Read The Second Book of General Ignorance Online
Authors: John Lloyd,John Mitchinson
The Second Book of General Ignorance (15 page)
Not that this means it is necessarily warmer when it’s snowing.
The coldest temperature ever recorded in England was –26.1° C at Newport, Shropshire on 10 January 1982 – a day also notable for its heavy snowfall.
Not necessarily, as Mummy warned you, from the top of your head.
The amount of heat released by any part of the body depends largely on how much of it is exposed. On a cold day, you could easily lose more body heat from a bare arm or leg.
That myth about the head is not only persistent, it’s official. The current field manuals for the US Army recommend a hat in cold weather, stating: ‘40 per cent to 45 per cent of body heat’ is lost through the head. The idea is thought to stem from the 1950s, when military scientists put subjects in Arctic survival suits (that didn’t cover the head) to measure heat loss in extremely low temperatures.
According to Professor Gordon Giesbrecht, at the University of Manitoba, the world’s leading expert on cold-weather survival, the head and neck are only 10 per cent of our body surface area and are no more efficient at losing heat than the rest of our skin.
If our heads
seem
to get colder it’s because the concentration of nerve cells in our head and neck makes them five times as sensitive to changes in temperature as other areas. But information from our nervous system (feeling cold) isn’t a direct indication of heat loss. This depends on the circulation of the blood – and there isn’t a corresponding increase in blood vessels in the head and neck.
Our bodies respond to cold by closing the blood vessels in exposed skin and reducing blood flow to the extremities. This makes the fingers, toes, nose and ears susceptible to frostbite, while the brain and vital organs are unaffected. The other response to cold is shivering: our muscles shake involuntarily to generate heat by using up energy. Both responses are automatic, controlled by a cone-shaped part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which also governs other instinctive
processes such as hunger, thirst and tiredness.
Professor Giesbrecht is no armchair theorist. Since 1991, he has put himself into states of hypothermia at least thirty-nine times to study the effects of cold on the human body. Hypothermia (from Greek
hypo ‘
under’. and
therme
, ‘heat’) is the point at which our internal temperature drops below 35 °C, and the body’s key processes start to slow down. This has led the redoubtable Dr Giesbrecht to plunge repeatedly into frozen lakes and hurtle a snowmobile at night into freezing seas. This, and the survival guides he has published, has earned him the nickname ‘Professor Popsicle’, after North America’s favourite iced lolly.
Dr Giesbrecht advises that the key to survival if you suddenly find yourself in an icy lake is to master your breathing in the first minute. Once your breathing is steady, you have ten minutes before the cold starts affecting your muscles and an hour before hypothermia sets in. Other tips: hot drinks do not help beat the cold (though sugary drinks do, as they provide fuel for the body to generate heat). And don’t blow on your hands to keep warm. The moisture in your breath makes them colder and increases the risk of frostbite.
DAVID MITCHELL
Is it not just a fact that your head is a bit of you
that is more naked than the rest of you?STEPHEN
Well,
that’s right, if your arm was exposed, more would
escape from your arm than from your head.DAVID
If people went around with bare buttocks a lot, they would
say: ‘Well, in the cold you really should put on a buttock hat.’
We’re all told at school that white reflects sunlight and black absorbs it, so that the paler your clothes are, the cooler you’ll be.
But it’s not quite that simple.
In many hot countries, locals often wear dark colours. Peasants in China and old ladies in southern Europe, for instance, traditionally wear black, and the Tuareg, the nomadic people of the Sahara, favour indigo blue.
Dark clothes are effective because there are two thermal processes happening at once. Heat is coming downwards from the sun but it is also going outwards from the body. Though light clothes are better at
reflecting
the
sun
’s heat, dark clothes are better at
radiating
the
body
’s heat. Given that no one born in a hot climate willingly stands in direct sunlight, the dark clothing has the edge because it keeps you cooler when you’re in the shade.
Then there’s the wind factor. People who live in really hot places don’t wear tight jumpers or tailored suits. They wear loose robes that enable maximum air circulation. In 1978 a study examining the significance of colouring in birds’ plumage found that, in hot and still conditions, white feathers were best at letting heat escape; but as soon as the wind got above 11 kilometres per hour (7 miles per hour), black feathers – provided they were fluffy – were the most efficient coolers. Experiments on black and white cattle have reached similar conclusions.
Applying this to humans, given even a modest breeze, loose black clothes will carry heat away from your body faster than they absorb it.
In less extreme climates, one of the best ways to keep cool is to learn how to use windows properly. Physicists at Imperial College, London have shown that optimum air flow in a room
comes from opening both the top and bottom sections of a sash window.
If the two openings are of equal size, colder, heavier air coming in through the lower gap pushes the warmer, less dense air out of the top, much as a cooling gust ventilates a Tuareg’s flowing garment, known as a
k’sa
.
The equivalent robe in French-speaking West Africa is called a
Grand Boubou.
Yes, there are two such places.
The first is Marie Byrd Land in western Antarctica, which is so remote that no government seems to want it.
It’s a vast swathe of the Earth’s surface, spreading out from the South Pole to the Antarctic coast and covering 1,610,000 square kilometres (622,000 square miles). This is larger than Iran or Mongolia, but it’s so inhospitable that it supports only one permanent base, which belongs to the USA. Marie Byrd Land is named after the wife of US Rear-Admiral Richard E. Byrd (1888–1957), who first explored it in 1929. The remote research station was the inspiration for John Carpenter’s classic horror film,
The Thing
(1982).
The rest of Antarctica is administered by twelve nations under the Antarctic Treaty system established in 1961, which
made the continent a scientific preserve and banned all military activity there. The biggest territories belong to the nations that first explored the continent (Britain, Norway and France) and those that are closest (New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Argentina). The ocean beyond Marie Byrd Land stretches up into the empty reaches of the South Pacific, where no one nation is close enough to claim it as their own.
The legal term for a territory outside the sovereign control of any state is
Terra nullius,
literally ‘no-man’s-land’. Although Marie Byrd Land is the biggest remaining example, there is one small tract of Africa that can claim the same status.
The Bir Tawil Triangle lies between Egypt and Sudan and is owned by neither. In 1899, when the British controlled the area, they defined the border between the two countries by drawing a straight line through a map of the desert. This put Bir Tawil in Sudan and the piece of land next door, called the Halai’b Triangle, in Egypt. The boundary was redrawn (using wigglier lines) in 1902. Bir Tawil (‘water well’ in Arabic) went to Egypt, and Halai’b to the Sudan.
Bir Tawil is the size of Buckinghamshire – 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles) – and you’d think both countries would be fighting over it, but they’re not. What they both want is Halai’b. Whereas Bir Tawil is mostly sand and rock, Halai’b is fertile, populated, on the Red Sea coast and ten times larger. Egypt currently occupies it, citing the 1899 boundary. Sudan disputes the claim, citing the 1902 amendment. Both disown Bir Tawil for the same reason.
The world’s most disputed territory is the Spratly Islands, an archipelago of 750 uninhabited islets in the South Pacific: 4 square kilometres (1½ square miles) of land spread over 425,000 square kilometres (164,000 square miles) of sea. Rich fishing grounds and potential oil and gas fields mean that six nations claim them: the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. Apart from Brunei, all maintain
a military presence in the area. To strengthen their claim, the Philippines pay a rotating team of public sector employees to live on one of the Spratlys. It isn’t a popular posting: the charm of a tiny tropical rock that can be walked round in thirty minutes soon fades.
Despite its timeless association with Egypt, most of the Nile is in Sudan.
The Nile rises in Rwanda, in the Great Lakes area of Central Africa, and flows through Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Egypt, but the largest section traverses Sudan. The river’s two great tributaries – the Blue and White Niles – meet in Khartoum, the country’s capital.
Sudan is the largest country in Africa, covering 2,505,813 square kilometres (967,500 square miles), making it bigger than Western Europe and a quarter of the size of the USA. It is also the largest country in the Arab world. Because of its political and military precariousness, no one is quite sure what its current population is, but most estimates suggest 40 million, with four times as many living in the Arabic-speaking Muslim north as in the largely Christian south.
The northern Muslim population is descended from Arab invaders and the indigenous Nubian people, one of black Africa’s earliest civilisations. The name ‘Nubia’ comes from the Egyptian
nbu
, ‘gold’, as the region was famous for its gold mines. From the seventh century
AD
, waves of Arab invaders spread out from Damascus and Baghdad, establishing Islam throughout north-west Africa. The first Nubian Muslim ruler
ascended to the throne in
AD
1093 and northern Sudan has been a part of the Islamic world ever since.
‘Sudan’ means ‘black’ in Arabic. It comes from the Arabic
bilad as-sudan
meaning ‘land of the black people’ and southern and western Sudan contains a complex mix of almost 600 black African tribal groups, speaking over 400 different languages and dialects. Many of them are Christian, or practise traditional African religions. The Dinka – whose name means ‘the people’ and who are, at over a million strong, Sudan’s largest tribal group – practise both.
For over thirty years, the northern government and the southern tribes like the Dinka were locked in civil war. Ending in 1989, the war cost the lives of more than 2 million people and displaced another 4 million. It is estimated that 200,000 southern Sudanese have been forced into slavery in the north. Most of them are Dinka. In 2005 Southern Sudan was finally granted autonomy and this is being implemented by the United Nations.
In the meantime, the Northern Islamic government has been accused of genocide by using terrorist militias to destroy three tribal groups in the western region of Darfur. In 2008 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is the first time the court has brought charges against a serving head of state.
Sudan is 150th out of 182 nations on the UN’s human development index. One in five Sudanese lives on less than £1 a day. In the 2009 Happy Planet Index, which measures well-being and environmental impact, Sudan is ranked 121 out of 143, though this beats both Luxembourg and Estonia.
She was Greek.
Cleopatra (literally meaning ‘renowned in her ancestry’) was a direct descendant of Ptolemy I (303–285
BC
), the right-hand man to Alexander the Great. On Alexander’s death in 325
BC
, Ptolemy’s loyalty was rewarded with the governorship of Egypt. Like Alexander, Ptolemy came from Macedon, north of Greece. The Macedonians had hereditary, all-powerful kings and despised the newfangled ideas of the south, crushing democracy in Athens in 322
BC
. In keeping with his heritage, Ptolemy appointed himself Pharaoh of Egypt in 305
BC
, founding a dynasty that would last 275 years.