Professional industrial and jewelry designer (here’s my Bēhance portfolio), hard-sci-fi enjoyer, cat lover and procrastinator. Started a few communities on kbin: Urban Details, Industrial Design and Jewelry Design, feel free to join if you find those interesting.
You can tip me if you like or use something I made.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Yeah, it’s definitely very rare. I can’t seem to find that article right now, but I remember reading that these events account for something like 0.1–0.3% of all wildfires. So while insignificant as an actual cause in general, with 100k+ wildfires happening each year it means that a couple of hundreds per year should still be caused by those. Which is still like one every 1-2 days on average.

    Not enough to be a noticeable threat, but enough to cause a pedantic comment mentioning those as existing :)



  • While these are more prevalent, they’re not the only causes. For example, sparks from rock falls also cause natural wildfires, as well as spontaneous combustion. The latter is caused by oxidation, bacterial fermentation and other natural processes.

    Manure piles can spontaneously combust during conditions of extreme heat. Cotton and linen can ignite when they come into contact with polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Hay is quite prone to spontaneous combustion when specific moisture/heat levels are reached.

    So while near densely populated areas idiots are way more likely causes, sometimes forests do self-ignite. And the rate of those events increases during heatwaves.


  • No one is going to post news/articles here and then discuss them as they would in a regular post. It won’t get bumped up on the subscribed page if something interesting happens. Most of the comments here are going be about the megathread itself.

    So this is effectively banning all the discussion concerning all of his companies. Which might be something you want to do, every community can decide for itself what kind of stuff they want to forbid after all. But I feel like it should be said directly, not via making a catch-all megathread.





  • As was mentioned in another comment, it’s a statistical term that measures the standard deviation. It basically tells you how “far” from the center of the bell curve you are with your data points. The higher the sigma, the less likely it is that an observed event was a fluke.

    For example, 1-sigma event has a ~37% chance of being a “coincidence”, and 2-sigma has a chance of about 4.5%.

    In science, 3-sigma (0.135%) is the first publishable certainty, it’s when something becomes significant enough to start a discussion.

    And 5-sigma is the most common threshold for claiming discovery. 5-sigma events have a 0.0000287% chance of being a coincidence or some random happenstance. Or one in 3.5 million.

    Higgs boson discovery was announced after 5-sigma certainty was reached. It means that if that particle didn’t actually exist, the chance of the experiments producing observed results would be 1 in 3.5 mln.