Don’t wipe unless you’re drenched. Sweat releases heat by evaporative cooling. As each gram of sweat transitions from liquid to gas phase, it absorbs 2,427 joules of energy from the body and dissipates the heat into the environment. But if you wipe away the perspiration before it evaporates, that process will get cut short, and you’ll need to sweat more just to achieve the same degree of cooling. On the other hand, any sweat that drips to the ground before it can evaporate won’t do you any good, so if you’re really soaked you may as well reach for the towel.
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Should you wipe away your sweat, or does that keep you from cooling down? - Slate Magazine
A heat wave gripped the northeastern United States this week, as temperatures rose into the upper 90s. With all that sweat beading on foreheads from Washington to Boston, one Explainer reader wonders: Should you wipe away your sweat, or does that just keep you from cooling off?
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Dancing is a sweat job. … When you’re experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, that you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion. This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn’t want to be tracked. It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable. There must be a certain amount of polish to it. I don’t want it to look anything but accomplished, and if I can’t make it look that way, then I’m not ready yet. I always try to get to know my routine so well that I don’t have to think, ‘What comes next?’ Everything should fall right into line, and then I know I’ve got control of the bloody floor.
Fred Astaire -
Word of the Day 05/08/12: sudorific
sudorific [soo-duh-RIF-ik] causing sweat
Plagued by sudorific thoughts, he tossed and turned in bed.
