  Burning something, (e.g. the proverbial lump of coal, or an encyclopaedia for
that matter), in a blackbody furnace leads to an approximately Planck emission
spectrum with an average entropy/information transfer of approximately $3.9 \pm
2.5$ bits per emitted photon. This quantitative and qualitative result depends
only on the underlying unitarity of the quantum physics of burning, combined
with the statistical mechanics of blackbody radiation. The fact that the
utterly standard and unitarity preserving process of burning something (in
fact, burning anything) nevertheless *has* an associated entropy/information
budget, and the quantitative *size* of that entropy/information budget, is a
severely under-appreciated feature of standard quantum statistical physics.
