On Friday night we lit the candles around the bodies of the soon-to-be dead. Muuuhahaha!
Here's what it looked like.
Momma Daisy is in a big pot, so it took a 33-gallon trashcan to hold her and the candles.
She's tall, so the candles were placed on small, overturned plastic pots so that their wicks cleared her leaves. Since Oxygen is lighter than CO2, placing the flame higher would also help the candles consume more oxygen.
I bought a sheet of glass to put over the top as a lid. It was heavy enough to make a decent seal. It doesn't have to be perfect as there will be almost no air movement within the can or around the cracks in the seal to allow significant mass transport between the air in the can and the air outside. The candles inside would create convection-based air currents as they burned that would ensure that the maximum possible Oxygen was consumed.I would have loved to instrument the can, but O2 sensors are expensive. I'm letting it go for 3 days and keeping it covered with towels to limit the amount of photosynthesis going on. Finally, I'm shopping around for a decent USB camera eyepiece for my microscope so I can share what I see with you. I took a video of the candles burning out, but it turned out very badly and no amount of editing helped. It's all a learning process.
4 comments:
It doesn't have to be perfect as there will be almost no air movement within the can or around the cracks in the seal to allow significant mass transport between the air in the can and the air outside." I can completely relate to that quote from personal experience. There's a really interesting debate that I thought would be of interest on evolution vs. intelligent design going on at http://www.intelligentdesignfacts.com
Nice. Although, with the candles, this is starting to look more like an exorcism than anything else :-)
Which I suppose it is, in a way . . .
Cammie, thanks for stopping by and leaving the comment, but I don't have any need for Intelligent Design. To me, ID picks an unnecessary fight between religion and science. If you accept that God created the Universe, then what does ID do for you? To a very large extent, the science-based atheists are right in that the physical world is mostly deterministic. By setting things in motion in a certain way, that seems like intelligent design enough.
Tim, I had the image of an old Vincent Price film with the Satanists performing some hideous ritual involving dark robes and candelabras.
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