Quick Hits: Temperature, Therapy, History, and Physics

Also a laughably easy quiz

As is my wont, I’ve been accumulating open browser tabs for a good while now, things that seem interesting but that I don’t feel strongly enough about to urgently demand a complete blog post. These usually end up in the Links Dump section of a time-in-review post, but since I haven’t had much time to write, there’s a big gap between those, too.

I’ve got some free time today, though, and lacking any greater inspiration, I’ll use this opportunity for a bit of tab clearance. So here are a handful of things I’ve had open for a while, with brief comments about them:

— “The Average Human Body Temperature Is Not 98.6 Degrees” by Dana G. Smith: During the Covid year of 2020-21, we had a system in place that required faculty and students to complete a declaration that we were not experiencing Covid symptoms before coming to campus for classes, which included a requirement to log our temperature. To this end they distributed cheap digital thermometers to everyone, and I found it sort of amusing that this routinely recorded my temperature as way lower than the usual standard— often in the neighborhood of 95F, a level that would be medically troubling if it were remotely accurate.

Anyway, that context made me particularly enjoy this article about the inaccuracy of the conventional belief regarding human body temperature. I especially liked the suggestion that the average may have genuinely been higher a century or so ago because everybody was just slightly ill all the time.

— “These Teens Got Therapy. Then They Got Worse.” by Olga Khazan. This is a report on a study where a group of teenagers were randomly assigned to a program that required them to learn and practice a set of mental-health practices derived from therapy programs. At the end of the trial, they found that the treatment group had actually gotten slightly worse by the relevant measures of mental health, especially in terms of their relationships with family members.

This comes with all the usual caveats regarding splashy social-science studies— the effects are smallish and the sample is smallish, so I would not wager anything super valuable on the outcome here. It both kind of amusing and kind of unsurprising, though. Amusing because the idea of psychotherapy making people crazier is inherently funny, and unsurprising because this seems right in line with the way that medical students all become mild hypochondriacs. Detailed instruction on a bunch of techniques about how to identify problematic behaviors seems like a great way to get kids with no real problems to overanalyze their way into thinking they have problems.

Just another reminder of the importance of keeping things in perspective. Within reason, anyway:

— “The life and times of my grandfather,” by Kevin Drum: A very pointed rejoinder to some claims on social media that the current generation of young adults has it worse than any other generation in history. Very much in the same vein as (my take-away from) the previous.

— “Newton’s Law Blocks” by Joe Cossette: On a very different note, this is a nice set of class demos/ activities using wooden blocks to illustrate basic classical physics. With detailed instructions on how to make them. Inspired by a Bruce Yeany video, if you’re of the generation that prefers information in that format:

Finally,

-U.S. Religious Knowledge Quiz by Pew Research: A 15-question quiz about aspects of major world religions, which I found comically easy to get a perfect score on. Which kind of makes me despair for the general public, who are more around the 50% mark…

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So, yeah, those are some tabs I can close down. Here’s a button if you want to be informed when I have something more substantive to write about:

And if you’d like to react to any of these, the comments will be open: