Twenty-Four Hours Indoors
I have been rather ill the last couple of days and as a result have been spending a good deal of time in my house. In fact, it has now been over twenty-four hours since I last set foot outdoors. As being ill (and the accompanying fever and headache) prevented me from doing a lot that was particularly worthwhile like reading, which is hard to do when you can't really focus your eyes quite right, and meditating on higher values, a task made prohibitively difficult when every few minutes a bolt of pain from my head, throat, etc. causes me to lose all thought except, "God, that *****ing hurts!" Despite the invocation of the divine, this apparently does not count as a prayer either, thus religion is another thing that was not advanced by my illness.
However, I am happy to say that I have had time to think about several things that can only be truly considered in a state of fever.
To that end, I have a question raised by a plot point in W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. If Frederick was born in February, and meets the Major General's daughters on his birthday, why, pray-tell, are the girls about to try to go paddling in the ocean? The high water temperature in Cornwall in February is on average 7 degrees celsius (or 44.6 degrees F or 280.15 Kelvin). While this is not a temperature at which one would die instantly, it is hardly optimal swimming temperature as someone is expected to lose consciousness between 30 minutes and an hour into the swim, and barring that they will get terminal hypothermia in 1-3 hours, thus meaning that these are by no means comfortable temperatures and would likely have resulted in at least a few nasty cases of frost bite.
However, I am happy to say that I have had time to think about several things that can only be truly considered in a state of fever.
To that end, I have a question raised by a plot point in W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. If Frederick was born in February, and meets the Major General's daughters on his birthday, why, pray-tell, are the girls about to try to go paddling in the ocean? The high water temperature in Cornwall in February is on average 7 degrees celsius (or 44.6 degrees F or 280.15 Kelvin). While this is not a temperature at which one would die instantly, it is hardly optimal swimming temperature as someone is expected to lose consciousness between 30 minutes and an hour into the swim, and barring that they will get terminal hypothermia in 1-3 hours, thus meaning that these are by no means comfortable temperatures and would likely have resulted in at least a few nasty cases of frost bite.