Everything is broken

[Snowhog]

Seems that to many people have become addicted to OPM (other peoples money). As long as they are able to receive their 'fix' they remain content.

[MoonRise]

Today I'm not sure that there's so much difference between the two parties -- they appear to be two branches of the Establishment Party, and all engaged in bribing the people with our own money.

Yep! + a million on that! The whole lot of them are bad. Even with the numerous more parties involved now they are all driven by one thing and that is the money going into their pockets!

[GreyGeek]

As my favorite columnist James Fallows likes to remind us, that's a myth.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...ying-now/7446/

I think his reasoning is a myth. From my anatomy & physiology training I can say unequivocally that a frog can die if heated gradually enough. The reason is that is the frog, or human, is warmed up by the water the blood vessels of the body dilate. This lowers the blood pressure and makes the heart work harder to pump blood to the head. This can lead to drowsiness and to weakness in the muscles, making it difficult if not impossible to climb out of the jacuzzi. If a person fell asleep they could fall over into the water and drown, being too weak to lift themselves out of the water.

My own personal experience was when I watched the Sugar Ray Leonard boxing match (against whom I can't remember) from a Jacuzzi at a clients country estate after I installed an Apple ][+ computer connected to an 8' Satellite dish, which I also installed so that he could have instant stock market quotations. He claimed he was one of the heirs to the Pillsbury Doughboy fortune. After about an hour I began feeling dizzy and barely managed to crawl out of the jacuzzi. Had I fallen asleep I could have drowned, suffered a heart attack (also common among the 800 deaths due to jacuzzis per year), or become severely dehydrated, which can also lead to heat stroke and/or heart attack as well. Oh, I wasn't drinking alcohol, just a soda. (The owner of the estate was/is? a practising Morman, i.e., no alcohol)

http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroom/News...-Temperatures/

According to CPSC staffers, the use of hot tubs at water temperatures above the normal body temperatures can cause drowsiness which may lead to unconsciousness and subsequently result in drowning.
...
Even if no alcohol is consumed, extremely hot water during hot tub use can threaten life, CPSC reports. Soaking in a hot tub with water heated to 106 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, can raise human body temperature to the point of heat stroke (or impairment of the body's ability to regulate its internal temperature). These conditions can be fatal even to fully healthy adults.

P.S. -- That Apple-Satellite setup was installed in 1984, IIRC. After I got the Apple and satellite set up I gave him a run through on the software running the peripheral card attached to the dish. During the 30-45 minute period he made over $7,000 profit in stock trades, which was more than the retail price of the equipment I set up and tuned for him. I told him that I was in the wrong business. He said "Not necessarily, I lost everything a couple of years ago and had to borrow a couple hundred grand to climb out of debt to get where I am today." We were in his new 20,000 sq foot mansion, three stories plus a full basement and a seven car attached garage. It had a HUGE south facing two story three pane window pointing south and an imported Italian chandelier in the main hall. Being a Morman he had a full one year supply of food for himself, his family, his children and their families stored in the basement.

[SteveRiley]

I think his reasoning is a myth.

It isn't Fallows making the original assertion. He refers to an article in the first issue of Fast Company, where their "Consultant Debunking Unit" put the boiled-frog fable to the test.

First we spoke with national scientific authorities. According to Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians, the National Museum of Natural History, "Well that's, may I say, bullsh!t. If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out. And I cannot imagine that anything dropped in boiling water would not be scalded and die from the injuries."

Professor Doug Melton, Harvard University Biology Department, says, "If you put a frog in boiling water, it won't jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot -- they don't sit still for you."

We then called on our Testing Laboratory to conduct an empirical test. Participating were Thomas Hout, vice president of the Boston Consulting Group and coauthor of "Competing Against Time"; and J. Debra Hofman, research associate at MIT's Center for Information Systems Research and coauthor of "Implementing Radical Change: Gradual Versus Rapid Pace."

We placed Frog A into a pot of cold water and applied moderate heat. At 4.20 seconds, it safely exited the pot with a leap of 24 centimeters. We then placed Frog B into a pot of lukewarm water and applied moderate heat. At 1.57 seconds, it safely exited the pot with a leap of 57 centimeters.

How did our expert interpret this triumph of science? "There are certain cases where gradual change is almost preferred," Hofman commented. "The change myth assumes a very narrow view of people. If frogs can do it, people definitely can."

Maybe the difference between frogs and humans is that while we're warm-blooded, the frogs are cold-blooded? As the environment (that is, the water) gets warmer, their bodies absorb that heat. Instead of languishing in a stupor like we do when our temperature rises, the frog is equipped to handle such a change and can seek a remedy -- the remedy being "jump!"

[GreyGeek]

Ya, I read the references. My opinion still stands. A frog is cold blooded, which only means that their muscles are not in constant tensor, which is used to generate heat for the central core and the brain, to create a constant temperature. Frogs are ectotherms, i.e., their body temperature assumes that of their surroundings, as you know. Regardless, their striated skeletal muscles follow the same biochemical laws of physiology as our striated muscles do.

Regardless of what that frog "expert" thinks about frogs and warming water, the temperature dependence of muscle contraction is well known. Here is a general google search bringing up scholarly articles concerning the relationship between muscle behavior and temperature:
https://www.google.com/#q=temperatur...action&spell=1

I just selected the first one, which showed a reduction in activity of around 80% at 86F:
http://www.google.com/url?url=http:/...XAv_jQ&cad=rja

Effect of temperature
In Fig. 4, two sets of recordings are shown obtained on a type II A fibre segment from the vastus lateralis muscle at 12 and 20C. It can be seen that both isometric force and
ATPase activity are very temperature sensitive in this range. The maximal isometric force reached at 20C was about 50% larger than the value found during the control
measurement at 12C. The isometric rate of ATP consumption derived from the slope of the NADH absorbance when the fibre was maximally activated inside the measuring chamber increased almost by a factor of three with the 8 'C increase in temperature. The stability of the human fibres appeared to be very good in the temperature range from 12 to 20C but at higher temperatures, deterioration in force and ATP consumption was observed. During repeated measurements at 12C, force and ATPase activity hardly declined, but after an activation at 25C, force during the control measurement was reduced on average to 85 +- 3 % whereas after an activation at 30c, a reduction to 79 + 2% was found.

ATP turnover was reduced in proportion with force. This temperature-dependent reduction in force is a well-known phenomenon in skinned fibres (e.g. Kasuga & Umazume,
1990).

Figure 5 clearly shows the relationship between temperature and muscle force. While ATP activity increases logarithmic as a function of temperature, which is what one would expect until the temperature of denaturization is reached, the muscle force for Type IIA muscles (fast contracting) levels off at 30C and essentially flat lines.

Insert "frog" in front of muscle in the above search phrase and many articles about frogs and their striated muscle activity as a function of temperature are listed.
Figure 7 shows the decline of force as a function of temperature in a frog leg in the following article:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti.../figure/fig06/

Basically, the cytoplasm of the cell is an aqueous mixture of biologically active chemicals whose function are highly temperature dependent. Their reaction velocities approximately double for each 10C rise in temperature, until the protein enzymes began to deactivate at temps above 100-105F. The same is true of nerve cells. As early physiologists who actually experimented with frogs in gradually increasing water baths noted, the frog failed to jump if the temperature was raised slowly enough. Frogs normally jump around without much provocation. While I haven't read the details of the early frog experiments I know that if I wanted to test frogs ability to sense a rise in temperature, or not, I'd put them in a dark container so they couldn't see where to jump even though they have the liberty to do so.

As far as people go, my anecdotal experience indicates that careless jacuzzi user is risking their lives if they stay in too long at temperatures above 100F.

EDIT:
I recalled an experiment I used in teaching biology classes concerning the sensation of temperature. Put three beakers on a table. Fill the one on the left with ice cold water. The one on the right in the middle with room temp water, and the one on the right with 105F water (as hot as comfort allows). Put your left hand in the left beaker and your right hand in the right beaker. After about 30 seconds remove both hands, dry them, and put them into the middle beaker. Your left hand will tell you the middle beaker is hot. Your right hand will tell you the middle beaker is cold. They are both right because temperature sensation are relative. Now, modify the experiment a little by bringing the two outside temperatures closer to the temp of the middle one. At what temp (both low and high) can you have and still determine a difference in temp between the two on the outside and the one in the middle? Gradually increase the temp of a beaker of water by that interval over successive 10 minute periods until the hand begins to sense discomfort. Now, imagine the entire body in the water, with the temperature increases affecting the Type IIA (or B) muscle contraction. At what point will you be unable to successfully life your body out of the water with your legs? My personal anecdotal experience was that I was barely able to climb out of the water after an hour at 105F, and I was only in the water from the waist down.