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eftychia at 05:43pm on 2004-01-20Argh. Got a tune stuck in my head and I don't even get the satisfaction of inflicting it on everyone else. It's "An Dro on the Red Line", written by one of my bandmates (one of the tunes we haven't finished recording yet).
Doing much better than yesterday but still have the problem of running out of steam before finishing various things that really need to get done. But at some point (and I think that point is about now), I'm going to need to shift my focus to not being konked out when I need to drive off to Thrir Venstri Foetr rehearsal, instead of trying to get one more thing done before then. Let's see if an hour or ninety minutes of sleep does me enough good.
Fred pointed out some temperature scales I'd never heard of. I'll post more about them once I've figured out which science-history web sites to believe, since there's some disagreement on key details. In the meantime, I've been wondering who uses the Fahrenheit scale in the 21st Century other than the U.S.
I am, unsurprisingly, way behind on LJ again, especially responding to comments (and this was a comment-heavy day). I read, I ponder ... I don't get around to responding just yet but hope to catch up later. I've also got a Heavy Question about sex/gender to try to write a coherent response to.
Setting my alarm and headed for bed.
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Vamp:)=
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The simplest method would be to pick a temperature most people find comfortable, say 73 degrees Fahrenheit, and measure the temperature above or below that. Since it was 23 degrees out this morning, you could say that it was 50 degrees below comfort. In that system the difference between 20 and 40 below comfort is more easily understood. Choosing which size degrees to measure in is a whole other can of worms; Fahrenheit/Rankin or Celsius/Kelvin.
An advanced system would want to tie in wind speed, humidity, and even pressure/density for ultimate flexibility. It's always bugged me that wind chill factor is converted back to a temperature. I'd like to see this sort of thing expressed as something like heat loss of exposed skin measured in heat calories per square meter per second. That would be really nice for a science nerd like me.
Of course, cal/m^2/sec would just be another meaningless figure to most people. For something with dramatic newscasting punch you could go with the LD50 exposure time. How long would it take kill 50% of the people exposed unclothed to the current weather conditions. I bet people would sit up and take notice if you told them the current LD50 was 10 minutes! But maybe that's just a wee bit morbid, and I'd hate to think where the data would need to come from to make the conversion to such a scale.
A better possibility would be to take the exposed skin heat loss rate and compare it with the average metabolic rate to get the required insulation factor necessary to maintain body temperature. You could express it a standard building R values, "Today's weather is R 5". I suspect that humans would need a much lower R value than a typical building since their surface area is smaller and heat production density is higher. Walking around actually wearing an R value of 20 would likely be stifling in any circumstance.