Fire Hazard

Grace and I have a gas oven that we light with matches, as well as a space heater which is on a lot (no central heat in this place for two weeks, but its supposedly going to be fixed tomorrow), but the closest we've ever come to starting a fire was due to a mirror on Monday morning.

I have to get to work earlier than Grace this week since she's going to observe a big human rights case at the Houses of Parliament for work (!), and on Monday morning, Grace woke up to the smell of burning plastic. She went to investigate and found my backpack was smoking! The culprit? Her make-up mirror, with the Sun as an accomplice (and it is a rare thing to have a bright sun in England). Using my artist skills and physics degree, I will now diagram what happened.



The mirror is concave, to use the technical term, which means it's curved inward. This makes your face look bigger in the mirror, but it means the mirror can also act like a magnifying glass, which is what happened here. Anyway, good thing Grace woke up when she did. Also, my tough little backpack, which has lasted years, now has had it's mesh lining completely burnt through, and also had some plastic part on the outer shell melt. Fortunately, it's still structurally intact and watertight!

Maybe we can find a way to use the mirror as a heatray now, driving away potential robbers...