I’ve been very interested in coming up with a “trigger” for coworkout. In other words, coworkout would be held every Friday, and also on days when the weather is JUST SO FREAKING AWESOME that you can’t help it. Like the “class outside” days in college.
Forgetting for a moment that I’m trying to use math to describe what’s happening outside the window, Randy and I were thinking about what quantitative numbers could be used.
In a stroke of genius, Randy suggested that we could express the difference between YOUR weather and the weather in San Diego as an index. Because the weather is ALWAYS perfect in San Diego, EVERY day must be a “work outside” day in San Diego. Therefore, all you have to do is express the indexed difference between your weather and San Diego’s weather. Piling on the awesomeness, then Randy came up with a name for it: “The Sandex.”
“Oh, look, the Sandex is 90% tomorrow! We’d better Twitter everyone that we’re holding coworkout tomorrow.”
“Hmm, the Sandex is 89% in West Chester, but it’s 94% at Fort Mifflin. We’re TOTALLY gonna have coworkout there.”
This seems like a fantastic idea. So far, I’ve created a Ruby gem to calculate your Sandex. It checks your temperature from the NOAA database, the San Diego temperature, and expresses the difference. When the gem reaches version 1, it should also take into account the difference in relative humidity, cloud cover, and wind. And also maybe pollen, though NOAA doesn’t provide that.
Ideally, we’ll be able to create a Google Maps view of local Sandexes, and have a @coworkout twitter bot send a tweet when tomorrow’s Sandex reaches a particular threshold.
Doing all this work on “comfortable” temperature made me wonder “well, what is the “perfect temperature”? What is “room temperature”, for that matter, and how did it get to be that way?
This turns out to have a fascinating history, and like many areas of 20th-century industrial design, is built upon a number of studies and temperature-satisfaction surveys, which were then aggregated into acronyms with excellent names, like the “Predicted Mean Vote” (PMV) and the “Predicted Percentage of People Dissatisfied” (PPD), and the “clo” index, which can be used to express the difference in weight between winter clothes (1.0) and summer clothes (0.5) This is some AWESOME SCIENCE, right here. Is there a “tra” modifier, to express the relatively-less-insulative properties of clothing in relatively-more-trampy areas of the country?
The path-breaking researcher here is a Dane, and his name was professor Ole Fanger. His calculations, published in the 1970 book “Thermal Comfort” were embedded in the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Cooling Engineer’s standards, and the ASHRAE standards determine how much heating and cooling power is deployed to control a building’s temperature and humidity.
In other words, Ole Fanger is the Emperor of Air Conditioning, and here is his smiling face!
I’m continuing to read up on thermal comfort and the ASHRAE standards. These kinds of standards are the kind you have to pay for (ASHRAE 55 costs $50.00), but you can find some of the good bits mentioned in articles elsewhere. I’m going to try to apply Fanger’s thermal comfort model to the Sandex, and see if we can’t make sure that when it’s the same temperature and humidity OUTSIDE that you’d try to use a whole entire building HVAC system to get INSIDE, that that’s a day we hold coworkout.
More to come on this!
Oh, man, it gets better:
“fcr = ratio of clothed/nude surface area”
In a summertime office, fcr is assumed to be 0.5, and in “Swimming baths with rest places”, it is assumed by researcher to be 0 (nude.)(!)
I always thought of “Room Temperature” as something immutable, eternal, handed down by our ancestors. Not carefully calibrated by an awesome, mustachioed Dane in the 60s!
The “Ole” in Ole Fanger is a two syllable name, I believe. In Kodiak there was a road named after the Swedish man Ole Johnson (Ole Johnson Ave) and it was pronounced Oley Johnson Ave. I bet the Danes don’t say Oley, but they probably don’t say Ole either.
Excellent info and great work you all are doing in the lab there @superscoop!
at my next to last job i had the burden (or the God-like power) of having the thermostat for the A/C inside the enclosed bookshelf over my desk (we’ll save discussions on the efficiencies of that setup for the coworkout).
It was up to me to control the weather. However I was also the lightning rod for my “I’m cold” and “I’m hot” dissatisfied coworkers. I spent one afternoon researching USB thermometers that everyone would plug into their desktops that would read into a central dashboard that would allow me a more visual read on the temperature fluctuations and perhaps assist in reorganizing desks based on personal climatic preferences. My concept and proposal were summarily dismissed.
McGlinch, organizing desks based on personal climactic preferences would have been a really interesting experiment. Would you have had all the fatty boomalattys (like me) all clustered in the Arctic corner, and then all the 2% body-fat runners over by the windows, where the sunlight streams in and warms things up?
i really don’t think BMI figures into the equation (or at least I wasn’t thinking it would). Now that I ponder some more, I probably would have also installed a red/blue button that users would press (too cold, too hot) instinctively when they were uncomfortable. graph their pressings against their usb thermostat readings to find natural groupings. Graphing it all against their BMI would probably been on a strictly voluntary basis.
btw, though i subscribed to comment notifications, i didn’t get one! sort that out, ok?
Hmm, that’s interesting. Some Googling for “thermal comfort bmi” returns results for climate-control papers checking whether particular car-seat covers actually do make you cooler, but BMI doesn’t seem to be something that’s tested, just mentioned:
http://bit.ly/GeonJ
But isn’t it a truism that well-insulated chaps like me don’t mind being LOW on the Fanger Box, while triatheletes and ballet dancers don’t mind being RIGHT on the Fanger box? So far, I have a sample of one triathelete and one ballet dancer to corroborate this. So I don’t think that will be Science until we have about 1,498 more reports
Wow, I wonder how many jillion kilowatts could be saved if we could develop climate-control systems with things just like you’re describing, with multiple zones and shutters on the airflow vents, that would accept votes…