Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Gent eats hot coals

Mark Frauenfelder at 7:55 pm Wed, Apr 18, 2012

— FEATURED —

Science

Last chance to enter the Armchair Taxonomist challenge!

Book Review

Black Code: how spies, cops and crims are making cyberspace unfit for human habitation

Book Review

We Can Fix it! - a graphic novel time travel memoir

Science

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle

I like the crunchy sounds. (Via Arbroath)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

  • bcsizemo

    Screw the coals, eating that fluorescent tube is liable to give him mercury poisoning.

  • http://orbitnet.com JIMWICh

    Well, sh*t fire!

    • bcsizemo

      And here I thought Taco Bell was the worse thing to come out the other end…

  • william beaty

    Jim Rose Circus?  Or science teacher!   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiKtjaqt-_M  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yQbh59fFj0

    With the physics classroom “drink liquid nitrogen” trick, word went out in the 1980s that the thermal shock causes accumulating crazing-fractures to teeth.  Physics teachers don’t do that one anymore, just lying on bed-0f-nails while assistant smashes a cinderblock placed on ribs.   Probably burning charcoal has similar risk to LN2, but I can’t recall ever seeing this suggested as a lecture demo.  (Should I be first?)  Leidenfrost effect provides an insulating layer for firewalking (which is a common lecture demo too.)

  • Daemonworks

    Ah, geeks.

    (For those who don’t know – “geek” was originally carny slang for the guys who ate wierd stuff in sideshows)

    • http://thelizardman.com The Lizardman

       Geek was usually reserved for those who ate live animals (biting their heads off) whereas people who ate strange inanimate objects were billed for what they ate or sometimes as human ostriches – however, the most famous human ostrich was actually a regurgitator who used both objects and small live animals (he didn’t kill & consume them but brought them back up whole & alive).  So, while there is no hard fast rule on the terminology a geek would be much more likely to be eating live animals.  this gentleman would most likely have been billed as neither, what he is doing falls under both pain proof man & fire manipulator (eating coals is one of the first effects explained the classic text Fire Magic as an extra for fire performers)

  • IamInnocent

    Well, how many calories in a serving?

  • TheMudshark

    Why?

  • awjt

    This is what they make me do every day at work, except it’s burning coals of SHIT