, in fact, it is possible to boil water using tea lights. A tea light takes about 4 hours to burn fully. That video shows 17 tea lights burning for 8.5 minutes, which should release about 60% as much energy as is contained in a single tea light. It looks like that brought about 400ml of water to a boil, so the sanity check does in fact check out.

I really don't think that random british dude who is showing you how to use candles to boil water during a power failure is in on a global conspiracy to cover up a lack of genocide, but, just in case you think he is, this is an experiment you can try at home with your own materials.

Edit: clarity

I think securesignal's argument has massive holes elsewhere (even in the point under discussion, finding fuel in industrial quantities to burn bodies should not be a problem for a modern state) , but your argument is very theoretical.

I listen to true crime, and I never heard of a murderer burning a body without fuel. Usually it takes them a day of piling on wood on the corpse before it's gone. Is a steak spontaneously combustible? It would seem to have enough energy, yet I have never seen one burst into flames and keep burning if briefly exposed to fire.

I never heard of a murderer burning a body without fuel.

ah but this wasn't the claim! @SecureSignals's claim was that the cremation process was energy negative, which has shown not to be the case not only by @faul_sname's calculations but experimentally as well

also while SecureSignals seems to always be insinuating that 1 body was burned at a time... this is clearly not the case as claimed by... well everyone that isn't a holocaust denier

You have to dehydrate it first, but jerky is in fact flammable. We're not talking about a single body, we're talking about a pile of bodies with fuel and accelerants at the bottom.

SecureSignals keeps coming back to the assertion that "pile a bunch of bodies on a grate, put wood and accelerants below them, and ignite" is not a viable way to burn bodies, and that it is not viable because burning bodies is a strongly energy-negative process, as evidenced by normal cremations taking a lot of fuel. This would actually be a pretty good knock-down argument against the reliability of that testimony if burning bodies was in fact strongly energy-negative.

That jerky is 50% fat. And your theoretical argument claimed it would boil the water away, no need to remove it first. But ok, I'll grant it is possible within certain parameters and I learned something about jerky and the wick effect.

I don't happen to have any lean beef jerky on hand, but I do have some dried shredded squid, which has 0.5g of fat, 25g of sugar, and 16g of protein per serving (and also, according to the back of the packaging possibly some lead, mercury, and cadmium?!), and that burns quite vigorously. That's rather more sugar (and heavy metals) than I would expect my dried squid snacks to have.

I do expect that even lean jerky would burn pretty vigorously once it got going though. I'll actually run the experiment the next time I have some lean beef jerky (that is not, for some reason, full of sugar and heavy metals).

So your contention is that it takes no fuel beyond body mass to perform a cremation?

Whether or not you can perform a cremation without additional fuel will depend on how much heat is lost to the environment (plus the question of achieving ignition in the first place). My contention is that body mass contains sufficient energy to perform a cremation. This is based on the following logic:

  1. Humans are made of meat

  2. Meat with a nontrivial fat percentage contains enough energy to boil all of the water in the meat.

  3. Meat without the water is called "jerky".

  4. Jerky is flammable.

Whether or not you can perform a cremation without additional fuel will depend on how much heat is lost to the environment

So you are not saying one way or another whether a cremation requires fuel? Can you cite me any case or example where the cremation of a carcass (livestock for example) did not require fuel to be cremated to ash?

Here's an example by the way of a cremation of a pig with a large amount of wood fuel. It did not achieve complete cremation.

Can you cite me any case or example where the cremation of a carcass (livestock for example) did not require fuel to be cremated to ash?

I can cite you several cases where the burning of a body did not require significant amounts of external fuel. Which had already been pointed out to you at the time you made this comment. However, and I will emphasize this because it is in fact an important point:

Nobody in this thread has made the claim, or is currently making the claim, that the pyres did not have any fuel. They are instead saying that your assumption that the amount of fuel required to burn a pile of bodies must scale with the number of bodies is wrong.

The actual specific testimony in question was

The cremation took place in such away that railway lines and concrete blocks were placed together. The corpses were piled on these rails. Brushwood was put under the rails. The wood was doused with petrol. In that way not only the newly accumulated corpses were cremated, but also those taken out from the graves.

You seem to be under the impression, not just that this did not happen, but that this physically could not have happened. That is why people, including me, are pointing out that bodies do in fact contain enough energy that they could burn under the right conditions.

And rather than disputing the math, or making specific claims about why the math does not apply in this situation, you've been doing an awful lot of sneering about how absurd peoples' claims are[1][2][3], and trying to misrepresent what their claims were[4][5][6].

So no, I am not going to engage in the way you want, providing ever more statements for you to make doubtful sneering faces at while avoiding actually engaging with the arguments.

I'm out.

[1] "Your claims are literally absurd. But it's why witnesses thought it wasn't too big of a problem to say that little or no fuel was used, or particularly fat women were used as fuel". (no explanation of why the claim is absurd, just an attempt to distract with other claims by the same person that you find non-credible)

[2] "It's pretty unbelievable that you make the claim that thousands of people could be cremated simultaneously without fuel (except to start the fire), and that the cremation would be net energy-positive" (and your source of why it's unbelievable was... ChatGPT???)

[3] "It's a logistically absurd claim. It's not even close to being possible." (judged absurd by ChatGPT again, of course)

[4] "The suggestion that cremations were burned in the open-air without fuel is of course completely absurd" (that was not, in fact, the suggestion)

[5] "So that's now 3 people who have claimed it takes no fuel to cremate bodies, just for the record." (which was, again, not the claim)

[6] "So your contention is that it takes no fuel beyond body mass to perform a cremation?" (you get the idea)

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