Saturday 17 May 2008

"92 Degrees"

An article in today's Times entitled "Hot under the collar? It's mango madness" (not available online) refers to research saying that in Northern Territory, alcohol-related violence increases in October and November when "daily temperatures at night were highest, humidity peaked and rainfall and hours of sunshine were lowest".

Strange, I thought this phenomenom had been common knowledge ever since the research came out saying that violence increases with temperature up to a maximum at about 92° Fahrenheit (approx. 33° Centigrade/Celsius*) - any hotter than that and people get too lazy to do anything active, so violence then decreases with further rises in temperature, to which Siouxsie and the Banshees referred to in the track 92° (video here, lyrics here) on their 1986 album Tinderbox**.

What goes around comes around, I suppose.

* 92 minus 32 divided by 9 times 5 equals 33.33r.

** One of their worst albums, BTW, the only track that made into onto my iPod is Candyman.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is bloody mysterious. October and earl November are the end of The Dry, so I buy rainfall being lowest. Since they are at the end of The Dry, I can accept temperature being highest. But hours of sunshine surely can't be lowest - that'd be in June. And humidity peaks in The Wet, December-March. I'll grant you that I'm basing this on experience in Queensland, but it won't be all that different from NT.