The Cold

I hate the cold.

I hate it with a passion.

It makes me feel numb, disconnected. Apathetic, less eager to react, less aware of my surroundings, dumber even. Highly uncomfortable and unable of coherent thought and actions.

We are tropical animals. When the ambient temperatures drops below 25°C and we don't wear clothes, we start losing heat, which means we feel cold. It can even start at 25°C, not even waiting until 10, or 0.

Below 5°C, nearing 0, you run into the risk of frostbite. Which is basically when an exposed extremity of your body - finger, toe, nose, ear - starts to freeze. The surface-to-volume ratio of those body parts makes them susceptible to losing heat faster than others, so they'll be the first ones that your body considers expendable and stops providing warm blood to.

Here's a "nice" illustration of frostbite in stages:

The end result of frostbite, if it persists for long enough, can be the total loss of that extremity. It starts to rot, so it has to be amputated.

Of couse, frostbite wouldn't be "fun" enough on its own without its big, bad sister, hypothermia. Hypothermia means your body is insufficiently warm for its normal functioning, and it starts when the internal temperature drops to about 35°C. The first stage is shivering. Also, warm blood delivery starts to be restricted to the more important organs, leaving extremities prone to frostbite, as noted above.

The next stage, when your body temperature is at around 28°C, brings cognitive performance decreases. Disorientation, impaired speech, irrational actions.

Soon after, the body may even stop shivering. What's the point of spending more energy if the temperature still decreases, right?

The last and fatal stage of hypothermia is the creepiest one. It may happen that, after all defense lines of your body against the cold are breached, it just gives up entirely: all the warm blood that has been carefully conserved to the vital organs in the previous stages is now released back into the whole body. But those parts of the body that have been deprived of it and are cold suddenly start to feel as if lava flows through them. You feel like burning with intense heat of all of sudden. Irrational and detached from reality as you may well be at that point, you feel the need to cool down. So you start undressing, throwing off all of your clothes. Which, of course, causes the rapid, fatal loss of the little heat you have left in you. This phenomenon is called "paradoxical undressing" and has been observed in multiple cases of severe hypothermia. What a way to go...

If you're feeling lucky and believe you're well-protected against the usual low temperatures, you'll be disappointed to find out that frostbite and hypothermia have a powerful ally: the wind. Wind-chill factor is a measure of how much colder it feels when the wind is blowing. Intuitively, the harder it blows, the more heat loss it will cause you, hence the colder you will feel. Below is a chart showing combinations between temperature and wind speed, leading to the wind-chill temperature you may actually feel:

Source: https://www.accuracyproject.org/WindChill.html

So if, for example, the ambient temperature is -10°C and the wind blows with 50 km/h, you would feel it as if it were -22°C...

Source: Hilde Færevik, Mariann Sandsund, Øystein Wiggen, Julie Renberg - Arctic weather protection, health effects,

monitoring systems and risk assessment

...I really hate the cold.

Or at least I used to. Until I realized that hating the cold makes as much sense as hating a color. Or thinking that fire is evil, because it wants to burn you and your belongings.

I am a software engineer by profession, and a book I once read is Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects. The best advice that still stands out to me from this book can be applied to much more than software engineering. This advice deals with those things that cause you headaches, pain, and you try to avoid as much as possible, but sooner or later you have to deal with them. Instead of avoiding them, start doing them a bit more often, a bit more prepared, until it becomes less and less painful. This advice was aimed at releases of complex software projects so that the new product or updates to it reach the users. It's an advice that has been taken at heart for the past decade or so in the software engineering community, spawning modern practices such as continuous delivery. It worked.

And I couldn't help but wonder, might this advice work for something else? Such as my deep hostility towards cold? I wanted to try it out, to see if well-planed exposure can alleviate my aversion to it and let me view the cold more objectively and less personal, as every natural phenomenon should be.

And where do I start implementing this plan? In the coldest city in the world, naturally!

Next post: The Coldest City on Earth