discussion Boiling temperature is Soooooooo unrealistic !!!

[cekivi]

1 hour ago, akodo1 said:

I'd make cooking independant of temperature though.  I always figured you'd hold the meat closer or further away (on a pointed stick on in a pan) to get the right temperature for a good cooking.  Hotter fire wouldn't cook it faster it would just burn the outside and leave the inside raw (and dangerous)

Very true that you don't want to burn your food. For just boiling water though more heat would translate into a faster boil.

[EternityTide]

4 hours ago, akodo1 said:

True but not sure how relevant.

The survivor isn't suffering any sort of high altitude issues.  There are mountains around but they seem to be relatively small.  We are close to the ocean.  Therefore no place around the survivor, even Timberwolf Mountain, is going to give the kinds of elevations that give very low boiling temperatures.  Google tells me the highest town in Canada is Lake Louise, Alberta, a little town of right at 1000 people, which is at 5K.  Google tells me the highest mountain on Vancouver Island is the Golden Hinde, and Gold River is a tiny town nestled in the mountains that is where people who are climbing Golden Hinde go to, so it sounds like a good one to look at for elevation to figure out how high up our survivor might be, erring on the side of caution because our survivor is much closer to the coast, and hence lower elevation.  It is 160 M elevation.  Even if we double that to 300 M elevation, we aren't getting CLOSE to having the boiling temp change.  Let's double that elevation again, 600 M, roughly 2000 feet.  We are still talking a boiling temperature of +97 C.

While a few rare biologicals can withstand temperatures over 100C, the ones that are common in drinking water and that can affect your health are going to die after a few minutes of exposure at 80C, so if your water starts boiling, even if it is only 97C,  you can be confident that you have been at or above 80C long enough to kill to make the water safe...or at least switch the safety concern from biologicals to pollutants.

It's nothing to do with relevance. It's everything to do with the fact that I'm being a hardcore pedant because I need a good debate to keep my mind off my uni application.

[Boston123]

In "reality", generally anything big, bad, and nasty enough to get you sick is dead or functionally dead at temperatures lower than 100 C (212 F), it is just that, I dunno about you guys, but I generally don't carry around a thermometer in the wilds. So, waiting until my drinking water has been at a rolling boil for at least a couple of minutes just makes really, really sure it is safe to drink.

Plus, I usually boil and filter my water, just to be on the safe side. Nothing like a spot of diarrhea to put a damper on your day 

[KD7BCH]

E coli is the one I would point to as a very serious however any food-borne or waterborne illness to my knowledge is going to subject the body to infection or intoxication. Infection would be when the organisms are introduced into the body through ingestion or inhalation. Infections occur when the organisms survive the acidic climate of the stomach and make it to the intestines where they wreak havoc on the body and attack it. Intoxication is due to the waste products created by the organisms consuming the food product and leaving their waste products to be digested by the body and distributed by the blood stream. In any event, food that has been exposed to temperatures inside the temperature danger zone of 40-140 for more than a few hours, and has the right ph zone can have serious risk of contamination from just the airborne bacteria. This is because inside this temperature zone some of them die but most of them live a few generations, dividing as often as every 20 min, In effect, 1000 bacteria on a steak left in this temperature zone, can become on the order of 10's of millions of bacteria, another 8 hours and there would be billions of bacteria. Even if you cook this food, most of the waste products, those that mobilize in the food juices and did not drip off while cooking would be ingested even if there was no infection risk. Which is why refrigeration, cooking food properly, food safety is so important.

Here is a really good article with some good graphs on the whole concept of bacteria growth and risk rates. http://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/magazine-archive1/februarymarch-2004/the-danger-zone-reevaluated/

[cekivi]

On 2016-10-13 at 3:42 AM, EternityTide said:

It's nothing to do with relevance. It's everything to do with the fact that I'm being a hardcore pedant because I need a good debate to keep my mind off my uni application.

Ah, best of luck with your applications @EternityTide

[RCCross]

On 10/11/2016 at 10:15 AM, EternityTide said:

At 14,000 feet, water boils at 85.5°C, meaning that the higher you get, the less dependable the boiling water technique becomes. If you were boiling water near the summit of mount Everest, you would need to boil the water for 20 minutes according to their figures, because at that altitude, the boiling point of water is 71°C.

Timber Wolf Mountain fees like waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay high, but in fact it's just hundreds of meters higher than the lighthouse, which is... the sea level.

*not Timberland LOL