Monday, October 15, 2007

We were right!

A while back, I agreed with Cactus Kate on the matter of swimming in public pools.

We decided it wasn't a good idea for those not into urolagnia


I did the pool water treatment qualification course today.

We were right!

16 comments:

Cactus Kate said...

OMG.

Lucyna would be right to call this lot sexually depraved :)

Mrs Smith said...

Why? Why wee in a pool? I really don't understand the human race at all. How bad is it? I sometimes swim in hotel/resort swimming pools, which perhaps is a better class of wee.

Anonymous said...

The funny thing is, that if you bowled up to the edge of the pool with everyone in it, whipped it out and pissed a nice golden arc into the water, I reckon everybody would be out of there quicker than you can say 'shark'
But quietly slip into the water, relax, and... ahhhhh.... nobody has any idea!

I find it.... strangely thrilling.

Unknown said...

I think Lucyna's threashold for sexual depravity is fairly low.

Or her morals are fairly high depending on your perspective.

I suspect ours would be tending towards being the worms eye view.

Anonymous said...

Heh, Yes I remember, you talked about "floaters".. had another giggle.

Barnsley Bill said...

I once spent an afternoon sitting by the swim up bar at the sheraton denarau drinking with a load of guys from First Mobile, it was not until I had hopped out 4 or 5 times to go for a wizz that I realised none of them had. Ferals the lot of them.

Unknown said...

I'm fairly philosophical about the weeing - I take my 4 year old daughter to the Kilbirnie pools and i figure there's a bit of highly diluted piddle in them. I try not to think aobut it though

...so THANKS A BUNDLE, Os and Cactus!

Less relaxed about what we used to call 'brown sharks' the summer I worked at Port Waikato...

Oswald Bastable said...

EVERYBODY that gets into a pool releases about 15 mls of urine without even noticing.

And all that body oil, dead skin, snot and dags float to the top- right were your face is when swimming.

But the good news is that the chlorine kills most all of the nasties!

usually...

Anonymous said...

A prime minister of India started his days with a jigger of his own urine, and found it to be a right proper tonic. If it was good enough for him, what's the fuss?

sweetpea said...

A local swimming school insists everyone has a rince off under a shower before entering the pool and that students go easy on conditioner and hair product.

Cuts down on the maintainance apparently.

Oswald Bastable said...

I'm told NZ is one of the few countries where showering before swimming is not mandatory.

It does indeed cut down on the filter maintenance.

Perhaps we should stop calling pools 'Baths'

Anonymous said...

At the H2) pool in Upper Hutt a few years back I was sitting by the side of the wave pool watching the kids avoid drowning, and this Chinese boy about 10-12 years old did exactly what Helmet said. Whipped it out and pissed into the pool. People were in a state of shock, especially as his parents and grandparents said nothing. They didn't even blink. I berated the little bugger for his actions pointing out that 1) there are toilets at the pool and 2) there are toilets at the pool. His parents got all upset and I went to the pool admin to complain. At Huia Pool in Lower Hutt we once booked the kids pool for a kid's birthday party at 18:00 on a Saturday. When we arrived, they were emptying the pool because someone had dropped a floater. This was no small kid's product either. It was a fairly hefty sized thing. We lost half an hour of our swim time while they cleaned and tested the pool.

Brian Smaller

ZenTiger said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ZenTiger said...

I don't take chances. I drink 2 litres of liquid chlorine before every swim and rub some Surfactin over my body. Surfactin, as every body knows, is a bacterial lipopeptide with powerful surfactant-like properties. I discovered that the high-sensitivity isothermal titration calorimetry could be used to study the self association and membrane partitioning of surfactin, to assure myself of its efficacy.

Knock me down with a feather, but it turns out the critical micellar concentration (CIVIC), was 7.5 (mu)M, the heat of micellization was endothermic with delta(H)^sup w->m^^sub Su^ = +4.0 kcal/mol, and the free energy of micellization delta(G)^sup O,w->m^^sub Su^ - -9.3 kcal/mol (25degC; 100 mM NaCI; 10 mM TRIS, 1 mM EDTA; pH 8.5).

At this point, it was obvious to all but the kind of people that only ever took showers, the specific heat capacity of micellization was deduced from temperature dependence of delta(H)^sup w->m^^sub Su^ as delta(C)^sup w->m^^sub p^ = -250 +/- 10 cal/(mol*k).

I'd hazard a guess to say the data could be explained by combining the hydrophobicity of the fatty acyl chain with that of the hydrophobic amino acids.

It therefore made sense to review the membrane partition equilibrium - and study it using small (30 nm) and large (100 nm) unilamellar POPC vesicles. At 25*C, the partition coefficient, K, was (2.2 =/- 0.2) x 10^sup 4^ M^sup -1^ for large vesicles leading to a free energy of delta(G)^sup O,w->b^^sub Su^ = -8.3 kcal/mol. The partition enthalpy, K, was again endothermic, with delta(H)^sup w->b^sub Su^ = 9 +/- 1 kcal/mol.

If you'd be suggesting the strong preference of surfactin and a varity of non-ionic membrane insertion explained the high membrane-destabilizing activity of the peptide at this point, then you'd be right.

For surfactin and a variety of non-ionic detergents, the surfactant-to-lipid ratio, inducing membrane solubilization, R^sup sat^^sub b^, could be predicted by the simple relationship R^sup sat^^sub b^ ~/= K * CMC.

Choosing the sunscreen gets more complicated. Anyone recommend anything based on its R^sup sat^^sub b^ ~/= K * CMC?

Oswald Bastable said...

Yep- wear more clothes and a big hat!

ZenTiger said...

Ah, bloody obvious when you put it like that. Ta.