Death by "fractal wood burning" - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: JimRemington
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 02:46:23 pm
content: Couple electrocuted to death making art hyped on TikTok, officials sayhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/04/26/fractal-burning-tiktok-wisconsin-died/When investigators responded to an April 6 fire at a Wisconsin home, they were immediately stumped.The house in Marathon County, northwest of Green Bay, was badly burned, and its owners were nowhere to be found. But once the blaze was extinguished, officers found two bodies in the garage — those of Tanya Rodriguez, 44, and James Carolfi, 52.Firefighters suspected foul play, and Marathon County sheriff’s deputies started looking for clues to solve what they thought was a homicide case. Then, pathologists conducting the couple’s autopsies proposed a theory that changed the course of the investigation: that Rodriguez and Carolfi had died after electrocution from fractal wood burning.Chief Deputy Chad Billeb confirmed the findings during a Thursday news conference.“Foul play has been ruled out and the deaths are found to be accidental in nature and believed to be caused by electrocution from fractal wood burning,” he said.Fractal wood burning pairs high-voltage electricity and a chemical solution to etch intricate designs into slabs of wood. The process creates what is referred to as Lichtenberg figures, a pattern discovered in 1777 by German physicist Georg Lichtenberg while he conducted static electricity experiments. The intricate designs — often seen in the scars of people who’ve been struck by lightning — resemble tree branches, lightning bolts or ferns.The results have turned fractal wood burning into a social media phenomenon. Hundreds of how-to videos exist on the Internet. On TikTok, #fractalburning and similar hashtags have garnered millions of views. Yet the aesthetically pleasing look of veins spreading across a piece of wood can come at a high cost — and in dozens of cases have turned fatal.People trying the craft often pick apart microwaves or car batteries to remove the power supply, which is then connected through jumper cables to nails attached to a piece of wood slathered with a conductive solution of baking soda and water.At least 33 people — ranging from rookies to experienced electricians — have died from fractal wood burning since 2016, according to the American Association of Woodturners. The group has banned references to the dangerous process at its events, as well as in its articles and publications.“It’s very pretty, quite frankly,” he added about fractal burning. “But it should only be done by professionals.”

author: Ian.M
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 02:57:26 pm
content: Quote from: The Washington PostI doubt many people are wood-burning with 450V Tesla batteries!Don't they still teach that electricity + water is extremely dangerous in American schools nowadays? Or is it just that the Darwin award candidates were even dumber than the journalists?

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 03:30:08 pm
content: Done it by accident using a plank to knock up a quick and dirty Jacobs ladder, using neon sign transformers, and cooked the wood a little, seeing as it was high in moisture. But yes, seens people really are not thinknig, probably from having thought that 120V is just going to be a little shock, and that the RCD will trip. But not realising that the secondary of a MOT is both grounded, and not connected to the mains, and also quite capable of killing you dead, and then cooking you as well, and then finally catch you on fire as well.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 03:49:37 pm
content: what's this got to do with fractals ?

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 03:51:22 pm
content: The pattern produced by the process resembles fractal geometrical patterns.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 04:39:39 pm
content: resembles but is not... tofu resembles meat.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 04:45:02 pm
content: The resemblance is "what's this got to do with fractals ?" just as "dentritic" resembles trees.

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 05:02:06 pm
content: Smoking tabacco: 5 million deaths / yr.Drinking ethanol: 3 million deaths / yr.Hurling yourself at 70km/h in an thin metal can: 1 million deaths / yr.DIY project inspired by TikTok: 5.5 deaths / yr.Visiting an amusement park in US: 4 deaths / yr.Place bets on which of those is going to be the subject of the next fearmongering and calls for urgent ban.free_electron:Lichtenberg figures are fractal. Not merely looking like fractals — they are fractal in the strict sense.

author: eugene
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 05:10:46 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on April 27, 2022, 03:49:37 pmWhat's this got to do with EE?

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 05:15:40 pm
content: About the same as the AN-125 Dream Plane or NY state banning natural gas heating in new construction. And I didn't hear any complaints about those threads.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 05:51:47 pm
content: Quote from: eugene on April 27, 2022, 05:10:46 pmIt relates to electrical safety, which should be important to EE.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 07:21:06 pm
content: Quote from: golden_labels on April 27, 2022, 05:02:06 pmIt's also probable that some of those deaths were not from electrocution, but fire.One thing to bear in mind is the fatality rate vs numbers who participate in said activity. Far more people drive than do fractal wood burning.

author: m3vuv
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 09:03:20 pm
content: ive had a few near misses with homebrew linear rf amps,some of the transfos used make microwave transfos look like toys,luckily the only things that duffered were my underpants!.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 09:21:40 pm
content: You need to shell out for materials that have high dielectric strength and learn about proper strain relief/cabling/touch safety techniques to be able to do this safely. Also buy good wire.Maybe someone should run a professional paid service that does this for you so that you can get them mail order instead of screwing around trying to DIY this. I think with something this random/weird.. the best option is to commercialize it so there is less incentive to DIY, or to standardize it as some kind of art studio equipment. There are so many 'stupid' ways to get yourself killed its basically random. I would say its actually a somewhat hard design to make this safe, people have problem dealing with 'invisible' forces. Try convincing someone that they need a flat clean dielectric surface to do this kind of work on that is made of plastics that have special hard to measure parameters ETC. Carpenters don't have a stellar reputation for safety as it is. If a professional service offers some kind of 'quality' because of finer control or whatever, the DIY version would get a bad reputation as being low quality and demand would drop in the art world. Clearly it has a demand, clearly its not possible to enforce this shit, so the only thing you can do is to try to make people buy instead of DIY. Spend about 2 hours on youtube watching industrial practice in developing nations and you will see that the best option is to try to make better equipment with 'guards*' and stuff, because people will do whatever makes them money, especially something as 'benign' as texturing wood.*imagine what kind of industrial hell there would be in some places if no one figured out how to make a gear box coverAnd education helps, there needs to be the same association with a crappy unsafe electrical system as a mechanical one. It needs to be seen like a car without a wind shield or something. If you start removing guards/protections from typical things you see that are commonly accepted people won't wanna get near them because its obvious that its dangerous. The current 'technology level' of the HV-sculpting? systems is akin to cooking a home meal with a gasoline pit.

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2022, 09:59:08 pm
content: Quote from: Zero999 on April 27, 2022, 07:21:06 pmThat was a half joke, half comment on journalist’s approach to the subject. So I did not meant to discuss that part seriously.But if you want to talk about it: if it’s public safety matter, it must be taken as per population, not per participants. 300 people of 300 million engaging in an activity that, assume hypothetically some value higher than that TikTok trend, has 10% fatality rate per participant-life is not something important. It may be 1000× more dangerous than something having 0.01% fatality rate per participant-life, but the latter will still yield 1000× more victims.Of course this is just pedantism, because smoking turns out worse no matter if you count it per-population or per-participant.And, I will repeat, that comment was about how the journalist demonized the situation.

author: eugene
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 01:25:46 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 27, 2022, 05:15:40 pmThose are both in the General Chit Chat subforum where this thread belongs.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2022, 06:44:50 am
content: Quote from: eugene on April 28, 2022, 01:25:46 amI think the beginner section is fine, since it's important to warn newcomers about dangerous things.Quote from: golden_labels on April 27, 2022, 09:59:08 pmThose statistics reflect the status quo. We need to discourage uncommon risky activities with a high fatality rates, because they would kill large numbers of people, if they were to become popular.