Comments on: Comfortable lives at constant ambient temperature contribute to a lower metabolic rate

By: TRX

TRX — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 22:04:58 +0000

Feynman talked about how Milliken’s figure for the speed of light was found to be wrong, but instead of correcting it, textbooks “fudged” it a little at a time over decades, until it became the modern commonly-accepted number.

I also get a distinct whiff of Anthopogenic Global Warming…

An obvious thing would be to measure the average temperatures of demographics who are unlikely to have been affected by “modern living.” Rural India, Russia, and China would have medical records going back far enough to be useful, and they’d be on paper, which has to be “interpreted” instead of outright falsified…

Yes, I *do* have major problems with “reproducibility crisis” BS…

By: Felix

Felix — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 13:59:27 +0000

They pick “inflammation” as a first choice to explain the temperature drop. People back in the day had a lot of tuberculosis, pneumonia, dental problems, etc.

I wondered whether clothing could do the trick. But they found a down-slope inside what seems like a shorter, older time period — a period probably unaffected by modern, scant clothing.

They figured they handled thermometer differences and such-like.

One of the blog comments points out that 98.6°F is 37°C, exactly, i.e. presumably a rounded number.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 17:16:23 +0000

Does make you wonder, though… Are the differences due to improved thermometers, different technique, or something else that the data gatherers are doing?

Second issue is this: What, precisely, is the decrease in body temperature doing for our resistance to disease? Are there diseases tuned that closely to our baseline body temperatures, and how will they be affected by this “global human cooling” phenomenon? Will there be diseases that become less virulent, or more? Does it even make a difference?