> During their simulation of Mallory’s Everest expedition, the data showed that on summit night, the average body temperature difference between the twin in modern down and the twin in complicated layers of silk, wool, and gabardine was a staggering 1.8°C.
The human body self-regulates, and is pretty sensitive to dramatic temperature swings. So, conditioned on the fact that they both survived the adventure, we should expect their temperature differences to be relatively small. This doesn't mean the clothing is great, it means [their body] + [their clothing] is adequate.
Additionally, I'm not a doctor but 1.8 C is not small compared to normal human variation! Normal body temperature ranges between 36 and 37 C, a "high fever" starts around 39 C [0], and hypothermia is anything below 35 C [1]. The comfortable range of human temperature is 1 deg C, and the "outside of this is concerning" range is only 4 C wide. 1.8 C is quite big from that perspective.
I didn't see more details in the article, but my guess is they were taking and averaging multiple temperature reads across the body. That is, core temp should only be within a narrow range like you say, but fingertip temp will vary much more widely.
All in all I found this to be a very strange article. If you just look at the data, I think a reasonable conclusion is that modern gear is vastly better at its function than old time Mallory gear. It's much lighter and keeps the wearer much warmer than old gear. But the whole tone of the article is about "myth busting" and how there haven't been really that many improvements in gear. I'm just looking at their charts and data and wondering what they're smoking.
Not to be a stickler (ok I like being a stickler) but temperature delta, especially deltas between degrees celsius, should be given in kelvin. A 1.8K difference makes sense. A 1.8C difference would be 274.8 kelvin!
To be a stickler, communication requires respect for your audience. The vast majority of everyone understands a 1.8 degree C delta. I would argue that very few people anywhere would understand a temperature delta given in kelvin.
> the data showed that on summit night, the average body temperature difference between the twin in modern down and the twin in complicated layers of silk, wool, and gabardine was a staggering 1.8°C.
> “In a hundred years, you’ve gained—arguably—one degree of efficiency per 50 years,” Ross reveals.
Depending on where the baseline is, 1.8 degrees could be huge! But more importantly, heat dissapation is a non-linear function. The warmer you are relative to your environment, the more energy is lost. While Shackleton's kit forms a lower baseline, it probably makes sense to imagine how some imaginary perfect vacuum insulated sleeping bag would perform.
If they're actually measuring body temperature (using that swallowed pill they mention?) then 1.8C is a huge difference.
This whole article does feel like they started with a conclusion and they were going to report that conclusion regardless of what they measured or experienced. Content that claims to debunk things is hot right now.
Also the body will increase metabolic rate in the cold to maintain body temperate which is an externality they aren’t measuring. The user of the worse clothing is very likely burning more calories and still not as warm. This would mean increased fatigue and greater food weight on expeditions.
I disagree. People also may care about the cognitive load of thermal management. As the article notes:
> the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
In modern terms, this means that stopping to take a photo — whether Ansel or selfie — would carry a material risk of harm in the classic gear that is addressed by modern gear. The example of a selfie is perhaps too easily dismissed unconsidered, but the cognitive load is real for casual hikers, and is a benefit to modern gear that deserves the mention it gets. If I had to choose between a cap that has perfect heat management and a cap that weighs 10g less but requires me to constantly take it off and put it on every five minutes to allow evaporation, I would choose the heavier and lower annoyance cap. Each person’s preferences and skills apply; if one seeks to minmax weight/thermal then that’s a negligible price to pay to improve — but only some truly do strive for the limit of lowest mass without regards to complexity.
There was an enviro-scifi book from the eighties that noted that a few people will pursue ‘one piece of apparel serves all functions’ skinsuit to the exclusion of all other concerns (such as natural fabrics or apparel design), at which point we would plausibly expect to see at one extreme the folks who make a discount-ultralight vented bodysuit out of FedEx envelopes. I am taking for granted that someone has tried this, because of course someone has tried this! And that starts to verge on why, in a different enviro-scifi book of that same relative era, the stillsuit existed: the lightest way to have convenient purified water in an absurd climates. Even the stillsuit as we see it described prioritizes convenience, the sip tube, over a more efficient system that doesn’t expend calories on pumping water up. That’s purely because human beings have a cognitive annoyance limit; and we do variably prioritize convenience when assessing the weight-complexity tradeoff.
I go mushroom picking in the Oregon forest every year.
The only real dangerous moment I ever had was getting soaking wet, and when the storm cleared, I stopped like a fool to eat lunch in a sunny for breezing opening. I finished lunch, and realized I was shockingly cold. Like, dangerously cold. I did jumping jacks as long as I could and then started walking uphill even though that wasn't where I wanted to go really. Weird moment.
It must just be that the way the stillsuit functions is because of the limits of Herbert as a engineer and designer had been reached and he did not think or realize that there was a more efficient system than the sip tube possible.
Yeah, it shows the old gear is about two kilograms heavier than the new gear, which is huge.
Considering that someone carrying 2 extra kilos will also be generating more body heat etc, the focus on heat over the rest of the article is in question.
To clarify slightly: it shows the old gear is significantly heavier in three areas: head, hands, and ‘accessories’. I think that suggests where investment in technical fabric has been most successful at improving the burden of mass in surviving extreme cold.
> The data proves that the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
Important-- when they say "cotton" in the article they're talking about gabardine cotton as a water repellent layer.
Neither one of these dudes is wearing cotton base layers, midlayers, socks, etc. It's too slow to evaporate moisture which can cause blisters on feet and rapid drop of body temperature drop in cool/cold weather.
I remember sleeping in old canvas tents - in the heavy rain - on boyscout camping trips around seattle as a kid. I remember waking up in a puddle, cotton lined bag soaked through, not being dry even after 12 hours of laying it out after the rain stopped.
By comparison my RIE UL2 is 100x, no 1000x better in every single way. Same for my 15 degree duck down mummy.
Are sweaters better now than then?? I don't know, maybe. But seriously, get out of here with the general notion that 19** is within a hundred miles of good modern backpacking gear.
About boots, unless you are in snow, boots are scam. Period full stop with whatever expansive definition you want to use. Comfy $30 sneakers from Big 5 are great. I do have some trail running shoes I use personally that cost me about $100. I'm sure they had great options 100 years ago.
Couldn't help but think the same. Clearly they went through a lot of work to do the experiment and take all these pics, and then it's all let down by such bad text.
Also weird phrasing: "a staggering 1.8 degrees" begs the reader to think of it as a large number (which in fact it is, as you point out) yet their intent seems to be, ironically and paradoxically, to diminish it.
I felt like that’s more like a rhetorical device for shorthand-saying “one might expect a ten or twenty degree difference based on modern marketing”, and I’m annoyed the article didn’t say that because it’s a pretty good point delivered rather poorly.
My wife studied costume design with a focus on historical European garments a few years back. Fascinating field!
And yes, when you can't mass produce clothing it goes up in price massively. Most mass produced clothing costs slightly more than the fabric, but even a very fast couturier will spend hours on a single piece. On top of that, it's one of those industries where price sensitivity inverts at the upper end.
The idea that full grown identical twins are identical humans for purposes of analysis is also fundamentally flawed. Just because they share DNA and look the same doesn’t mean anything about their relative health, fitness, metabolic rates, etc.
> During their simulation of Mallory’s Everest expedition, the data showed that on summit night, the average body temperature difference between the twin in modern down and the twin in complicated layers of silk, wool, and gabardine was a staggering 1.8°C.
The human body self-regulates, and is pretty sensitive to dramatic temperature swings. So, conditioned on the fact that they both survived the adventure, we should expect their temperature differences to be relatively small. This doesn't mean the clothing is great, it means [their body] + [their clothing] is adequate.
Additionally, I'm not a doctor but 1.8 C is not small compared to normal human variation! Normal body temperature ranges between 36 and 37 C, a "high fever" starts around 39 C [0], and hypothermia is anything below 35 C [1]. The comfortable range of human temperature is 1 deg C, and the "outside of this is concerning" range is only 4 C wide. 1.8 C is quite big from that perspective.
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/treat...
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypothermia/s...
I didn't see more details in the article, but my guess is they were taking and averaging multiple temperature reads across the body. That is, core temp should only be within a narrow range like you say, but fingertip temp will vary much more widely.
All in all I found this to be a very strange article. If you just look at the data, I think a reasonable conclusion is that modern gear is vastly better at its function than old time Mallory gear. It's much lighter and keeps the wearer much warmer than old gear. But the whole tone of the article is about "myth busting" and how there haven't been really that many improvements in gear. I'm just looking at their charts and data and wondering what they're smoking.
Not to be a stickler (ok I like being a stickler) but temperature delta, especially deltas between degrees celsius, should be given in kelvin. A 1.8K difference makes sense. A 1.8C difference would be 274.8 kelvin!
Kelvin and Celsius use the same unit magnitudes. It would be a 1.8* difference either way.
To be a stickler, communication requires respect for your audience. The vast majority of everyone understands a 1.8 degree C delta. I would argue that very few people anywhere would understand a temperature delta given in kelvin.
How is expecting readers to not understand what a kelvin is respecting the audience?
That makes no sense. A difference between a read of 37C and 38.8C is still 1.8C.
Degrees celsius are a relative scale. You can’t use them for absolute temperature deltas.
The difference between 37C=310k and 38.8C=311.8K is 1.8K.
> the data showed that on summit night, the average body temperature difference between the twin in modern down and the twin in complicated layers of silk, wool, and gabardine was a staggering 1.8°C. > “In a hundred years, you’ve gained—arguably—one degree of efficiency per 50 years,” Ross reveals.
Depending on where the baseline is, 1.8 degrees could be huge! But more importantly, heat dissapation is a non-linear function. The warmer you are relative to your environment, the more energy is lost. While Shackleton's kit forms a lower baseline, it probably makes sense to imagine how some imaginary perfect vacuum insulated sleeping bag would perform.
Is that really core body temperature?
Normal core body temperature is around 37C.
Hypothermia starts around 35C, only 2C less.
If they're actually measuring body temperature (using that swallowed pill they mention?) then 1.8C is a huge difference.
This whole article does feel like they started with a conclusion and they were going to report that conclusion regardless of what they measured or experienced. Content that claims to debunk things is hot right now.
Also the body will increase metabolic rate in the cold to maintain body temperate which is an externality they aren’t measuring. The user of the worse clothing is very likely burning more calories and still not as warm. This would mean increased fatigue and greater food weight on expeditions.
This whole article is kind of a straw man anyway.
Warmth of clothing isn't actually what people care about. What people care about, and what the article does not mention, is warmth per unit weight.
I disagree. People also may care about the cognitive load of thermal management. As the article notes:
> the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
In modern terms, this means that stopping to take a photo — whether Ansel or selfie — would carry a material risk of harm in the classic gear that is addressed by modern gear. The example of a selfie is perhaps too easily dismissed unconsidered, but the cognitive load is real for casual hikers, and is a benefit to modern gear that deserves the mention it gets. If I had to choose between a cap that has perfect heat management and a cap that weighs 10g less but requires me to constantly take it off and put it on every five minutes to allow evaporation, I would choose the heavier and lower annoyance cap. Each person’s preferences and skills apply; if one seeks to minmax weight/thermal then that’s a negligible price to pay to improve — but only some truly do strive for the limit of lowest mass without regards to complexity.
There was an enviro-scifi book from the eighties that noted that a few people will pursue ‘one piece of apparel serves all functions’ skinsuit to the exclusion of all other concerns (such as natural fabrics or apparel design), at which point we would plausibly expect to see at one extreme the folks who make a discount-ultralight vented bodysuit out of FedEx envelopes. I am taking for granted that someone has tried this, because of course someone has tried this! And that starts to verge on why, in a different enviro-scifi book of that same relative era, the stillsuit existed: the lightest way to have convenient purified water in an absurd climates. Even the stillsuit as we see it described prioritizes convenience, the sip tube, over a more efficient system that doesn’t expend calories on pumping water up. That’s purely because human beings have a cognitive annoyance limit; and we do variably prioritize convenience when assessing the weight-complexity tradeoff.
I go mushroom picking in the Oregon forest every year. The only real dangerous moment I ever had was getting soaking wet, and when the storm cleared, I stopped like a fool to eat lunch in a sunny for breezing opening. I finished lunch, and realized I was shockingly cold. Like, dangerously cold. I did jumping jacks as long as I could and then started walking uphill even though that wasn't where I wanted to go really. Weird moment.
It must just be that the way the stillsuit functions is because of the limits of Herbert as a engineer and designer had been reached and he did not think or realize that there was a more efficient system than the sip tube possible.
Their bar graph showed that in almost every category except for accessories, the weights were pretty much identical.
"Pretty much identical"
Add up the numbers in the bar graph and you'll see that the old gear sums to two kilograms heavier than the modern gear.
Isn’t there a chart showing weight by body part midway through the article?
Yeah, it shows the old gear is about two kilograms heavier than the new gear, which is huge.
Considering that someone carrying 2 extra kilos will also be generating more body heat etc, the focus on heat over the rest of the article is in question.
To clarify slightly: it shows the old gear is significantly heavier in three areas: head, hands, and ‘accessories’. I think that suggests where investment in technical fabric has been most successful at improving the burden of mass in surviving extreme cold.
Wool, down, silk and leather are still commonly used in technical apparel and compete on weight.
2 big new innovations that matter are Gore-tex and Nylon fabrics that are very durable and wind resistance for their weight.
Key paragraph:
> The data proves that the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
Important-- when they say "cotton" in the article they're talking about gabardine cotton as a water repellent layer.
Neither one of these dudes is wearing cotton base layers, midlayers, socks, etc. It's too slow to evaporate moisture which can cause blisters on feet and rapid drop of body temperature drop in cool/cold weather.
I remember sleeping in old canvas tents - in the heavy rain - on boyscout camping trips around seattle as a kid. I remember waking up in a puddle, cotton lined bag soaked through, not being dry even after 12 hours of laying it out after the rain stopped.
By comparison my RIE UL2 is 100x, no 1000x better in every single way. Same for my 15 degree duck down mummy.
Are sweaters better now than then?? I don't know, maybe. But seriously, get out of here with the general notion that 19** is within a hundred miles of good modern backpacking gear.
About boots, unless you are in snow, boots are scam. Period full stop with whatever expansive definition you want to use. Comfy $30 sneakers from Big 5 are great. I do have some trail running shoes I use personally that cost me about $100. I'm sure they had great options 100 years ago.
nice pics, nice font, pity the text went through translopification
Couldn't help but think the same. Clearly they went through a lot of work to do the experiment and take all these pics, and then it's all let down by such bad text.
> Today, their biometrics are tracked by ingestible sensor pills that monitor core temperature from the inside out
I wonder if those are pills they've developed themselves, or if it's an existing product available to consumer?
I've read about them being used in other studies.
I thought weight would be where the modern wear performed best.
More surprisingly, the footwear of yore was apparently lighter
I feel like downplaying 1.8 degrees C of performance is a weird choice in the article.
1.8 degrees C is a huge temperature change in biology. Human bodies keep thermal equilibrium in a margin smaller then that.
Also weird phrasing: "a staggering 1.8 degrees" begs the reader to think of it as a large number (which in fact it is, as you point out) yet their intent seems to be, ironically and paradoxically, to diminish it.
I felt like that’s more like a rhetorical device for shorthand-saying “one might expect a ten or twenty degree difference based on modern marketing”, and I’m annoyed the article didn’t say that because it’s a pretty good point delivered rather poorly.
A 20* swing in body temp would render you dead…
One might expect to be dead if following Modern marketing guidelines.
Also: Freezing right away when you stop moving at 8k altitude? I was just skiing at 11k and it never even crossed my mind.
8k meters. There is no place at 11k where you can ski.
You could be on skis they might make it harder to control your parachute.
Yes. They were talking about 8,000 metres of altitude. (Talking about Mallory should have been a clue too.)
Not right away. But a lot depends on the wind.
The article says meters, not feet.
That's pretty cool. They talk about how getting period clothes basically required custom work.
Must be pricey.
My wife studied costume design with a focus on historical European garments a few years back. Fascinating field!
And yes, when you can't mass produce clothing it goes up in price massively. Most mass produced clothing costs slightly more than the fabric, but even a very fast couturier will spend hours on a single piece. On top of that, it's one of those industries where price sensitivity inverts at the upper end.
There was a time not all that long ago that the most expensive thing most people owned was clothing.
The idea that full grown identical twins are identical humans for purposes of analysis is also fundamentally flawed. Just because they share DNA and look the same doesn’t mean anything about their relative health, fitness, metabolic rates, etc.
absolutely terrible writing.