Hot enough to melt...

i know it's probobly dumb, but..

it was 104 in Denver last week, and the news was having a field day because it was record breaking heat. they were showing the high's of that day for the country, and in death valley, california it was 134. gosh, i thought, at what temperature does human skin start to melt/fall off?

Re: i know it's probobly dumb, but..

Yeah, I was trying to find a temperature at which you get a 1st degree, 2nd, 3rd degree burn but I guess it's based on the physiological symptoms instead. It's probably somewhere between egg frying temperature and medium-rare. I guess 145 degrees would make a person medium rare as easily as it would a T-Bone steak. But 134 in Death Valley, that's pretty insane.

what about skin

I added it between frying an egg and candles. Kinda hard to say though - depends if you are going for medium rare or well done.

You know what's interesting...well, at least it was interesting to me when I heard it. I was talking to a friend who works for the government at one of those weapons-testing places in New Mexico. And he said that because of the extreme heat there, there are all sorts of strange rules that people live by, in the area, and established on the base. For example, diet sodas sweetened with aspartame are banned from the area. Aspartame converts into formaldehyde when heated to certain temperatures that are fairly common out there, and formaldehyde in gaseous form in the air around other volatile materials is a seriously dangeorus combination. Of course, I was just as tickled to hear that governmental workers can't drink Tab on the job as he was to relate that tidbit of info. Of course, things are being sweetened with Splenda now, which does not convert to formaldehyde, so perhaps the low-carb lifestyle people will have their sodas back before long. :)

I've heard some blame Gulf War symptoms on just that. Supposedly Pepsi or Coke magnanimously donated tons of diet drinks to the soldiers, only to have the hot cans mutate in the desert sun and cause all kinds of horrible problems. But that may have been from one of those tinfoil-hat anti-aspartame sites. I'll admit that I'm a sucker for anything that implicates Big Pharma in crimes against humanity, I dunno, it just seems right.