From jhw@wetware.wetware.com Thu Aug  4 17:27:36 PDT 1994

There was a frog on the sidewalk outside my apartment last night.  It
may have been a toad for all I know -- I can't remember how to tell
the difference.  For my purposes, a frog and a toad are the same
thing.  ``You know what a turtle is Leonard?  Same thing.''

When I saw this poor hapless creature, I was in a foul mood.  Too many
people had recently used that old chestnut about the frog in the pan
full of water that gradually comes to a boil.  I decided this was a
testable hypothesis.

I filled a saucepan with water, paying attention to make sure that the
water was approximately the same temperature as my cold-blooded,
captive amphibian, placed the frog in the saucepan so that it was
mostly submerged, and put the electric burner on its lowest setting.

Moments later, the frog thrashed about and escaped the saucepan.  It
jumped onto the counter where it remained motionless.  I returned it
to the saucepan, and it immediately jumped right back out.  I did this
again, and again the frog refused to stay in the water.

I began to suspect that my stove could not apply the heat at a
sufficiently slow rate to cook the frog according to the ancient
wisdom of the old chestnut.  I devised a system.  I took the saucepan
off the burner and let it cool on the countertop while I heated a
quart of water in another pan.  I put the frog in the saucepan with
the ambient temperature water, and began to slowly ladle hot water
from the second pan into the first pan, and from the first pan into
the sink, so that the temparature of the frog's water would gradually
increase.

This didn't work.  The frog eventually jumped out of the pan.  I ran
this test four times, and all four times, the frog would not stay in
the pan to be cooked.

I felt convinced I had disproven one half of the old chestnut.  It was
now time to test the other half.  I brought the second pan to rolling
boil, and threw the frog into it.  The frog failed to escape and was
well and truly cooked when I threw its body into the trash chute.

The whole damned story was a deception -- it's clear.  I plan to find
the bastard that initially propagated this terrible lie and give him
what for.  Generations of people have used this noxious old padnag as
a parable by which to make sense of human events, and it's just plain
wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong.

You give a frog a chance to realize it's getting cooked, and it will
find a way to escape.  You want to boil a frog to death, you have to
bring the water to a healthy boil first, then hit it with the heat all
at once.  The truth of this should be intuitively obvious, but people
in our society have grown gradually accustomed to being deceived,
isn't that so?


--
j h woodyatt                                           jhw@wetware.com
            ...lightly spiced with uranium hexafluoride...