How heat affects our brains: it makes us dumber, irritable, impulsive, and aggressive (i.e. don’t blame me if the site sucks today, it feels like 97° here and I don’t have A/C).
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Comments 2
I recently read The Weight of Nature, which included this very topic—among other frightening developments. Recommended!
97 without AC is no joke. I imagine the humidity is up there, too. Sorry you're going through that. Where I live (6,000 foot elevation in New Mexico) at least has a much lower humidity most of the time. On the downside, though, the place I rent is about as insulated as a cardboard box. Without an AC it's over 90 inside by mid afternoon. Even with the power sucking window AC the owner installed, long before I moved in, there was a day last week when it couldn't cool the room it's in below 84 (it got up to 100 outside that day, which is thankfully not typical –– at least not yet!). And where I sleep is on the other side of the house ...
My freezer is about half full of containers of ice (somewhat counter-intuitively, a full freezer needs less electricity to keep cool). While the main motivation for all that ice was to keep the energy usage down, it has also provided me with a passable solution for keeping cool(ish) on hot nights. I put one of those containers of ice near my bed with a small fan behind it. It blows enough cool air my direction to allow me to get to sleep.
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