To all those who think a cold shower is not torture, you obviously haven't experienced immersion in cold water where you couldn't just get out. We've all had reason to have cold showers, hot weather, horniness, hangover. I've done the sauna thing jumping thru a hole cut in ice on a lake. I've participated in a polar bear swim in the Pacific and
Atlantic. In all these things getting in and out is your choice. Not being able to get out can lead to a bone piercing agony thats unbearable and is worse if you have a small body mass like this child. Listen again to his screaming in the shower. That's not fear of the water, that's pain. Inflicting pain on that level is child abuse, certainly worse than anything I got from my father the Sergeant Major.

I can see this woman in 10 years, waking from a sound sleep to the feeling of her own child plunging a knife in her body.

Almost all energy consumed by households is avoidable waste:
* think about the way you fry eggs. 99% of the heat from the burner is going into the air, not into the eggs. This should be solved by using small device that is well insulated on all sides and has an internal heating coil.
* Ovens have a high heat capacity and shitty insulation. More energy is wasted on heating up the oven itself than actually goes into the food. This could be solved by lining the inside of the oven with silica aerogel instead of metal. If an oven is properly insulated it will not feel very warm to the touch on the outside, even after being on for an hour.
* Most of your heating and cooling energy leaks out the windows -- if their inside surface feels significantly above or below ambient during extreme weather, your heating and cooling energy is being wasted and hemorrhaging out the windows. It would literally save energy to have a webcam on the roof and display that image on an LCD inside instead of having windows, if you live in a climate with extreme temperatures (especially in cold climates, as the energy used for the LCD would contribute to heating the house). All ventilation needs can be accomplished through a small portal with a fan (and a heat exchanger, of course).
* Hot water is produced very wastefully by just dumping energy into it instead of using a thermodynamic cycle to transfer heat and produce something cold as a byproduct. Hot water could be co-produced with cold water for AC / Refrigeration much more efficiently than doing them all separately.
* Hot water goes down the drain. This should at least go through a heat exchanger, which would dramatically lessen the amount of work that has to be done to heat up new hot water. A 7 Liter per minute showerhead putting water 30 degrees F above ambient down the drain is wasting over 8135 watts as long as it is running. However, I don't know of any houses yet designed with a heat exchanger between the shower drain water and the intake of the water heater.
* Fluorescent lights. Duh. Incandescent bulbs should be banned.
* Freezers built with the door on the top will waste much less energy to the convection of air when opened, for obvious reasons.

Here ends the lifestyle-neutral list of suggestions. The following would involve sacrificing something:

* Reduce excessive lighting -- if people wouldn't fuck up their retinas by driving just after sunrise or just before sunset, or seeing specular reflections of the sun on shiny cars and buildings outdoors, they wouldn't need such bright lights indoors. A 1 watt LED is plenty for reading. Sunlight could be used in the daytime instead of artificial lights.

The guy probably wouldn't have fallen had he lowered his center of gravity.

But if he did that his huge brass balls would have contacted the cold water.

Umm, the incident occurred in Australian territorial waters. Whatever cultural prerogative the Japanese might have for whaling (which is laughable as they poorly attempt to cover it up as 'research') doesn't trump our territorial rights.

Pity our government is a pack of f#ckwits who bend over at the drop of a hat appeasing foreign powers like China and Japan and are too busy trying to implement their net nanny program to actually give a toss about policing what is happening in our waters...

Further, using a water cannon on a boat you just rammed (regardless of who is at fault) rather than heaving to and giving assistance? There's a great deal of very cold water under those keels and exposure might be enough to kill a person out there. There is no excuse for those actions, whatever your ethical view is of whaling or sovereign rights.

Is it cold water? I'd jump off of cold water too.

"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." -Next Time, What Say We Boil a Consultant

So what's likely to have happened? There WAS a pot of boiling water on the table (you can see the steam throughout the video), and he did seem to pick up a frog from one of the many very real ones in the mini aquarium. I think I see a splash at 1:06 but it's hard to tell if it's either the video compression fuzzing in and out, his reflection on the inside of the pot as he moves back and forth, OR an actual splash.

The final piece of evidence? He is TELLING us he's using a real frog and after watching him cut open a fish on live TV I wouldn't put it past him. Why else would he go to all the trouble of actually boiling water and having real frogs unless he actually put one in the pot?

Poor little froggie :-(

[EDIT]

^Sepatown - Link pleasE?

To quote Josiah Bartlett, "Shaken, not stirred, will get you cold water with a dash of gin and dry vermouth. The reason you stir it with a special spoon is so not to chip the ice. James is ordering a weak martini and being snooty about it."

You know a blast from a cold water hose pipe stops the dogs when they get started doing that.

>> ^jimnms:
What were you doing to these guys while they were sleeping?



Probably involved gunfire and cold water...

Showers: See if you can find the hot water valve and turn it off during his shower. Alternately, turn off the cold water. >=)


Computer: Buy earplugs. It isn't perfect, but it works for all noise. You can turn off a computer, but you can't turn off snoring or random outdoor sounds. You can get a mask thing to cover your eyes as well if the light is really that bad.


He should be using headphones, but its a little more difficult to complain about the light. Is there somewhere else he can go? If he wants to be on his computer at 5am then that isn't an unreasonable action, but the sound is avoidable.


If you really want to make a point about the sound then find some music he hates and play it loud enough that he can't ignore it (earplugs for yourself are good here). Tell him that you will play the music any time he isn't using his headphones past midnight (or whatever time you choose).

If that cameraman hadn't harrassed that snake..... game over. Snakes typically release their food when they feel threatened. The water lubricated the frog and he was able to start slipping free. Had the snake been able to get out of the water it probably would have been a different story. The cards were stacked against the snake:

-Probably a miss strike (hence, eating the frog alive and backwards. Should have grabbed onto the frog head first and constricted it)
-Camerman Harrassment
-Once into the water, slippery frog
-Cold water is not good for a snake's endurance
-At the end of the vid it looks like a male frog is either (A) trying to mate with the female being eaten or (B) trying to scare off a rival male.

>> ^Mashiki:
>> ^Tack:
... This guy is trying to FIX these problems resulting from the last 8 years of terrible leadership.

I have to question some people on their understanding of history, and their ability to see more then what's dropped in their face. Especially with the grand scope of government policy.
You(that is Americans), started digging your own hole back in the days of Carter, and happily let it continue running with Clinton when he happily agreed to started deregulating the banking system and stock market. While not wholly a bad idea, you forgot to ensure that there was oversight in the long run. When issues were presented, both sides decided they either knew better, or didn't care.
8 years pah. Such a narrow, and short-sighted view. Congratulations on massive meltdown that hasn't been seen since the '30's, possibly since the 1880's. Personally, I expect with the ALT-A and ARMs coming up in about 6-9mo time, you should be hoping that this doesn't get any worse like it probably will.


We broke ground on this abyss at the end of WWII. It's like the boiling a frog story, we started with cold water and 60 years later we've boiled all the water out of the pot and are left with an ashen frog corpse.

Just give it a few more years, the Obama administration's efforts will have corrected much of the faults in our system, or y'all Europeans will be seeing an influx of ex-pats as we all desert the good ship Capitalist Greed.

Hot water from the hot-water tap, depending on what kind of heater you are using, is in general, a lot more contaminated with heavy minerals and germs than your cold water tap.

Remember kids, cold water is the MOST potable

Know what, I would call them Morons for using cold water. It makes no sense to use cold water when your going to heat it anyway. Obviously your water will boil faster if you use hot water.

I'm... pretty staunchly in favor of The Environment, but I think Earth Hour is pretty much the dumbest thing ever. It's a meaningless symbolic statement to make the arm-chair environmentalists feel better about themselves, as if turning off your lights for one out of eight-thousand seven-hundred and sixty hours in a year matters at all.

Do you want to make a difference? Drive a more fuel-efficient car. Walk. Turn your thermostat down five degrees for the entire winter, not for one damn hour. Turn your computer off when you're not using it. Only use lights that you need. Wash your clothes in cold water. Hang them out to dry instead of using the dryer. Limit how much meat you eat. Any of these things would be more meaningful.

Oh, right, those things would inconvenience you. Can't have that.