January 7, 2010--Connecting the Dots With Google

Like most of the rest of the country it’s cold down here in South Florida. When we went out for coffee yesterday morning it was 38 degrees. A record. I was about to complain, but before I could Rona reminded me that if we were in New York we’d be trilled to be out at 8:00 a.m. and for it to be that warm.

“And our high for the day is predicted to be 58,” she said, So stop whining and let’s get a warm cup of coffee. I also plan to have a bowl of oatmeal.”

This got me to thinking about cold and hot.

On my list for some time in this regard is why if you touch a glass window or its metal frame it always feels so much colder than a piece of wooden furniture in the same room. Common sense would suggest that if the room was a uniform 70 degrees to the touch everything in it would feel them same. But it doesn’t.

I fancy myself a bit of a science buff, with physics being a special interest. I know a decent amount about how pulleys and levers work and even a household thermostat. And of course atom and hydrogen bombs. So when I posed this issue with Rona, in addition to her rolling her eyes up in her head, neither she nor I could come up with a satisfactory answer.

I thought it might have something to do with specific gravity. A concept, to tell you the truth, I never fully understood even when I was knocking down A’s in high school science.

It’s something like this—

Specific gravity is the comparison of a substance’s density to that of water. For example, imagine a gallon bottle filled with water, a second filled with feathers, a third with lead weights. There are equal volumes of material in each, but the bottle with the feathers will weigh less than that containing water; the bottle with lead of course weights weighs the most.

This I can understand, but then what’s “density”? So you see how things of this kind can make one crazy.

But since after coffee and hot cereal yesterday it was dramatically clear that the stone countertop in our kitchen felt much colder than the blankets with which we wrapped ourselves (while we were out the heating system here failed!), I decided finally to see if I could come up with a comprehensible answer.

Happily, the computer was still working and so I typed the following into Google:

“Why does metal feel colder . . .”

And before I could complete the question Google finished it for me. I saw in window (or whatever it’s called)—“Why does metal feel colder . . . than wood”

I clicked on that and in much less than a second (0.14 of one to be scientifically precise) I was offered a variety of sources (408,000 to be exact) for where to find the answer. From--

pa.msu.edu
funtrivia.com
straightdope.com
wikianswers.com
reddit.com
uh.edu

And so on.

I tried the ever-reliable Wiki first. Since I know you are as curious about this as I, here’s what Wiki had to say:

Lets say room temp is 75 degrees. Your body temp is around 98 degrees. Metal conducts heat very well so when you touch it all the heat [from you hand] is transferred to the metal whereas wood is more insulating and the heat from your finger leaves at a much slower rate.

Also, there is also a difference in emissivity between the two materials. They radiate energy differently. The metal object not only feels colder in the room (or hotter in the sun), it really is a different temperature.

Metal is a thermal conductor and wood is a thermal insulator. When you touch the metal, the energy transfers rapidly to the metal, making it colder. When you touch the wood, the energy transfers very slowly from your hand to the wood.

Fine, but then for much of the rest of the morning I searched for explanations about “emissivity,” “thermal conductor,” and “energy transfer.” A hint—they are all related and quickly get you to the structure and behavior of atoms and their inner components.

To further distract myself from the cold, and to get me off the computer (Rona needed to do some on-line banking), I took a look at the New York Times. It was full of stories about Iran’s nuclear capacity (be forewarned that I will be writing about that happy subject tomorrow), the continued worries about the housing market, and of course the latest about the Nigerian underwear bomber and what Barack Obama reported went wrong that enabled him to get on that plane in Amsterdam.

He took responsibility for and faulted our homeland security system, indicating that just his banker father’s reporting to our embassy in Lagos about his son’s radicalization should have been enough to set off some red flags. Or how the fact that he bought a one-way ticket for cash and did not have any luggage should have alerted us to the danger since most of the 9/11 terrorists also bought one-one tickets for cash. But, Obama said, this did not happen since our intelligence system (again) failed to connect the dots. Very distressing.

I then proceeded to connect a few dots of my own—those connecting Homeland Security with Google since they are both in the dot-connecting business.

Think of all the dots Google had to connect to get me my answers about the different ways in which wood and metal feel. All in a little more than a tenth of a second. Thus, I thought, why doesn’t the government contract with Google to run our intelligence gathering system? Especially the part of it that requires quick and accurate dot-connecting?

I’m serious. We contract with Blackwater (or whatever it’s called these days) to serve as embassy guards and as versions of mercenaries all over the word, so why not turn this more serious piece of business over to Google?

For them it would be an easy job. And less costly I am sure than at present. I suspect it would be at least as easy for them as coming up with answers to my questions about specific gravity.