Przemek Klosowski wrote:
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

The article says it was difficult to ignite because it was a magnesium alloy
designed to be fire resistant.


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