"Przemek Klosowski" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:18:22 -0800, Steve B wrote:

The other night, we were camping, and tossed a
sliver of it on the fire.

It was magnesium. Good thing we didn't toss the entire bar.

It's surprisingly hard to get solid magnesium to light up. The cases of
NeXT computers were cast from magnesium, and Simson Garfinkel set out to
light it up. He had to heat it up significantly (like, with a torch) to
ignite the solid metal:

http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html

No problem there whatsoever. I have a torch.

Steve