Its (Not Quite) Hot as Balls Out

Before we get talking about heat, humidity, and for a very brief time, testicles, one or two housekeeping things.

Thank you to everyone who has looked at this at one point or another. I have over 700 page views, including people from countries all around the world. The top five most bastardly countries are the US (makes sense since that's where I'm from), Germany, Japan, Canada, and Ireland. Once I hit 1,000 page views, I'll do a blog post over something from the top countries for every 100 views I get until I hit 2,000. 

Secondly, if you're a regular reader of this, you're even more awesome and you may want to think of subscribing to the blog. That helps me out and let's me know people like what I'm doing and its not just random people each time. Once I get some followers, I'll put up a contact form for post suggestions.

But enough of that shit, let's talk balls.

Today is going to be a hot one here. High of 91*F or almost 33*C for my Non-Americans. That's hot but not quite hot as balls. By balls I mean testicles. Human testicles. 91*F/33*C degrees is not hot as balls. Mainly because balls like to be 95*F/35*C degrees. This is why in humans, the testicles are located in the scrotum which can pull the balls closer to the body if it's cold or lower the balls if its hot. Being internal is not an option because, as most of us know, body temperature is 98.6*F/37*C. Too hot for balls. It would cook the sperm. And I don't know about you, but cooked sperm does not sound like a good thing to me. 

But what is hot? We all know when something is hot or something is cold, but do we really know what heat is? Maybe, if you're smart. Probably not otherwise. Heat is this measure of how much thermal energy an atom or molecule has; the more energy, the more heat. But heat doesn't mean temperature because temperature is actually an average of all the heat of all the atoms present in the substance. Have you ever thought about how when you see a puddle of water, the water can evaporate even if its temperature is below boiling? That's because random molecules in the water can have enough heat to become a gas without the entire substance being at a high temperature. Crazy, right? 

So heat is just how much energy it has and temperature is the average of all the heats. Want to hear something even crazier? 

Cold doesn't exist. Cold is literally just a lack of heat. So when you put ice in a drink, the drink doesn't become colder, the ice gets hotter and steals away the energy from your drink, making the temperature of the drink drop. I know, some people are like "whaaaaaaaaat?" and I have to admit, its one of the coolest parts of non-biology for me. But this is exactly why you can't cool your house down by leaving the refrigerator open. In order to work, the fridge pulls heat out of the fridge and blows it away, which is why there's always hot air being blown from the fridge. It's not cooling stuff off, its un-heating it by heating the air around the appliance. 

Now, I originally wanted to discuss humidity too but to be honest, relative humidity confuses me and that's what they refer to on the news or whatever. It has something to do with the comparison of how much water vapor is in the air and the amount necessary for it be saturated, which means the air couldn't hold any more water vapor. But I don't know how they figure out that magic second number. What I do know is that humidity + high temperature = garbage. That's because when the humidity gets high, we don't cool off as easily because it fucks with our system of cooling -- sweating. Sweating is a type of evaporative cooling, and it works on the principles I've already talked about in this post. When you sweat, some of the sweat is going to evaporate because individual molecules have enough heat, just like in the puddle. When those molecules evaporate, some of the heat in your body goes with it, cooling you off. But if the air is already full of moisture, this evaporation isn't going to work as well. The air already has its hands full dealing with the water already there, it's not able to deal with your nasty ass sweat, so your sweat stays on your body and you stay hot. 

So there you have it, the difference between heat and temperature, why humidity sucks, and the proper temperature to be able to say "its hot as balls" and not be scientifically inaccurate. To restate the really important one of those, 95*F/35*C are the magic numbers for balls.