Listed! Five Things No One Tells You About Heat Waves

 

Since it’s too hot to work on posting the Final Fantasy V Retrospective article (whoops, now it’s Six Things No One Tells You About Heat Waves), here’s the sum total of what I’ve experienced and learned over the past week or so of record breaking temperatures.

This isn’t going to be like the usual lists people make about heat waves full of information everyone needs to know.  Staying hydrated and keeping cool should be common knowledge when dealing with extreme temperatures.  There are several unexpected effects heat waves can have.  These include:

 

1. ALL OF YOUR CHOCOLATE WILL MELT

I promise this is a serious list, but it kicks off with a bit of levity.  Have you ever tried to eat a chocolate that you carried around in your pocket for a bit?  It gets all melty and you basically end up licking it off the wrapper.  Chocolate warmed by body heat doesn’t taste very good.

The reason chocolate melts in your pocket is because its melting point is about 86 to 90°F (30 to 32°C).  Because of this, any sufficiently warm summer day would also start to melt it.  A heat wave like the one the Pacific Northwest is currently experiencing basically turns chocolate into soup.

If you want to be able to enjoy your peanut butter cups during extreme temperatures and you don’t have anywhere cool and dry to store them, I recommend putting them in the fridge.  The experts have even more suggestions.

 

2. YOUR SHAMPOO WILL MELT, TOO

I’m not talking about shampoo bars, I’m talking about regular liquid shampoo.  Shampoo typically isn’t thick, not like conditioner, but heat it enough and shampoo becomes runnier.  This can be good if you’re trying to get the last of it out of the bottle and forgot to turn it upside down since your last shower, but definitely be careful if your bottle is still full, you don’t want to dump all of it out at once.

That’s about all that can be said, too.  Just be careful when pouring your shampoo into the palm of your hand during a heat wave.

 

3. INFRASTRUCTURE WILL ALSO MELT

It’s no wonder one of the features many science fiction writers talk about when describing their futuristic empires is climate control.  If you can keep your city cool during the hottest days, you won’t have to worry about the various ways in which our modern society will ooze into a messy and disgusting puddle.

Case in point, Portland had to suspend their streetcar service during the heat wave because the power cables were melting.  Pavement also buckled from the heat in various places, which made driving unsafe.

Just like with melting chocolate, this begs the question: what temperatures can paved roads safely endure?  It turns out that asphalt can store heat, so even though its melting point is significantly hotter than the Pacific Northwest actually got during the heat wave, that doesn’t matter because even though the temperature might not get very far above 100°F (38°C), asphalt still steadily increases in temperature to the point where it’s unsafe to walk across with bare feet.

 

4. IT CAN ACTUALLY GET TOO HOT TO PLAY VIDEO GAMES ON TWITCH

Speaking of unsafe conditions, unless you have pretty good air conditioning or some decent fans, you might want to take a few days off from Twitch unless you can keep yourself from suffering heat stroke while playing.  Some streamers run a two PC set-up, since they can use one PC to play the game and one to stream it and thus not overly strain a single PC.  The downside to this is now their room is being heated from two sources instead of one.

Extreme heat from computers can and will endanger your health, believe it or not.  Just ask a man who nearly killed himself from Bitcoin mining.  He basically gave himself heat stroke from having so many computers running in his room during a heat wave that he cooked himself and required medical assistance.  He walked away from the experience with permanent and lasting consequences.

So what can you do?  Well, if you can afford to, take some time off from streaming until the weather cools down.  It’s not worth risking your health to play games for your audience.

If you can’t afford to take time off, then make sure you’re playing in a room with good air flow and have some decent air conditioning installed, or at the very least, a good ceiling fan.  Also, make sure to hydrate.  Getting enough water is very important during a heat wave and will be doubly important when gaming during a heat wave.  Finally, know your limits.  If you’re beginning to feel awful even though you’re properly cooling the room and drinking enough fluids, you might want to end your stream early.  Whether you can afford to or not, it definitely isn’t worth continuing your stream if you’re endangering yourself.

Bonus tip: If you are able to keep your stream going and not suffer any consequences for it, you might still want a way to keep your game controller from becoming all sweaty.  One recommendation I’ve discovered is to use the same chalk that rock climbers use.

 

5. IT ISN’T ALL BAD NEWS.  YOU CAN BAKE COOKIES IN THIS HEAT!

A Burnaby resident did exactly that.  We all know about frying eggs on sidewalks, but a lady known only as Mel decided she didn’t want to turn on her oven but still wanted some freshly baked cookies.  She came up with the idea to put a tray in her car to see what would happen.

For the exact same reason why we’re told not to leave our pets in a car, leaving cookie dough on a tray in her car actually worked to bake them.  The temperature in her car didn’t reach oven temperatures, but that’s alright, since she left the cookies in her car long enough that they did manage to cook through, although the outside was a bit too crispy.  Still, not only was she able to enjoy some cookies that day, she didn’t have to have her oven on, which meant her house didn’t get any hotter.

 

According to the weather forecast, it’s still going to be pretty warm in the foreseeable future, but we should be over the worst of the heat wave now.  That doesn’t mean you should stop drinking water and staying cool, though.  Always, always make sure to take care of yourself in weather like this.