On Wed, 09 May 2001 02:49:46 -0500, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
> Hello Clarence:
> On Tue, 08 May 2001 00:08:45 -0400, Clarence Verge wrote:
>> Well Sam, I agree with your comments re perception of discomfort, but
>> the survivability is independant of adaptation at those temperatures
>> assuming reasonable attire and no wind chill.
> You will find that most military historians would disagree with you if you
> would examine their explanations of the reasons why the armies of Napolean
> and the armies of Hitler were so soundly defeated when they made the very
> stupid mistake of invading Russia in the dead of winter. The Russian
> soldiers were not at all as well attired and as well equipped as their
> enemies. Yet the Russians could fight and carry on and survive the elements
> of the weather much more effectively than their enemies because the Russians
> were quite accustomed to the severe cold.
Hi Sam;
My knowledge of the difficulties encountered when invading Russia in
winter is limited to the fact that it has seemed to be a bad idea.
How cold it was, and how poorly attired the Russians were compared to
the invaders is completely unknown to me. But I do know that it can get
almost cold enough in parts of Russia to freeze out carbon dioxide. <G>
I'll certainly grant the advisablity of acclimatizing troops BEFORE they
hit the hard part. It just makes good sense to limit the distractions.
>>> With C, 0 is when water freezes and 100 is when water boils (assuming
>>> a sea level mean atmospheric pressure of 30 milibars). This is a most
>>> clearly defined scientific standard that all of us can universally relate
>>> to. There are absolutely no subjective sensations involved in our
>>> judgement here.
>> That's the point. Regardless of your adaptation, the comfort range in C
>> or K is very small compared to our ability to discriminate.
> This so called ability to discriminate among ranges of numbers is just
> simply attributable to our acculturation and the particular system of
> mathematics we are taught. We are told that since we use the decimal
> system we should think of zero to ten and ten to one hundred as orders
> of magnitude. To Aztecs and Mayans and other peoples who use a vegicimal
> system, zero to twenty and and twenty to 400 are orders of magnitude.
That's interesting. I'd never heard of the vegie system. I guess they
used the total of fingers and toes.
But my point re discrimination had to do with the size of a single
increment, not an order of magnitude.
>> The Fahrenheit scale was arrived at by an interesting series of mistakes.
>> Fahrenheit, German by birth, thought he was using a method described by
>> a contempory Dane, Roemer to calibrate his thermometers. He got the zero
>> point right - it was the coldest temperature they could regularly achieve
>> in the early 1700s - obtained by mixing ice and salt.
> Very interesting! I never did know how low a temperatue one could expect
> to regularly acieve by this method. I've done that to make ice-cream, but
> I didn't have any thermometer.
>> The first mistake was the high point which he misunderstood to be "BLOOD"
>> heat.
> Also very interesting! BTW, was "BLOOD" heat ever scientifically defined?
> How is "BLOOD" heat measured? As a medic in the Army I was trained to
> measure oral, rectal, and axial temperatures and I was taught how to apply
> the appropriate adjustment to conform to the "oral" standard when plotting
> vital signs graphs. Whatever method I used for taking a patient's
> temperature, I always had to do it according to the prescribed and defined
> standards.
I wasn't there personally, but the historical article I read indicated
he used the armpit of a young, healthy male. Which one I do not know.
> What do you suppose could have been the cause for his initally inaccurate
> measurement for the boiling point of water? What temperature was he
> expecting to read on his scale? Do you suppose that the scientific community
> in those days was unaware that the atmospheric pressure is a variable that
> affects the boiling point of water? Surely someone living before the early
> 1700's must have published some observations about some problems with
> cooking things in boiling water at high altitudes.
All very good questions, and I returned to the info I found via Google
to look for answers but found none - with the possible exception that
his measured temperature was too high - and therefore could not have
been due to atmospheric pressure unless he measured during some freak
high pressure condition. <g>
> What do you mean by the error detail?
The sequence of misunderstanding, miscorrection and measurement error.
See:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jup/metric/fahrenheit.html
- Clarence Verge
- Back to using Arachne V1.62 ....
