Why smoke follows you around a fire

[beschizza]

Originally published at: Why smoke follows you around a fire | Boing Boing

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[markstephan]

So what I take from this is to encourage my friends to sit close to each other while I’m on the other side.

[SamSam]

This is certainly interesting (seriously) but it also completely fails to explain the near-universal phenomenon where, when you are sitting around a campfire in a circle with friends, the smoke goes to you, personally, and if you move to another seat in that circle, it still follows you.

(There is presumably a whole untapped body of science which will also explain why you’re always in the slowest lane on the highway, and why it rains when you plan for a sunny event. Possibly the universe is a simulation.)

[FloridaManJefe]

you gatta say “rabbit, rabbit” and the smoke will go the other way.

[teknocholer]

That’s completely unscientific. As we learned in Scouts, you must say “white rabbit” three times fast and the smoke will

I’ve said too much.

[Lizardo]

A phrase in my wife’s family is “Smoke follows beauty.”

[SamSam]

Beautiful people get cremated?

[aidtopia]

For a more detailed explanation of why this happens with soldering iron smoke, this video includes actual experiments and demonstrates that the simple explanation has more nuance than you might otherwise appreciate.

Why does smoke from a soldering iron ALWAYS go towards your face???

[Papasan]

The fire smoke only follows you if you’re in league with Lucifer.

[Tamsin_Bailey]

Yeah, but he loves me, so…

[teknocholer]

@Papasan

smoke only follows you if you’re in league with Lucifer

But that’s how I got so beautiful.

[atteSmythe]

Thanks for this! The original post’s explanation didn’t seem to me to hold water, and your video supports my hunch. It seems unlikely, especially when sitting near a fire instead of standing looming over it, that a person would block enough air to change the flow of the smoke column. It’s more likely that in still air, relatively small changes in current move the smoke easily, and that people only notice when the smoke is in their faces and not all the other times it blows other directions.

[KingGhidorah]

Next up: why you trail your farts back into the room

[FGD135]

Why do birds
suddenly appear
every time
I am near?

[Jim_Campbell]

Pro tip (that most people who do this often probably know) make sure you use dry wood. There will always be some smoke but wood that is damp will have a ridiculous amount and be unbearable.

[IronEdithKidd]

It’s a fairness thing. Someone else sitting in that circle is getting all the mosquito bites. [It me.]

[knoxblox]

Smoke gets in your eyes (1933)

[anothernewbbaccount]

@SamSam

a whole untapped body of science which will also explain why you’re always in the slowest lane on the highway, and why it rains when you plan for a sunny event.

I thought that was long since sorted out by scientists.

Sod’s Law.

[jab]

confirmation bias, maybe??

[Otherbrother]

I never watched Lost but my understanding is that campfire smoke chasing people around was quite a problem, especially for those that were morally compromised.

The monster is a metaphor for people’s troubled pasts. The more morally questionable actions a person has committed in the past the larger the monster will be for them. When you run from these past events, they will eventually catch up to you. But if you face your problems or the Monster and come to terms with them, they seem less daunting and scary. It is not necessarily the monsters purpose to make you face your past, it simply derives it’s power through these terms.