those who wear warm clothes do not cool down quickly; You need to know. In this week’s newspaper, thermal physicist Boris Kingma is quoted as saying that we’ve “forgot how to keep ourselves warm”. Jeez, what stupidity! What now?
Fortunately, there was Johanna Luage, “an industrial engineer in the textiles group at Ghent University.” According to her, it’s important to “find out where your heat is escaping. Does your shirt not fit well with your pants or are your sleeves too wide? You’re likely to lose a lot of heat through this. You didn’t know, right?
But the article only became interesting with the third expert, Chris De Dekker. He explained how the insulating capacity of clothing is expressed in ‘clo values’. It is determined by the thickness of the garment, the material and the degree of its coverage. In other words: a wool sweater is warmer than a cotton shirt. Valuable information in these difficult times.
Surprised, I read. Because clo values were devised by the US military, clothing insulation of 1 clo corresponds to a typical military uniform, including undergarments. If you wear this, you need an internal temperature of 21 degrees to watch TV comfortably.
I saw these soldiers in front of me hanging on the sofa at 21 degrees in their uniforms, in their underwear at least, we hope so. Questions arose like: Does the US military have anything better to do than watch TV in comfort? But above all: 21 degrees? Isn’t that very hot? Maybe something went wrong here when converting US degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius?
After some digging into international “clo values,” I found the American room temperature for soldiers watching TV in uniform: 71 degrees Fahrenheit. This was much warmer than I had feared, 21.6°C. Twenty one point six degrees! Even my 83-year-old mother, in the cold, takes off her cardigan, puffs up.
Anger seized me. The thermostat in our house is set to 19. And those American soldiers, on the other side of the ocean, are sitting on their lazy asses in that sweltering heat while our climate is going to hell? Bunch of cowards! Why don’t they crawl through the snow, getting used to the icy fights against Putin, in the Siberian tundra?
Well, I don’t participate anymore. I’m going to buy a climate-devouring patio light for the porch. Personally, I think it gets very hot under something like that, but my cat would probably be happy with it.
These bastards don’t have underwear, after all.
