[AKN #49] Dying of heat stroke in 82 deg F, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and declining belief in God
another krappy newsletter #49
Sup homies?
Hope all my American readers out there enjoyed the holiday weekend!
Shout out to America for continuing to prove the haters wrong and turning another year older.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Dying of heat stroke in 82 deg F
As the climate continues to change over the coming decades, we will have more and more days where people die in 80 degree F heat and you are going to say “how is that possible?”
That is because whenever we (myself included!) envision people dying of heat exhaustion, we think of some jackass who somehow found himself in the middle of the Sahara with a suit on.
But that is just one type of heat death.
The other happens at what sounds on the surface to be completely reasonable temperatures.
For example:
Heat waves in the EU & Russia in 2003 and 2010 killed over a hundred thousand people at ~ 82 F.
This phenomenon occurred because both the EU and Russia were experiencing “wet bulb” temperatures.
"Wet bulb" temperature is the temperature + relative humidity at which water stops evaporating off a "wet" thermometer bulb.
If air is sufficiently humid (saturated w/ water vapor), evaporation will no longer cool the bulb, and it gets continuously hotter.
What does this have to do with dying of heat exhaustion?
While body temp is ~ 97-99 F, we maintain temp by sweating.
If sweat won't evaporate, our body temp rises, continuously. And when body temp hits ~108, we're dead.
For a vulnerable person in wet bulb temp, this takes much less than an hour. Naked. In the shade.
So next time you watch an entire episode of Law & Order naked under a tree, you better check to make sure it is not a wet bulb temperature outside.
Here is a deep dive on wet bulb temperature where I got the quotes from above if you want to learn more.
LAUGH: Live action Clifford or anxiety medication commercial?
I got a huge kick out of this meme.
I never understood Clifford the Big Red Dog. Like you took a perfect creature (ie: a dog) and ruined it by making it an obnoxiously large red head.
Complement this week’s Laugh section with Louis CKs timeless bit on Clifford. I just watched it again and I can guarantee you it is worth your time.
LOVE: Declining belief in God
Our collective belief in God is plummeting generation to generation.
My generation (the Millenials) “loves” trends like this. Every one of us seems to have a couple religion jokes in our back pocket that really get the crowd going.
But as someone who has never been religious for any portion of his life, I am not happy nor sad about these statistics.
I am mostly curious.
What does a culture that mostly doesn’t believe in God look like?
We don’t really know.
But I am reminded of Will Durant (famous historian who wrote the shit out of some history books with his wife, Ariel) writing on religion and its place in history:
Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age.
To the unhappy, the suffering, the bereaved, the old, it has brought supernatural comforts valued by millions of souls as more precious than any natural aid.
It has helped parents and teachers to discipline the young.
It has conferred meaning and dignity upon the lowliest existence, and through its sacraments has made for stability by transforming human covenants into solemn relationships with God.
It has kept the poor (said Napoleon) from murdering the rich.
For since the natural inequality of men dooms many of us to poverty or defeat, some supernatural hope may be the sole alternative to despair.
Destroy that hope, and class war is intensified.
Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.
It appears that there is a pendulum that gets swung throughout history between religiosity and Communism.
So while this graph may seem like a “culture war victory” for the atheists today, over a larger time horizon this might merely be a single battle won in an endless war (until we all go extinct).
If that is true, perhaps there is a coming religious resurgence in the next few decades.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?