Today (OK, yesterday, but it's just past midnight now), I was thinking about that metaphor you often hear. You know the one I mean: where they say that if you put a frog in a pan of water and slowly bring the water to a boil, so long as the temperature change is gradual enough, the frog will stay put and get cooked to death. It's a great metaphor.

But wait a minute. It makes no sense.

First of all, suppose you don't heat the water at all. Say you just put the water in a pan and leave it there with the stove turned off. Are you saying that the frog won't jump out anyway, regardless of temperature? I mean, it's a frog. Are they really so docile? If I get a pet frog and I want to keep it, all I have to do is put it in a pan of water with no lid and it'll just sit there without escaping?

And if I do turn on the stove, it's not the just the water than heats up. The bottom of the pan heats up first, and it gets hot pretty quickly. Is the frog carefully floating in the water so that it's touching only water and no pan? It seems to me that if you set a frog in a pan of water, it's going to sit on the bottom of the pan, in which case its feet are going to burn long before the water starts to boil.

I'm starting to think this whole thing is just made up.

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