[billnotgatez]

I can take two electrodes submerged in water with catalyst.
Then apply electric energy to the electrodes.
Hydrogen and Oxygen will bubble up.
I can then burn the the 2 gases.
So now I have created energy from water

The punchline is I had to put energy in to make the gasses.

In thermodynamics there is no free lunch.

[CuriousOne]

Do you believe SHC is possible, billnotgatez? (Funny name btw)

[billnotgatez]

I read the WIKI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_Human_Combustion
it is doing the NPOV thing
but among the entries is research done by Joe Nickell.
I think I have met him and he gave a presentation on debunking stuff like SHC.
His calling card was a wooden nickle.

You are worried about 300 potential cases in 200 years where most of them probably had external causes influencing them.

I would be skeptical

I suppose that I could feed a pig ethanol to just shy of killing it and see if it burns.
Wait, cancel that, not politically correct to burn a pig.

[CuriousOne]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I've read several debunking articles by Joe Nickell and he seems to be a logical thinker, but people like him still do assume. He can't be sure he is correct, otherwise SHC would no longer be up for debate by anyone.

To answer your question, yes I am worried about this phenomenon. I don't know what to believe as I've heard many theories from many sources. The scariest (in my personal opinion) is on rare occasions when you have claimed SURVIVORS of SHC and when you have WITNESSES of SHC.

These two freak me out, because while most cases are of the victims being alone in their homes, certain reports have witnesses and alleged survivors. I have read their stories and even seen verbal interviews with some of them. They look genuinely afraid, baffled, confused and not knowing what to make of what they/their loved ones experienced.

I don't think all witnesses or claimed survivors are liars or attention seekers either. Some of them appear quietly horrified, not really wanting to relive what they saw/felt, but not knowing how else to respond when questioned. And if people aren't lying ... wouldn't that mean their stories are true? Of course there's no way to be sure they're not lying...but it seems unlikely that ALL of them would lie about the same thing.

[408]

The human body contains roughly as much water as a soaked sponge.  I will let you try to set a soaking sponge on fire with diphisphine or even thermite if you wish, but it will not work.  Water is too great of a heat sink.

[CuriousOne]

There is one other thing that terrifies me. I would appreciate any reponses directly addressing this, or how it could be possible under normal circumstances?

What the film makers neglected to say, however, is that the time that elapsed between the grand-daughter handing Mrs Conway the matches and the firemen arriving to discover her completely consumed remains, was at most about 20 minutes and could have been as little as 6 minutes.

This information comes from Robert Meslin, a volunteer fireman (later Fire Marshall) in Upper Darby Township at the time of the fire, and one of the first on the scene. (It was Meslin who took the famous photographs of Mrs Conway's charred remains.)

"The amazing part of the incident in my opinion", says Meslin, "is the time element." Meslin said that the grand-daughter made the fire alarm call within "three minutes" of having last spoken to her grandmother. That meant Mrs Conway was alive at 8:42 AM. The firemen arrived to find her remains at 8:48 AM.

Once again, the "wick effect" can be completely ruled out. It is absolutely inexplicable that the makers of the BBC TV QED film should have stated that the "cause of the fire is known" when they must also have known that the fire that consumed Helen Conway did so in a time interval of not more than 20 and not less than 6 minutes. The film maker's own experiment showed them conclusively that the 'wick effect' would have taken a minimum of 7 hours to consume Mrs Conway.

Source: Fire Marshall Robert Meslin

[Borek]

Check out this source (a physics website) which even includes a video and a scientific explanation of how this can occur. If/after you read it, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Have you actually read the page you linked to? If so, you would never write something like 

Borek, if water cannot be used as a fuel source, how do you explain the new discovery that it can

as it directly addresses the fact that it is not a way of using water as a fuel, and explains why. Looks to me like you are juggling links without even reading content you are commenting on.

And please stop posting huge quotes without giving source to the link. For copyright reasons we will need to delete them, for the discussion to have any merit we need to know the source of the information we are discussing, as analyzing information from an unreliable source is a waste of time. Post a link and a snippet only.

[CuriousOne]

OK, sorry. Feel free to delete the whole thread if you want. I don't mind.

[CuriousOne]

I read online that diphosphane was found in human feces by German researchers, though when I tried to do more online research on this, I didn't find much. Does anyone know anything about this?

[Arkcon]

I hope you don't mind my merging this new topic with your older one, given they seem to work together.  I didn't find anything on Google regarding diphosphane and human feces, but we're facing a problem -- diphosphine seems to have been used as a a synonym for diphosphane.  So now we have to be very careful whenever we look up something ion this topic.

[CuriousOne]

Are diphosphane and diphosphine different? And I kind of wanted this topic to be on its own, separate from this one. 

[Hunter2]

Diphosphane and Diphosphine are same. The last name is older.