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Winter Hazards

Winter brings all kinds of challenges to encourage the observational skills of the amateur scientist. For example, observing ice carefully can help you decide whether it’s safe to walk on it. To be safe you want a clear, uniform, solid sheet of thick ice. If the ice has bubbles in it or looks cloudy or streaked, it may easily break along imperceptible fracture lines. To skate safely you need four inches of ice, and to support a snowmobile, at least five inches.

When you are out in the ice and snow, be careful about touching metal objects, especially with your tongue! It can be freeze-dried instantly! Even a sweaty hand can be moist enough to flash freeze you to a cold metal object. Because metal is such a good conductor, the heat in your body is immediately transferred to the metal object, and any moisture on the skin surface becomes crystallized. The thin layer of ice bonds the skin to the metal like crazy glue. It can cause contact frost bite and broken skin cells.

If you stay in the cold without wearing good gloves and boots, you run the risk of the blood vessels in your extremities suddenly constricting. This can cause your fingers and toes to go white and get so cold that they’ll soon be frost bitten.

So next time you are out in the cold, observe the ice carefully, and remember some basic science - that good conductors steal heat from anything that touches them.

It is amazing how much appeal something wrongheaded can have. Some children seem to have an irresistible urge to lick flagpoles, iron handrails, or other metal objects in the winter. This seems to come from nowhere. Is it that they lick those things in warmer weather and we don’t notice because there is no direct negative result which arises? I can’t help but wonder how much the desire to apply one’s tongue to a frozen metal object comes as a result of being told not to do it.

We humans seem to have a rebellious streak that comes to the fore whenever someone else addresses us with a “should,” “ought,” “must,” or other word that expresses obligation. In fact, things that would not normally offer any attraction to us at all, suddenly become intensely desirable when we are told they are not good for us or that we mustn’t have them.

Actions like placing our tongue on frozen metal has immediate intense negative consequences. So the good news is that not very many of us can be induced to try it a second time. It is more difficult when we look at the vast areas of life where the negative consequences are neither immediate nor intense. Worse yet are those things whose initial consequences bring more pleasure than pain, as they hide their negative aspect until we are habituated to a behaviour.

In the moral universe, things are made more difficult for us because of the span of time which often occurs between the self-destructive behaviour and the negative consequences. This is why an element of trust or faith comes into play.

Life is too short and delicate to allow us to engage in effective experiments. The really dangerous experiments have such final results that we can’t learn from them ourselves. We can sometimes benefit from the missteps of others, but they are often not so effective because they don’t touch us personally at a deep level.

This is why Christians look to “revelation” that is a source outside of ourselves and our experience to confirm ultimate truth. The Bible presumes to be such a source. In it, God reveals things about the spiritual realm which we cannot test and try. It’s worth looking into, even if you do so as a skeptic. You might be surprised!

David Humphreys and Ron Hughes