Tuesday, November 30, 2004
"That's hot."
"He's so hot right now."
"That is so cool."
"Icy to dull the pain, hot to relax it away."
"The party really heated up after you left."
Why are things that are stylish and fashionable often described in terms of temperature? And why is it that you don't necessarily get more "cool" as you travel further along in one direction on the temperature gradient? Nor is it better to be further toward the extremes, as cool better than frigid, but luke-warm is worse than hot.
And why are the temperature designations so imprecise? Wouldn't it be more useful if we could read Page 6 and know that Paris Hilton is 310 Kelvin right now, whereas last week she was 290 but when her sex video came out she was 400?
What does our usage of this temperature based nomenclature for specifying a level of trendiness tell us about a person's other variables? Well the Ideal Gas Law would imply that a person who increases in volume would be hotter (holding everything else constant), which is usually not the case. But hold on there one sec, you could also say that the increase in volume would make someone less cool, a phenomenon often seen among Hollywood actresses. I don't know if the contradiction is caused by the inadequacy of our measurements, or if celebrities are not modeled well by the ideal gases.
This post is tepid.
"He's so hot right now."
"That is so cool."
"Icy to dull the pain, hot to relax it away."
"The party really heated up after you left."
Why are things that are stylish and fashionable often described in terms of temperature? And why is it that you don't necessarily get more "cool" as you travel further along in one direction on the temperature gradient? Nor is it better to be further toward the extremes, as cool better than frigid, but luke-warm is worse than hot.
And why are the temperature designations so imprecise? Wouldn't it be more useful if we could read Page 6 and know that Paris Hilton is 310 Kelvin right now, whereas last week she was 290 but when her sex video came out she was 400?
What does our usage of this temperature based nomenclature for specifying a level of trendiness tell us about a person's other variables? Well the Ideal Gas Law would imply that a person who increases in volume would be hotter (holding everything else constant), which is usually not the case. But hold on there one sec, you could also say that the increase in volume would make someone less cool, a phenomenon often seen among Hollywood actresses. I don't know if the contradiction is caused by the inadequacy of our measurements, or if celebrities are not modeled well by the ideal gases.
This post is tepid.
