this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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Burning Up (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As is typically responded to this 'response': there are a large number of people-many European-who would unironically say that 50°F (10°C) is, in fact, the ideal temperature.

They're wrong, of course, but they exist.

But you're also assuming that the exact middle of the range is where the ideal sweet spot should be. That's wrong. People generally can better handle larger temperature deviations that are colder than their ideal than hotter deviations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

The difference is that humans emit their own heat. Combined with our funny tendency to wear insulative clothing that can asymptotically approach zero net heat exchange with the atmosphere, acceptable temperatures skew wildly towards and beyond freezing.

Meanwhile, without some kind of acting cooling mechanism, any temp even slightly above fever temp is inevitably fatal. You can only take off so many layers. What are you going to do, take off your skin? Sweating helps us humans a lot, but evaporative cooling can only do so much to reverse the heat gradient.

50 F is excellent... with a light jacket or a blanket. Not so much if you're naked.