Back in the day, I knew a couple of guys who did a bed-of-nails act for money in tourist venues. One guy would strip down to his trunks and lie on the bed of nails. The crowd would wonder, ooh and aah. The highlight was when the other guy placed a lightweight breeze-block on top of the prone guy and then whacked it with a hammer. The audience would wince and applaud. The money would be collected.

The trick was simple. There are a lot of nails on the `bed` and they are positioned close enough to each other so that the guy’s weight is evenly distributed, meaning no harm is done apart from the occasional scratch and graze, and the guy is careful getting on and off.

The breeze block bit is just theatre with the guy exaggerating the power of the blow.

Next week: How to pull a cast-iron roller 100 metres using only your testicles and a length of piano-wire.

“Firewalking is an amazing thing. After all, walking with your bare feet on a hot road at 44°C for 35 seconds can give you second-degree burns. So how do people walk on fire and not get burnt?

My first point is that the name ‘firewalker’ is not accurate. They don’t walk on fire. In fact, most firewalkers don’t even walk on naked hot coals. In general, they walk on hot coals that are covered by ash — but ‘ashwalker’ doesn’t sound as impressive as ‘firewalker’.

My second point relates to the concept of ‘heat conductivity’. It sounds a bit complicated, but let’s take it one step at a time. It relates to how quickly heat travels from one body to another.

Imagine that you have a cake cooking in a cake tin, inside an oven at 180°C. It has been baking for an hour, so everything in the oven is at 180°C. So the air, the cake, and the metal cake tin in which the cake rests are all at 180°C.

You open the oven and plunge your hand into the hot air at 180ºC. Your hand does not get burnt by the hot air. Weird!

Next, you gently, with your naked finger, touch the top of the cake, which is also at a temperature of 180°C. Once again your finger does not get burnt. More weirdness.

But if you touch the hot cake tin, you’ll immediately get large blisters on your naked fingers. So you grab an oven mitt and remove the hot tin and cake.

Why do the air, cake and metal cake tin all have different abilities to burn you?

Welcome back to our friend, heat conductivity.

Heat conductivity measures how rapidly heat energy can flow out of an object. ‘Conductivity’ and ‘insulation’ are opposites. If an object is a good conductor, it’s a bad insulator — and vice versa.

Air is a bad conductor, and a good insulator. So the flesh of your hand can ‘touch’ the hot air in the hot oven and not get burnt.

The same goes for the cake. Even though the cake has a lot of heat energy stored in it, its poor conductivity stops the heat from getting into your hands. There is a lot of heat energy in the cake, but it can’t flow quickly into your naked hand. Mind you, if you lay your hand on the hot cake for more than a few seconds, you’ll get a nasty burn.

But the cake tin has both a high heat content and a high conductivity. Touch the tin for a second or two with your naked flesh, and you’ll get burnt immediately.

But what about hot coals? They turn out to be very bad conductors of heat. A hot coal has a moderate amount of heat energy, but is incredibly bad at passing that heat energy to anything else.

Back in 1997, Kjetil Kjernsmo, a Norwegian scientist from the University of Oslo, investigated the phenomenon of firewalking with heat sensitive cameras. The first thing he found was that the temperature of the coal bed varied between 150°C and 700°C. 700°C is hot, but nowhere near the 1,200°C that some firewalkers claim to have measured.

The second thing that he found was that very little heat energy left the coals and entered the naked feet, during a firewalk. According to his heat camera, the naked feet didn’t cool down the coals much at all — so the hot coals stayed hot, and the feet stayed cold, all thanks to the very low thermal conductivity of the coals. He measured that after a typical firewalk, the bare soles heated up by only 4°C.

Finally there is some physiology involved. The outer layer of human skin is dead. Even people who always wear shoes and have soft feet, have enough dead skin to provide good insulation. And as a final help, blood circulating through the feet is an excellent conductor, and helps to take the heat away.

It’s not a higher state of spiritual awareness that protects you from blisters — it’s basic high school thermodynamics.

So if somebody tries to take your money for firewalking, ask them to prove that they have something really special to offer. Ask them to walk on a hot steel plate — it might not be such a cake walk, after all! “

https://www.sannyas.wiki/index.php?title=Walk_Into_the_Holy_Fire

It`s a no-brainer,surely?

This time of the year is different. You can light fires outside whenever you want. I love it. Nothing to beat a holy fire. Brings one back to a timeless time, where fires were the poor man’s TV. You can stare at the fire for hours and the movie constantly changes. I love altered states wherein the flames take you back to prehistoric times. A crackle and a cloud of sparks a cosmic event. Rising smoke a family of displaced ghosts. Might light a fire this afternoon, just for the pure enjoyment of it. All SN regulars welcome.

I came across a beautiful wild area, a small piece of land the other day just off a main road that was blocked by a large boulder. That rock had just been put there in the entrance to stop people from driving into that field, which is not used by any farmer or owned by anyone except perhaps the National Trust, and now the overgrown field, which is flanked by small hills and bordered by some trees is lying empty. No one walks in there. What a waste.

Apparently they’ve blocked most of the nicest places like that with rocks in England since the nineties so people can’t drive into them and camp anymore. You have to go up North or into Wales for a slightly more relaxed environment.

Then I came across this track which seemed appropriate:

“At night we’ll watch the embers blaze
As sparks dance in the darkening sky
And dream of better days…
Of a freedom never bought not sold…
No good intentions turned to dust
It can’t be broke with threats or gold…
I may leave but I won’t be gone
I’ll be there beside the fire singing along to all out songs
So I’ll meet you on the ridgeway downs
Under the solstice sun….”

‘Ridgeway Downs’ from Firepit Collective: https://youtu.be/6H1FdGkoyIM

From a recommended album of folk which I discovered the other day.

Perfectly correct.