alt Hacker News> 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...
Replies
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!
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.