Me and my friends had a lot of fun as teenagers using aerosols for a similar purpose. We'd scavenge old aerosols from our parent's houses and use them as the propellant for spud guns and the like (we didn't blow up any cars, for the record).
I think the trick was to find the ones with propane propellant rather than butane. I also suspect that the (rapidly boiled) moisture droplets from the aerosol would have added to the explosive force too.
Eventually we decided to go straight to the source and got ourselves a little oxy/propane welding kit. That worked a treat. I'm kind of surprised B&Q sold that to a bunch a teenagers actually.
The fuel:air ratio for getting high is way richer than the fuel:air ratio for combustion. Also if you're getting high off it you're probably not going to want to waste it. I'm assuming butane was the propellant for the air freshener since IIRC that's a common propellant for things that are supposed to smell nice.
Many things hit an explosive atmosphere at around 4%.
Also, there is the concept of deflagration vs detonation, the latter being decidedly worse, but unlikely in this case due to the geometry.
There is a whole field of electrical engineering dedicated to defining potential for and avoiding of igniting explosive atmospheres in industrial plant.
Achieving the right fuel/air mixture before the lighter ignites it requires so many things to go right (or wrong) that this might be one of those things tossed around by conspiracy theorists for a long time.
Probably significantly helped by the improvement of door seals over the years.
The guy blew up his car with an excessive use of air freshener. "Blow up" isn't a precise technical term we need to worry about abusing. "Excessive" might be subjective or subject to debate, but when the resulting damage is enough to blow out the windows and bend the sheet metal, let's just go with excessive.
No, they're scare quotes. Quoting the police statement would involve... quoting the police statement (or a portion of it, or multiple portions joined by elipsis), not quoting two separate words from the police statement.
Regarding your edit: yes, they use scare quotes in the article text as well as the headline. It's stupid.
I disagree. The feeling that immediately hits me when I read this headline is that they are pulling terminology from a 3rd party and using quotes to in fact lessen the scare-factor of the terminology. To me, this headline says, "here's how this incident is officially described, not just some stuff we're making up to be dramatic - please read the article to get the details, because the terminology is not necessarily objective." This feels responsible to me, rather than fear-mongering. I think your approach may be a little tainted by the common cynical outlook many people share regarding the entirety of the concept of news.
The term "scare quotes" is not synonymous with "scary quotes" - it refers to quotation marks added in order to distance the author from the source of the words, exactly as you describe.
> I think your approach may be a little tainted by the common cynical outlook many people share regarding the entirety of the concept of news.
Regarding my outlook towards the news, nothing could be further from the truth.
> To me, this headline says, "here's how this incident is officially described, not just some stuff we're making up to be dramatic - please read the article to get the details, because the terminology is not necessarily objective."
That's part of the problem with scare quotes. You're not trusting the reader. (in this case, the reader should be trusted to know that "blows up" and "excessive" are, well, as I described them above. One would hope they also trust you to not make stuff up, but if not, you're not going to fix that with some quotes.)
Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for that. To be honest the BBC is probably the only British thing I read much. Am I right in assuming it's generally a bit less tabloidish than a lot of the other popular stuff?
BBC isn't a tabloid but it's also not particularly high quality either, especially the output of the BBC Worldwide service (BBC.com) which has different editorial guidelines.
The BBC follows a journalistic style guide that requires the use of quotes when directly quoting someone else when the attribution is not clear.
That makes it easier to determine, when reading an article, if the substance of an article is based on a journalist's own research and observations or those of another.
It's a silly thing to go on and on about, but the quotation examples used in the style guide you linked to are quite different than what we're talking about here.
Totally, the reality is : smell is masked and air is full of chemical components harmful to your health [0]. Our olfactory receptors are there to protect us. It should be noted that persons with bad perception of odors are closer to their end [1]. At least, use some natural products which may be dangerous, but for those, our body has had generations of evolution to tolerate those.
There is nothing like odour destruction. It's just tricking the nose into believing that another scent is around. Odours add in bizarre ways. If something smells bad, 1) open the window and 2) solve the root cause.
Unless they're based on whatever chemical combination makes Febreeze work, in which case it does actually eliminate odor. There's a fascinating story behind the invention of Febreeze.
Seems to happen pretty regularly! The “More on this story” links below the article list two other similar incidents, in November 2019 and September 2017.
I wonder what really happened that he came up with that story to tell the cops? I'm not sure I'm going to believe this story until we have Adam Savage show it's possible.
Adam Savage already blew stuff up with spray sunscreen (for the same reason—propane as a propellant). The hard part is getting the stoichiometry right so it explodes instead of just burning.
If you contantly have source of ignition and add fuel, there will be a time when mix is just above sustaining near ignition source and more rich elsewhere. It doesn't take that much pressure to blow out windows in a car, it doesn't need to be properly mixed at right ratio in whole volume of car. It doesn't even need to be explosion, but very fast burning will increase pressure enough to blow out windows.
Vaporized fuel + air explosions is essentially what occurs in the cylinders of a gasoline engine of an automobile; there's nothing mysterious about this.
I think the trick was to find the ones with propane propellant rather than butane. I also suspect that the (rapidly boiled) moisture droplets from the aerosol would have added to the explosive force too.
Eventually we decided to go straight to the source and got ourselves a little oxy/propane welding kit. That worked a treat. I'm kind of surprised B&Q sold that to a bunch a teenagers actually.