heat law

People? What are they, nuts? As research subjects, people are far less reliable than plastic containers. My wife and I, for example, are people. But if you were to measure our responses to, well, anything, but in this case, temperature, we would perform better as plastic containers. That's because of a well-known scientific variable known as The Marital Effect. It says: The state of matrimony ultimately and inevitably produces a reaction wherein one person is colder than the other even if the other is completely right because when he sets the temperature at 78 degrees in the winter while going to the kitchen to make a sandwich, that is a perfectly acceptable, indeed, optimally comfortable setting and therefore doesn't understand why in blazes she has to always jack it up to 83 or whatever.

I'm not entirely certain about the exact wording of the variable, but you get the gist.

This brings us to the heat index. My theory is this: I think Southerners were jealous of Northerners for having something they didn't, so they developed the heat index - a way to make their lot in life seem harder than it actually was. "Y'all think it's worse than it seems up there? Well, y'all can have your little 'factor.' We have ourselves an 'index.'"

Now both the North and the South have equally dumb weather measurements. Consider the words factor and index. They mean, in technical jargon, "we dunno." Scientists couldn't call it windchill guesstimate or heat hunch because they wouldn't get any more grant money to move on to more meaningless projects (see: eggs: bad, good, bad, good).

But they couldn't call them something truly scientific, like windchill quotient or heat law because they aren't really science. They are more like Fun with Science.