finaardGeorge Goble died recently – known for first dual-CPU-Unix and fast BBQ lighting
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/wlfi/name/george-goble-obituary?id=61144779
His obituary or wikipedia page are well worth a read for what he was involved in - though he probably is best known for lighting a BBQ in under 5 seconds by use of liquid oxygen, and getting into trouble with the local firedepartment for that.
He used to have that video on his website - which I've discovered via a Usenet discussion not too long after it happened. It was one of the first videos I've downloaded via a web browser, and almost certainly the first video made with a digital camera I've ever seen.
George was really into video stuff - he had stacks of 8mm video tapes in his office, and of course stacks of exabyte drives. He had many different cameras and was always trying new ones out. He was also a really early adopter of laserdiscs, and I have a few discs he gave me when I graduated.
Any chance all of that will be sent to the Internet Archive or Archive Team?
Lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjPxDOEdsX8
Lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen
It reminds me of a comment I once read about how alien visitors, upon arriving on Earth, would be appalled to see how we live our lives at the bottom of a giant gaseous ocean of 20% oxygen.
Almost everyone and everything around us of any importance is one mishap away from going disappearing in a hot, sooty flame.
For another perspective on this, see the book Shroud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_(Tchaikovsky_novel)), there is all sorts of nifty commentary on oxygen related to your point.
(it's a great book in general, but the bit about our use of a volatile gas for a living environment is pretty neat)
George's personal home page (seems to be a mirror: https://www.bkinzel.de/misc/ghg/index.html) with the grill lighting video and the TWINKIES experiments (original site gone, but archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20060101093459/http://www.twinki...) were amazing web sites in the late 90s.
For you youngsters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble