> During their simulation of Mallory’s Everest expedition, the data showed that on summit night, the average body temperature difference between the twin in modern down and the twin in complicated layers of silk, wool, and gabardine was a staggering 1.8°C.
The human body self-regulates, and is pretty sensitive to dramatic temperature swings. So, conditioned on the fact that they both survived the adventure, we should expect their temperature differences to be relatively small. This doesn't mean the clothing is great, it means [their body] + [their clothing] is adequate.
Additionally, I'm not a doctor but 1.8 C is not small compared to normal human variation! Normal body temperature ranges between 36 and 37 C, a "high fever" starts around 39 C [0], and hypothermia is anything below 35 C [1]. The comfortable range of human temperature is 1 deg C, and the "outside of this is concerning" range is only 4 C wide. 1.8 C is quite big from that perspective.
Right, the 1.8C difference is substantial in terms of human physiology and indicates a diminished level of comfort as the body fights to keep the temperature up.
I also found it funny how they mentioned that modern clothing keeps you warmer longer once you stop moving, then tried to minimize the significance of that. There's a reason "cotton kills" is a cliche. Modern fabrics, windbreaker shells, and engineered layers don't make a huge difference in warm, dry, active conditions - it's when things go sideways that they can be the difference between comfort and fatal hypothermia.
There are times when layering is not the way to go. One of them is heavy activity in extreme cold. Layers can cause moisture to freeze in bad places. Having lived in a place that often got down to -40, I was always most comfortable with a light synthetic shirt under a single winter coat. No complex layers. And waterproofing isn't needed as there isn't any water around.
I also and have gone to -46F and for me a thick wool sweater and wool felt coat makes huge difference. I can not even wear my wool sweater until it gets to -20F otherwise I will burn up :)
I know someone who has three or four different thicknesses of pure lambswool jerseys for wearing while he's cycling, at different air temperatures. It never really gets all that cold down south here at 56°N and frankly I think spending ten minutes dicking about over which jumper you're wearing for optimal performance takes a lot of the fun out of it.
That said, I'm a fat 52-year-old, and I cycle in jeans and a T-shirt, and if I start to feel cold it's a sign I'm not pedalling hard enough and I should get the boot down a bit, burn some calories.
Does it take 10 minutes to choose? Back when I was commuting, I had different kit depending on the temperature, and it wasn't exactly hard.
>50F: Summer gear, and not much of it. I run hot, and there's no need to make it worse.
>20F: Add a thick sweatshirt and gloves
>0F: Add wool socks, long pants and a wool underlayer, a windproof outer shell, glasses, a hat, a thicker windproof layer over my gloves, and sometimes a scarf depending on how short I'd cut my beard.
>-20F: Similar, but with some extra layers over my core, and the scarf is mandatory.
>-40: Similar, more layers.
<-40: I know my limits. I've nearly gotten in serious trouble before when it's too cold out and I didn't plan for extra wind and a cold pocket near the river or having to walk because of a poorly maintained road or whatever. My gear wasn't especially high-tech, and I just called work and emailed my professors to let them know I wasn't going to make it.
Wind would have me reaching for wind breaking and insulation at higher temperatures.
It wasn't a 10-minute process by any means though. I'd pull out my phone in the wee hours of morning, see that it was X temperature on the homescreen, and plan accordingly. If he's just selecting between a few jerseys that should be even easier, right?
If you start doing longer rides you learn there are general temperature ranges and kit that's fine to commute in or ride an hour in traffic with a rucksack is very different from the kit you want on a 6 hour ride in the countryside. I generally have kit for 0-10, 10-15, 15-22, 22+°C. My 0-10 jersey will boil me alive after an hour cycling in 13°C but likewise my 10-15°C will risk hypothermia in 8°C. There's only so much layering you can do with cycling kit before it starts becoming restrictive.
At one point I was stationed at a military base in the north which got to -40, even -50 somewhat regularly in the winter. Part of the orders for extreme cold was "no bicycles". Too many cardio nuts were seen riding in inadequate clothing, especially lack of proper boots. The worry wasn't them getting cold, it was them falling.
A light jacket is all good when you are pumping out the calories, but take a fall and you are now sitting on the ground unable to move. At -40 you may have only minutes before life-altering cold injuries (lost toes). Add to that the darkness and snowbanks and you might not be found for hours... IF anyone is actually looking for you. Cellphone screen get tricky in serious cold. A person walking to work, which was still not advisable, would at least be wearing clothing warm enough to stand still in the cold.
The radio used to have public service announcements calling for people to keep blankets in their car. Not in the trunk. Within reach of the driver. Get into a wreck, trapped without heat, and that fleece blanket under your seat might save your life.
I'm curious: I do cycle in jeans and a t-shirt while in the city. Up to 45 minutes I'm perfectly fine, but if I'm on the saddle for over one hour I really start to miss the chamois. What's your experience with that?
Seconded. Old-school leather saddles are pretty good for riding in street clothes. But, they do tend to require a slightly different fit - I never managed to run one with my normal saddle-bar drop - the Brookes really wanted saddle and bar at the same height and the nose of the saddle pointed up a bit. This was good for ~2 hours or so, never tried it for longer, since I had normal road bike with normal saddle for that.
My old bike had a Brooks saddle and I gave it to someone to use with no real expectation of getting it back, and sure enough I didn't get it back. They're still using it though :-)
I wish I'd swapped out the really nice saddle for a more entry-level one though.
I didn't see more details in the article, but my guess is they were taking and averaging multiple temperature reads across the body. That is, core temp should only be within a narrow range like you say, but fingertip temp will vary much more widely.
All in all I found this to be a very strange article. If you just look at the data, I think a reasonable conclusion is that modern gear is vastly better at its function than old time Mallory gear. It's much lighter and keeps the wearer much warmer than old gear. But the whole tone of the article is about "myth busting" and how there haven't been really that many improvements in gear. I'm just looking at their charts and data and wondering what they're smoking.
Across their boots, legs, and upper body, they're at 6.578 kg/14.4 lbs for the old gear and 6.373 kg/14.0 lbs for the new gear. Yes, the newer gloves and headgear are significantly lighter - 1.132 kg/2.5 lbs vs 0.463 kg/1 lbs, and I don't know what they're bundling in "accessories", but the difference is nowhere near what I would have imagined.
Also, I've got some lightweight modern gear from companies like Patagonia, Montbell, Sea 2 Summit, REI, and others, and if I could get the same performance out of waxed canvas and leather at the same weight I'd ditch those systems in a heartbeat. The nylon is finally ripstop, but it's thinner than ever and tears when you rub your shoulder on a thorny branch.
But I don't think you actually get the same performance at the same weight. You're colder and have to be more careful about stopping and getting hypothermia, but your old gear weighs the same? Then you should get more of it.
Obviously that older gear wasn’t useless, since real people used it to climb the exact same mountains that people climb today.
It’s pretty clear from the text that they have debunked the idea that modern synthetic materials have outstripped older materials in performance. At the start of their project they expected modern gear of similar capabilities to be lighter. What they found was that modern gear’s advantage is primarily that it is simpler to use. Instead of seven carefully–chosen layers of wool and silk, you can wear a single coat. That single coat is also effective over a much larger temperature range than the older clothes.
Really this should not be all that surprising, as the expertise required to pick those layers has been condensed by engineers into the design of the coat. The modern climber no longer needs that same expertise, just money to buy the coat.
This is the same story of specialization that has powered our economic growth for centuries. You and I no longer need to know how to grow vegetables, or shoe a horse, or design a circuit. There might still be advantages to knowing how to write a sonnet or plan a battle, but for the most part we can leave these tasks to specialists who can get better results than we can. Those specialists in turn can leave other tasks to us. Everyone gets more efficient as a result.
> It’s pretty clear from the text that they have debunked the idea that modern synthetic materials have outstripped older materials in performance... That single coat is also effective over a much larger temperature range than the older clothes.
It feels like these two statements are in contradiction.
FWIW, I do a lot of hiking / backpacking / snowboarding in various conditions and "effective over a much larger temperature" is the #1 thing I shop for. If I can have 1 jacket that I wear from the time I get up in the morning until lunch, that's worth more than any other feature. I hate having to stop a hike to strip off a layer and I hate having to find a way to carry my jacket while snowboarding.
It was 1.8 C difference in skin temperature, not core body temperature. As you note, 1.8 C would be massive for core temp.
Wearable thermometer patches attached to each man’s head, chest, hands, feet, and legs recorded body temperature at five-minute intervals, nonstop, for the entire 10 days of the expedition.
I'll argue that, if it got down to the sharp edge of survival's knife, only the 2-degree warmer twin would come home. 2 degrees C (3 F) is palpably warmer.
That being said, if a 2-degree dip in temp would kill you, you are already praying for Ernest Shackleton's leadership.
Any theories or conclusions in the article especially with regards to science and medicine is best ignored as the article was written by an LLM.
The photographs and text within quotes are probably the only human things in there. We might go to the source of the data (the brothers instagram) for better conclusions, but for me this well is poisoned by slop.
Do you imagine that "nerds" have different bodies than "normal" people? I mean, sure, they're athletic, but they still go to human doctors, not some sort of xenobiologist veterinarians.
They may have started out the same as you or me, but the conditioning and acclimatization they’ve done over their lives certainly makes them more adapted to the activities they’re doing than the average person.
Not to be a stickler (ok I like being a stickler) but temperature delta, especially deltas between degrees celsius, should be given in kelvin. A 1.8K difference makes sense. A 1.8C difference would be 274.8 kelvin!
This is probably the most ridiculous comment I've read in the history of this website.
There is no difference in the amount of energy 1 degree Celsius delta and 1 degree Kelvin delta represents.
The only (and I really mean only) difference is how zero energy is defined. It is not possible to have negative energy, and that zero Celsius represents the freezing point of water is an artifact of convenience, not of absolute definition.
Also, the way Kelvin is defined necessitates that both degrees are identical. If 10 degrees Celcius defined the boiling point of water at 1 atmosphere (or whatever the actual definition is) then Kelvin would be smaller by a factor of 10. And this applies to both negative and positive K values.
Celsius is not an absolute scale, but that isn't a problem for deltas: (10C - 5C)=5C, (10K-5K)=5K. Celsius is only problematic when multiplying or dividing. 10C is not twice as hot as 5C.
To be a stickler, communication requires respect for your audience. The vast majority of everyone understands a 1.8 degree C delta. I would argue that very few people anywhere would understand a temperature delta given in kelvin.
You're just confused by terminology. While 1 C is 273 K, 1 degree Celsius is 1 degree Kelvin.
See, a degree is not an absolute unit of measure like a Celsius or a Kelvin, it's a relative difference between two absolute units of measure. When discussing the difference between two separate temperature readings measured in Celsius, degrees Celsius is entirely appropriate.
Think of it like time: there is a difference between meeting at 2:00 and meeting two hours from now.
A 1.8 degree C different would be 1.8 kelvin. The two degrees have different zero points but one degree Celsius and one degree Kelvin are identical in magnitude.
"A 1.8C difference" expands as "A difference of 1.8C" expands as, and here's the ambiguity, either:
"An absolute difference of 1.8C, or 274.8K, measured between A and B"
or
"A relative difference of 1.8C, or 1.8K, is added/subtracted to A/B in order to reach B/A"
I don't think the context-free variant with K will improve understanding and decrease confusability in this discussion context, but I appreciate the pointer about it in general. I'll take a lot more care around it in a future thread about space apparel!
No it doesn't. The absolute difference[1] of 1.8°C is the same as 1.8K; they have the same scale. The subtraction of values cancels out the offset.
A relative difference[2], usually given in percent change, has problems with a unit that has an offset zero like Celcius, but that isn't what anybody is using here. It's more than simple subtraction; you have to divide by the reference value.
For really low temperatures some of the traditional materials work really well. For example, at -30 °C you don't need a waterproof shell but you want something that's very windproof and breathable. So at the British Antarctic Survey in the late 90s we were still using cotton Ventile[0], it's tough and effective.
This is the ultimate refutation of the article in my opinion, the people who do this stuff professionally are still using traditional materials where they make sense. We did not forget about wool as a species.
> the data showed that on summit night, the average body temperature difference between the twin in modern down and the twin in complicated layers of silk, wool, and gabardine was a staggering 1.8°C.
> “In a hundred years, you’ve gained—arguably—one degree of efficiency per 50 years,” Ross reveals.
Depending on where the baseline is, 1.8 degrees could be huge! But more importantly, heat dissapation is a non-linear function. The warmer you are relative to your environment, the more energy is lost. While Shackleton's kit forms a lower baseline, it probably makes sense to imagine how some imaginary perfect vacuum insulated sleeping bag would perform.
If they're actually measuring body temperature (using that swallowed pill they mention?) then 1.8C is a huge difference.
This whole article does feel like they started with a conclusion and they were going to report that conclusion regardless of what they measured or experienced. Content that claims to debunk things is hot right now.
Also the body will increase metabolic rate in the cold to maintain body temperate which is an externality they aren’t measuring. The user of the worse clothing is very likely burning more calories and still not as warm. This would mean increased fatigue and greater food weight on expeditions.
I disagree. People also may care about the cognitive load of thermal management. As the article notes:
> the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
In modern terms, this means that stopping to take a photo — whether Ansel or selfie — would carry a material risk of harm in the classic gear that is addressed by modern gear. The example of a selfie is perhaps too easily dismissed unconsidered, but the cognitive load is real for casual hikers, and is a benefit to modern gear that deserves the mention it gets. If I had to choose between a cap that has perfect heat management and a cap that weighs 10g less but requires me to constantly take it off and put it on every five minutes to allow evaporation, I would choose the heavier and lower annoyance cap. Each person’s preferences and skills apply; if one seeks to minmax weight/thermal then that’s a negligible price to pay to improve — but only some truly do strive for the limit of lowest mass without regards to complexity.
There was an enviro-scifi book from the eighties that noted that a few people will pursue ‘one piece of apparel serves all functions’ skinsuit to the exclusion of all other concerns (such as natural fabrics or apparel design), at which point we would plausibly expect to see at one extreme the folks who make a discount-ultralight vented bodysuit out of FedEx envelopes. I am taking for granted that someone has tried this, because of course someone has tried this! And that starts to verge on why, in a different enviro-scifi book of that same relative era, the stillsuit existed: the lightest way to have convenient purified water in an absurd climates. Even the stillsuit as we see it described prioritizes convenience, the sip tube, over a more efficient system that doesn’t expend calories on pumping water up. That’s purely because human beings have a cognitive annoyance limit; and we do variably prioritize convenience when assessing the weight-complexity tradeoff.
I go mushroom picking in the Oregon forest every year.
The only real dangerous moment I ever had was getting soaking wet, and when the storm cleared, I stopped like a fool to eat lunch in a sunny for breezing opening. I finished lunch, and realized I was shockingly cold. Like, dangerously cold. I did jumping jacks as long as I could and then started walking uphill even though that wasn't where I wanted to go really. Weird moment.
I used to lead hiking trips and being wet (and/or exposed to rain a bit above freezing is generally more dangerous than being mostly dry in colder temperatures
I didn’t wear my rain gear hiking uphill in a quarter inch per 4 hours downpour and started feeling sleepy by degrees until I caught myself looking for a place to lie down for a nap. At that point I realized I’d better turn around posthaste.
It must just be that the way the stillsuit functions is because of the limits of Herbert as a engineer and designer had been reached and he did not think or realize that there was a more efficient system than the sip tube possible.
Dunno. I'm content analyzing the analogy as if authorial limitations did not apply; it helps fend off the entropic forces of IDIC given the necessity of using flawed examples to communicate at all.
Add body weight and the old gear sums to about three percent heavier than the modern gear. I'd say total weight matters more than gear weight alone, doesn't it?
I've done a lot of long hikes (200+km in the sahara, 6000+m mountains in kazakstan), and 2kg extra means a lot, like the difference between carrying extra fuel/food versus just clothing.
Anyway, you can try it yourself, wear a 2kg wax cotton jacket versus a 500gm technical jacket and see how you feel after a day's hiking.
No. Weight x distance from center of mass is the real metric of burden.
Carrying your lunch on a 10-foot pole, keeping it off the ground at all times, versus slipping it into a fanny pack - or eating it and carrying it in your very center of mass.
I noticed while ultralight hiking (full kit without food, fuel, and water under 9 lbs, for multi-day excursions) that how close your backpack was to your back mattered. Unfortunately, if it was tight to your back it overheated you, so a standoff of an inch or so was essential. I considered dividing it front and back, so each was about half as "thick" (far from my body), but there isn't a lot you can carry in front of you without seriously impeding movement.
Yeah, it shows the old gear is about two kilograms heavier than the new gear, which is huge.
Considering that someone carrying 2 extra kilos will also be generating more body heat etc, the focus on heat over the rest of the article is in question.
To clarify slightly: it shows the old gear is significantly heavier in three areas: head, hands, and ‘accessories’. I think that suggests where investment in technical fabric has been most successful at improving the burden of mass in surviving extreme cold.
Tech fabrics were a prerequisite to the widespread use of down in adventure clothing. Earlier fabrics were either too heavy, like leather, and would collapse the down and negate its insulating properties, or would get wet like cotton/linen and saturate the down.
Important-- when they say "cotton" in the article they're talking about gabardine cotton as a water repellent layer.
Neither one of these dudes is wearing cotton base layers, midlayers, socks, etc. It's too slow to evaporate moisture which can cause blisters on feet and rapid drop of body temperature drop in cool/cold weather.
If I look at the Wikipedia article for gabardine, it's supposed to be tightly woven wool, which makes more sense to me since the exterior of the fibers are supposed to be hydrophobic. Kind of confused at the existence of gabardine made of cotton which is hydrophilic... Polyester seems like it would be cheaper and more effective... Maybe in the past it was the economical choice, but cotton gabardine is still sold today. Seems like the worst material choice for gabardine of today, but maybe I'm wrong.
1. managing active body temperature by radiating heat effectively
2. managing passive body temperature by retaining heat effectively
3. managing internally generated moisture by allowing evaporation
4. managing externally generated moisture by preventing absorption
5. minimising weight
6. maximising toughness
This article talks about point 1 as though it's the entire story, but maintaining a comfortable active body temperature is by far the easiest point. You can do it with a tshirt under most circumstances. Wools do have an advantage with regard to point 3, which is why a lot of technical gear is now made of merino wool. The entire selling point of goretex is that it provides a reasonable degree of 3 whilst giving an excellent degree of 4, which is simply not possible with antique gear.
Modern technical gear is genuinely incredible stuff, it's possible to pack something that will keep you warm and dry down to 8°C in a space less than a large cup of coffee and a weight less than a glossy magazine.
Not to mention that from a scientific perspective, experimenting on a single pair of twins adds essentially zero statistical power to the results. This is theatre.
Don’t forget agility/mobility. Also a polar fleece that sheds water vs a wool sweater that absorbs it will both keep you warm, but one will be heavier with water weight.
> The data proves that the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
That was the key takeaway for me as well and is very consistent with articles I've read in the past about mountaineers with gear that was adequate except when it was not - and that can make the difference between life and death.
We’ve had the ability to make water/wind-proof garments long before Gore-Tex. The crucial thing is that Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable. So it has a way better ability to shed excess heat without needing to take off a layer.
Traditional materials still have a place though. Material science has not beaten down feathers or wool yet, for the most part.
> The crucial thing is that Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable.
While dry, or intermittently wettened (so it can still shed water). Numerous independent tests show that it doesn't breathe at all, once the surface is fully wet. Also, Gore-Tex is no longer best-in-class amongst rain-shedding breathable fabrics; it simply has name recognition.
To be fair, few things do breathe once their surface wets... but wool's surface is so convoluted by the twisty, hydrophobic threads that it rarely gets fully wet on the surface.
> Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable. So it has a way better ability to shed excess heat without needing to take off a layer.
It's a way to shed water: Wearing waterproof, non-breathable layers often is worse than not, because the moisture your body releases and that gets trapped soaks you from the inside as surely and rapidly as the rain. (Maybe it's a bit warmer.)
I was wondering if they’ve taken into account that one of the test subjects had a prior fractured vertebrae (and the other not). I know a lot of time has passed, but I expect that it would probably never be possible to fully recover from an injury like this? And therefore there would be differences in overall fitness between them?
For example … skeletal and muscular compensation. Nerve damage. Damage to lymph system due to surgeries.
1) 1.8⁰C on body is very big difference, it is like difference between person who is slightly warm and one who barely can move because of cold. It is huge.
2) Tone like «we are victims of marketing, we can use simple equipment instead of high-tech one» is in same article as «Custom boots for Mallory were been developed for many month». Yep, very simple equipment, of course.
> “We had a midlife crisis at 17,” Ross explains. “Life got put in perspective.”
> They needed to live and test their limits. They started by rowing the Atlantic to raise funds for Spinal Research, a UK-based charity they’ve worked with for years.
Going to guess the sample size for identical twins who never needed to work is even lower.
Now, here’s the fun bit for gear geeks like us: it’s not cosplay; it’s rigorous historical reconstruction. … Their rule is strict: materials must be 100% natural—wool, silk, cotton, fur, and leather.
No rule against LLMs, or for rigorous human writing.
Couldn't help but think the same. Clearly they went through a lot of work to do the experiment and take all these pics, and then it's all let down by such bad text.
I remember sleeping in old canvas tents - in the heavy rain - on boyscout camping trips around seattle as a kid. I remember waking up in a puddle, cotton lined bag soaked through, not being dry even after 12 hours of laying it out after the rain stopped.
By comparison my RIE UL2 is 100x, no 1000x better in every single way. Same for my 15 degree duck down mummy.
Are sweaters better now than then?? I don't know, maybe. But seriously, get out of here with the general notion that 19** is within a hundred miles of good modern backpacking gear.
About boots, unless you are in snow, boots are scam. Period full stop with whatever expansive definition you want to use. Comfy $30 sneakers from Big 5 are great. I do have some trail running shoes I use personally that cost me about $100. I'm sure they had great options 100 years ago.
"Julia Child's recipes aren't within a hundred miles of modern cooking, because I used to burn ramen in a hotpot in college."
Your scouting experience was in no way, shape, nor form like Mallory's expeditions. He knew a few things 12-year-old you didn't. And these guys have tested their theories; you have not.
I do and did know about backpacking around Seattle (and the Sierra Nevadas, and the Uintas). I should have been more clear that I wasn't trying to make a comment about Everest expeditions, my comment is about extrapolating generally to "modern equipment is a scam" to an audience that is 99% people who do medium to low seriousness backpacking - who would in 1985 have been sleeping in canvas tents with cotton lined bags, just like I was.
Plus according to recent research being twins with same DNA doesn't mean they have same body parameters today, especially as one experienced traumatic event in juvenile age. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Also weird phrasing: "a staggering 1.8 degrees" begs the reader to think of it as a large number (which in fact it is, as you point out) yet their intent seems to be, ironically and paradoxically, to diminish it.
I felt like that’s more like a rhetorical device for shorthand-saying “one might expect a ten or twenty degree difference based on modern marketing”, and I’m annoyed the article didn’t say that because it’s a pretty good point delivered rather poorly.
Yep! That's what makes marketing against the imaginary foil of death so impactful: the alternative, "if not for our technical fabric, you'd have to fluctuate between zero and six layers of fabric based on exertion, humidity, inclement weather, and personal thermal comfort", is a lot less manipulative than "wear our fabric or die before the peak". Sure, it's true that you have to wear something or die (unless you're a statistical anomaly, anyways), but marketing based on glove weight doesn't cause as many sales as marketing based on frostbite.
Yeah, for "real" mountaineering, weights a concern, but not as much as "I don't my limbs to freeze off".
For my use cases (backpacking/bikepacking), it's all about the weight. But, I tend not to camp when it drops below 40*F (I do, but I have a travel trailer for that).
I’m useless at recognizing AI writing sometimes; so, if this is that, email the mods and ask them to flag it off the site. (Explaining why you view it as AI writing will save a round or two of reply.) I’m all for what the twins are doing but AI writing should be purged here.
My wife studied costume design with a focus on historical European garments a few years back. Fascinating field!
And yes, when you can't mass produce clothing it goes up in price massively. Most mass produced clothing costs slightly more than the fabric, but even a very fast couturier will spend hours on a single piece. On top of that, it's one of those industries where price sensitivity inverts at the upper end.
Custom clothing is used to signal wealth, so past a certain point, more expensive actually becomes more desirable.
It happens when something is supply constrained and a costly signal. Universities are the classic example, Harvard would never lower its prices to be more appealing than Yale.
Apparently further beyond "Veblen", price stops being a signal because the very wealthy have money. The signal has to change to other more scarce resources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265889
Harvard’s signal is how hard it is to get in. There are less prestigious universities with a higher sticker price. Bad example, but I agree with your point in general.
Well, obviously there's an upper limit to that game, but I would bet Princeton's issue wasn't that they were failing to fill classrooms at the higher price point.
Suppliers will often sponsor/partner with high-profile athletes, providing kit for free and treating it as an advertising expense. Still "pricey", but accounted in a different way.
The Turner Twins website has sections on their – fairly significant – PR/Media work and Brand Partnerships.
"Dear Mother: school is fine. I'm getting good grades. Please send money for a new tunic, as I have torn my only one. Love, John" - gist of an actual 15th-century letter home from a university student.
I generally prefer natural materials for both look and feel. If I wear hiking boots with Gore-Tex in the summer, my feet will sweat and boil. But hiking boots with leather lining are much more comfortable.
> it’s not cosplay; it’s rigorous historical reconstruction
...
Taking it at face value, this is more theatre than science for a few reasons:
- twins don't magically mean two identical bodies
- food intake has a much greater effect from thermogenesis than most laymen realize; I don't see that the two men consumed the same diet at the same meal times each day, nor does the article mention what they ate at all?
- no control for their own body quirks, they should swap gear every so often
- the focus seems to be on warmth and moisture management, but in a weird way. Was the historical gear twin actually cold on summit day, or are we just assuming warmer=better? Warmth alone is useless. In my circles, good gear performs well at the intersection of performance(warmth per weight for insulation, as high moisture vapor transmission rate with as low cubic feet per minute airflow per weight for windshells, ability to shed external moisture while avoiding internal moisture buildup per weight for outer weather layers, breathability and speed of drying per weight for base layers) crossed with durability and your price point.
>Modern gear allows for a “set and forget” mentality
No the heck it doesn't!!! Every climber, long distance backpacker, and mountaineer reading this article surely got hit with a blast of Gell-Mann Amnesia just like I did. Layering for active and static usage and frequent adjustments to clothing/gear according to changes in body temperature and weather are still very much part of the game!
If you're comparing the pinnacle of gear tech 100 years ago to today, you can't compare to generic off the shelf Patagonia and Arcteryx clothing. A more apt comparison would be a modern ultralight kit with bespoke gear made by cottage companies like Timmermade.
I posit the primary function of modern gear is not that it performs better as a rule, rather it weighs less while performing the same or better. Other commenters have minimized the weight savings of 2kg with modern gear. As someone who regularly backpacks in winter conditions, I must say 2 kilos is a LOT of weight to shrug your shoulders at. It's over two full days of food at 4,000 calories per day. It's more than my snowshoes and spikes weigh combined!
I think this may sound smart and counterfactual to common knowledge as a layman, but to anyone who regularly goes outdoors in extreme conditions, this article and experiment is horseshit.
> I think this may sound smart and counterfactual to common knowledge as a layman, but to anyone who regularly goes outdoors in extreme conditions, this article and experiment is horseshit.
The idea that full grown identical twins are identical humans for purposes of analysis is also fundamentally flawed. Just because they share DNA and look the same doesn’t mean anything about their relative health, fitness, metabolic rates, etc.
On the one hand I think critical assessment & deep review is vital.
But this feels so not far from anti-Wayland pro-X11/Xorg grumblers. You'll hook 15% of people by being against the modern world. Theres a niche demanding rejection of modernity, current offering. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448328
There are some valid areas of investigation. I want deep critique. But mostly it's just noise, is filler, to give people their outlet against reasonability. Mostly it's not serious. It doesn't have to be: these marks want to believe. And alas alas, that 15% of fans you have against modernity: they are hot to go be loudly obnoxious against any and everything new or popular. They will be unreasonably loud for you.
How humanity copes with basically anti-informed vice-signalling is our most outstanding problem of the 21st century, is our noospheric challenge.
TL;DR Modern gear is actually much better than what they wore a few generations ago. More flexible, waterproof, requiring less thought, better and overall lighter. Even with lots more effort and investment, there remains a significant difference between two brothers when one insists on wearing recreated ancient gear.
Well, whadaya know!
But I bet you didn't know that you can find modern pro hiking shoes that are even heavier than the old ones they recreated!
Fun experiment, but it doesn’t really prove anything. On a good day, elite runners like Tyler Andrews can run up Mera and more difficult peaks with minimal gear. Next time, try testing them on a cold, windy, and wet ridgeline traverse.
”[The twins] realized they possessed the ultimate scientific tool: a perfect control subject and a perfect variable. Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas. Any difference in performance could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.”
It’s a great idea and these men are undoubtedly incredible athletes, but I’m not sure “ultimate” and “perfect” are the right words here.
A killjoy would bring up double-blinding or n>1 and I don’t want to sap the fun out of this being about an interesting people-centric piece.
There’s no mention though of a more basic trick: having them alternate clothes every expedition or season! Pfizer it ain’t, but it would still take it up a notch on the scale of interesting/fun to “ultimate/perfect”.
> During their simulation of Mallory’s Everest expedition, the data showed that on summit night, the average body temperature difference between the twin in modern down and the twin in complicated layers of silk, wool, and gabardine was a staggering 1.8°C.
The human body self-regulates, and is pretty sensitive to dramatic temperature swings. So, conditioned on the fact that they both survived the adventure, we should expect their temperature differences to be relatively small. This doesn't mean the clothing is great, it means [their body] + [their clothing] is adequate.
Additionally, I'm not a doctor but 1.8 C is not small compared to normal human variation! Normal body temperature ranges between 36 and 37 C, a "high fever" starts around 39 C [0], and hypothermia is anything below 35 C [1]. The comfortable range of human temperature is 1 deg C, and the "outside of this is concerning" range is only 4 C wide. 1.8 C is quite big from that perspective.
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/treat...
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypothermia/s...
Right, the 1.8C difference is substantial in terms of human physiology and indicates a diminished level of comfort as the body fights to keep the temperature up.
I also found it funny how they mentioned that modern clothing keeps you warmer longer once you stop moving, then tried to minimize the significance of that. There's a reason "cotton kills" is a cliche. Modern fabrics, windbreaker shells, and engineered layers don't make a huge difference in warm, dry, active conditions - it's when things go sideways that they can be the difference between comfort and fatal hypothermia.
There are times when layering is not the way to go. One of them is heavy activity in extreme cold. Layers can cause moisture to freeze in bad places. Having lived in a place that often got down to -40, I was always most comfortable with a light synthetic shirt under a single winter coat. No complex layers. And waterproofing isn't needed as there isn't any water around.
I also and have gone to -46F and for me a thick wool sweater and wool felt coat makes huge difference. I can not even wear my wool sweater until it gets to -20F otherwise I will burn up :)
I know someone who has three or four different thicknesses of pure lambswool jerseys for wearing while he's cycling, at different air temperatures. It never really gets all that cold down south here at 56°N and frankly I think spending ten minutes dicking about over which jumper you're wearing for optimal performance takes a lot of the fun out of it.
That said, I'm a fat 52-year-old, and I cycle in jeans and a T-shirt, and if I start to feel cold it's a sign I'm not pedalling hard enough and I should get the boot down a bit, burn some calories.
I'm still faster than many-jerseys-guy.
Does it take 10 minutes to choose? Back when I was commuting, I had different kit depending on the temperature, and it wasn't exactly hard.
>50F: Summer gear, and not much of it. I run hot, and there's no need to make it worse.
>20F: Add a thick sweatshirt and gloves
>0F: Add wool socks, long pants and a wool underlayer, a windproof outer shell, glasses, a hat, a thicker windproof layer over my gloves, and sometimes a scarf depending on how short I'd cut my beard.
>-20F: Similar, but with some extra layers over my core, and the scarf is mandatory.
>-40: Similar, more layers.
<-40: I know my limits. I've nearly gotten in serious trouble before when it's too cold out and I didn't plan for extra wind and a cold pocket near the river or having to walk because of a poorly maintained road or whatever. My gear wasn't especially high-tech, and I just called work and emailed my professors to let them know I wasn't going to make it.
Wind would have me reaching for wind breaking and insulation at higher temperatures.
It wasn't a 10-minute process by any means though. I'd pull out my phone in the wee hours of morning, see that it was X temperature on the homescreen, and plan accordingly. If he's just selecting between a few jerseys that should be even easier, right?
-20 and -40? You're harder than me, I move indoors onto the turbo when it gets much below 28*F.
If you start doing longer rides you learn there are general temperature ranges and kit that's fine to commute in or ride an hour in traffic with a rucksack is very different from the kit you want on a 6 hour ride in the countryside. I generally have kit for 0-10, 10-15, 15-22, 22+°C. My 0-10 jersey will boil me alive after an hour cycling in 13°C but likewise my 10-15°C will risk hypothermia in 8°C. There's only so much layering you can do with cycling kit before it starts becoming restrictive.
At one point I was stationed at a military base in the north which got to -40, even -50 somewhat regularly in the winter. Part of the orders for extreme cold was "no bicycles". Too many cardio nuts were seen riding in inadequate clothing, especially lack of proper boots. The worry wasn't them getting cold, it was them falling.
A light jacket is all good when you are pumping out the calories, but take a fall and you are now sitting on the ground unable to move. At -40 you may have only minutes before life-altering cold injuries (lost toes). Add to that the darkness and snowbanks and you might not be found for hours... IF anyone is actually looking for you. Cellphone screen get tricky in serious cold. A person walking to work, which was still not advisable, would at least be wearing clothing warm enough to stand still in the cold.
The radio used to have public service announcements calling for people to keep blankets in their car. Not in the trunk. Within reach of the driver. Get into a wreck, trapped without heat, and that fleece blanket under your seat might save your life.
I still shiver uncontrollably when I remember winter training at Ft Drum... brr
KI or Minot?
I'm curious: I do cycle in jeans and a t-shirt while in the city. Up to 45 minutes I'm perfectly fine, but if I'm on the saddle for over one hour I really start to miss the chamois. What's your experience with that?
Brooks saddle (actually very on topic in this case)
Seconded. Old-school leather saddles are pretty good for riding in street clothes. But, they do tend to require a slightly different fit - I never managed to run one with my normal saddle-bar drop - the Brookes really wanted saddle and bar at the same height and the nose of the saddle pointed up a bit. This was good for ~2 hours or so, never tried it for longer, since I had normal road bike with normal saddle for that.
My old bike had a Brooks saddle and I gave it to someone to use with no real expectation of getting it back, and sure enough I didn't get it back. They're still using it though :-)
I wish I'd swapped out the really nice saddle for a more entry-level one though.
I didn't see more details in the article, but my guess is they were taking and averaging multiple temperature reads across the body. That is, core temp should only be within a narrow range like you say, but fingertip temp will vary much more widely.
All in all I found this to be a very strange article. If you just look at the data, I think a reasonable conclusion is that modern gear is vastly better at its function than old time Mallory gear. It's much lighter and keeps the wearer much warmer than old gear. But the whole tone of the article is about "myth busting" and how there haven't been really that many improvements in gear. I'm just looking at their charts and data and wondering what they're smoking.
A few things are lighter, but others are basically the same. Check the graph:
https://i.imgur.com/WKcLVDt.png
Across their boots, legs, and upper body, they're at 6.578 kg/14.4 lbs for the old gear and 6.373 kg/14.0 lbs for the new gear. Yes, the newer gloves and headgear are significantly lighter - 1.132 kg/2.5 lbs vs 0.463 kg/1 lbs, and I don't know what they're bundling in "accessories", but the difference is nowhere near what I would have imagined.
Also, I've got some lightweight modern gear from companies like Patagonia, Montbell, Sea 2 Summit, REI, and others, and if I could get the same performance out of waxed canvas and leather at the same weight I'd ditch those systems in a heartbeat. The nylon is finally ripstop, but it's thinner than ever and tears when you rub your shoulder on a thorny branch.
But I don't think you actually get the same performance at the same weight. You're colder and have to be more careful about stopping and getting hypothermia, but your old gear weighs the same? Then you should get more of it.
I think they're "debunking" a strawman argument that old gear was completely useless
Obviously that older gear wasn’t useless, since real people used it to climb the exact same mountains that people climb today.
It’s pretty clear from the text that they have debunked the idea that modern synthetic materials have outstripped older materials in performance. At the start of their project they expected modern gear of similar capabilities to be lighter. What they found was that modern gear’s advantage is primarily that it is simpler to use. Instead of seven carefully–chosen layers of wool and silk, you can wear a single coat. That single coat is also effective over a much larger temperature range than the older clothes.
Really this should not be all that surprising, as the expertise required to pick those layers has been condensed by engineers into the design of the coat. The modern climber no longer needs that same expertise, just money to buy the coat.
This is the same story of specialization that has powered our economic growth for centuries. You and I no longer need to know how to grow vegetables, or shoe a horse, or design a circuit. There might still be advantages to knowing how to write a sonnet or plan a battle, but for the most part we can leave these tasks to specialists who can get better results than we can. Those specialists in turn can leave other tasks to us. Everyone gets more efficient as a result.
> It’s pretty clear from the text that they have debunked the idea that modern synthetic materials have outstripped older materials in performance... That single coat is also effective over a much larger temperature range than the older clothes.
It feels like these two statements are in contradiction.
FWIW, I do a lot of hiking / backpacking / snowboarding in various conditions and "effective over a much larger temperature" is the #1 thing I shop for. If I can have 1 jacket that I wear from the time I get up in the morning until lunch, that's worth more than any other feature. I hate having to stop a hike to strip off a layer and I hate having to find a way to carry my jacket while snowboarding.
It was 1.8 C difference in skin temperature, not core body temperature. As you note, 1.8 C would be massive for core temp.
Wearable thermometer patches attached to each man’s head, chest, hands, feet, and legs recorded body temperature at five-minute intervals, nonstop, for the entire 10 days of the expedition.
I'll argue that, if it got down to the sharp edge of survival's knife, only the 2-degree warmer twin would come home. 2 degrees C (3 F) is palpably warmer.
That being said, if a 2-degree dip in temp would kill you, you are already praying for Ernest Shackleton's leadership.
I'd rather pray for Roald Amundsen's leadership if I wanted to actually survive.
Any theories or conclusions in the article especially with regards to science and medicine is best ignored as the article was written by an LLM.
The photographs and text within quotes are probably the only human things in there. We might go to the source of the data (the brothers instagram) for better conclusions, but for me this well is poisoned by slop.
I think both points can be true at once
"Normal body temperature", ok but these are two mountaineering nerds (not normal) so who knows.
Do you imagine that "nerds" have different bodies than "normal" people? I mean, sure, they're athletic, but they still go to human doctors, not some sort of xenobiologist veterinarians.
They may have started out the same as you or me, but the conditioning and acclimatization they’ve done over their lives certainly makes them more adapted to the activities they’re doing than the average person.
Serious question: do you really think mountaineers have a different resting core temp than "normal" human beings, as you apparently have claimed?
Not to be a stickler (ok I like being a stickler) but temperature delta, especially deltas between degrees celsius, should be given in kelvin. A 1.8K difference makes sense. A 1.8C difference would be 274.8 kelvin!
This is probably the most ridiculous comment I've read in the history of this website.
There is no difference in the amount of energy 1 degree Celsius delta and 1 degree Kelvin delta represents.
The only (and I really mean only) difference is how zero energy is defined. It is not possible to have negative energy, and that zero Celsius represents the freezing point of water is an artifact of convenience, not of absolute definition.
Also, the way Kelvin is defined necessitates that both degrees are identical. If 10 degrees Celcius defined the boiling point of water at 1 atmosphere (or whatever the actual definition is) then Kelvin would be smaller by a factor of 10. And this applies to both negative and positive K values.
Ranking, Celsius, Centigrade have the degrees. Kelvin is a base unit, absolute and no degree!
Taking differences between degrees Celsius values is absolutely fine.
Ratios are undefined because the Celsius scale has no absolute zero while the Kelvin scale has.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement
> A 1.8K difference makes sense. A 1.8C difference would be 274.8 kelvin!
I think there was some insight here that went off on a bad tangent leading to a math word-problem mistake, confusing these two:
1. A difference... between [X] and [Y], which is a delta of 1.8°C
2. A difference... between [0°K] and a reading of [1.8°C], which is a delta 274.95°K.
Celsius is not an absolute scale, but that isn't a problem for deltas: (10C - 5C)=5C, (10K-5K)=5K. Celsius is only problematic when multiplying or dividing. 10C is not twice as hot as 5C.
That makes no sense. A difference between a read of 37C and 38.8C is still 1.8C.
To be a stickler, communication requires respect for your audience. The vast majority of everyone understands a 1.8 degree C delta. I would argue that very few people anywhere would understand a temperature delta given in kelvin.
How is expecting readers to not understand what a kelvin is respecting the audience?
You misread.
Most people do not understand temperature on the Kelvin scale. As such, you should not use it to communicate in a general setting such as this.
The same way expecting you understand what a Kelvin is isn't respectful to you.
Kelvin and Celsius use the same unit magnitudes. It would be a 1.8* difference either way.
You're just confused by terminology. While 1 C is 273 K, 1 degree Celsius is 1 degree Kelvin.
See, a degree is not an absolute unit of measure like a Celsius or a Kelvin, it's a relative difference between two absolute units of measure. When discussing the difference between two separate temperature readings measured in Celsius, degrees Celsius is entirely appropriate.
Think of it like time: there is a difference between meeting at 2:00 and meeting two hours from now.
>A 1.8C difference would be 274.8 kelvin!
Categorically and factually incorrect.
A 1.8 degree C different would be 1.8 kelvin. The two degrees have different zero points but one degree Celsius and one degree Kelvin are identical in magnitude.
"A 1.8C difference" expands as "A difference of 1.8C" expands as, and here's the ambiguity, either:
"An absolute difference of 1.8C, or 274.8K, measured between A and B"
or
"A relative difference of 1.8C, or 1.8K, is added/subtracted to A/B in order to reach B/A"
I don't think the context-free variant with K will improve understanding and decrease confusability in this discussion context, but I appreciate the pointer about it in general. I'll take a lot more care around it in a future thread about space apparel!
No it doesn't. The absolute difference[1] of 1.8°C is the same as 1.8K; they have the same scale. The subtraction of values cancels out the offset.
A relative difference[2], usually given in percent change, has problems with a unit that has an offset zero like Celcius, but that isn't what anybody is using here. It's more than simple subtraction; you have to divide by the reference value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_difference#Applicatio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_difference
I'm waiting for an article that explains what it means for my pants or my belt to be "tactical".
So other than being easier to use, cheaper to buy, lighter, and warmer: modern apparel isn't any better than old apparel.
It's more profitable to manufacture than using expensive natural materials like silk, wool or leather.
I wish microplastics pollution was mentioned.
It appears the only drawback in the article, was moisture.
Which is your greatest enemy in cold weather.
Seriously, I'll take -5 C and dry over +5 C and rainy, if I don't have protection from the rain. Any day. Or over sweaty clothes and +5 C.
For really low temperatures some of the traditional materials work really well. For example, at -30 °C you don't need a waterproof shell but you want something that's very windproof and breathable. So at the British Antarctic Survey in the late 90s we were still using cotton Ventile[0], it's tough and effective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventile
This is the ultimate refutation of the article in my opinion, the people who do this stuff professionally are still using traditional materials where they make sense. We did not forget about wool as a species.
> the data showed that on summit night, the average body temperature difference between the twin in modern down and the twin in complicated layers of silk, wool, and gabardine was a staggering 1.8°C. > “In a hundred years, you’ve gained—arguably—one degree of efficiency per 50 years,” Ross reveals.
Depending on where the baseline is, 1.8 degrees could be huge! But more importantly, heat dissapation is a non-linear function. The warmer you are relative to your environment, the more energy is lost. While Shackleton's kit forms a lower baseline, it probably makes sense to imagine how some imaginary perfect vacuum insulated sleeping bag would perform.
Is that really core body temperature?
Normal core body temperature is around 37C.
Hypothermia starts around 35C, only 2C less.
If they're actually measuring body temperature (using that swallowed pill they mention?) then 1.8C is a huge difference.
This whole article does feel like they started with a conclusion and they were going to report that conclusion regardless of what they measured or experienced. Content that claims to debunk things is hot right now.
Also the body will increase metabolic rate in the cold to maintain body temperate which is an externality they aren’t measuring. The user of the worse clothing is very likely burning more calories and still not as warm. This would mean increased fatigue and greater food weight on expeditions.
Or they can move faster or carry more weight. You can warm yourself by moving or by metabolism.
"We aren't carrying the best gear, so we'll just hurry a bit climbing Everest... and carry heavier packs of food, too."
It's mostly from metabolism, friction is negligible (<1%).
> Normal core body temperature is around 37C.
Traditionally, yes.
In practice, modern people are a bit colder than that. The 37C value is old enough that it's out of date, but the reasons why aren't well understood.
This whole article is kind of a straw man anyway.
Warmth of clothing isn't actually what people care about. What people care about, and what the article does not mention, is warmth per unit weight.
I disagree. People also may care about the cognitive load of thermal management. As the article notes:
> the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
In modern terms, this means that stopping to take a photo — whether Ansel or selfie — would carry a material risk of harm in the classic gear that is addressed by modern gear. The example of a selfie is perhaps too easily dismissed unconsidered, but the cognitive load is real for casual hikers, and is a benefit to modern gear that deserves the mention it gets. If I had to choose between a cap that has perfect heat management and a cap that weighs 10g less but requires me to constantly take it off and put it on every five minutes to allow evaporation, I would choose the heavier and lower annoyance cap. Each person’s preferences and skills apply; if one seeks to minmax weight/thermal then that’s a negligible price to pay to improve — but only some truly do strive for the limit of lowest mass without regards to complexity.
There was an enviro-scifi book from the eighties that noted that a few people will pursue ‘one piece of apparel serves all functions’ skinsuit to the exclusion of all other concerns (such as natural fabrics or apparel design), at which point we would plausibly expect to see at one extreme the folks who make a discount-ultralight vented bodysuit out of FedEx envelopes. I am taking for granted that someone has tried this, because of course someone has tried this! And that starts to verge on why, in a different enviro-scifi book of that same relative era, the stillsuit existed: the lightest way to have convenient purified water in an absurd climates. Even the stillsuit as we see it described prioritizes convenience, the sip tube, over a more efficient system that doesn’t expend calories on pumping water up. That’s purely because human beings have a cognitive annoyance limit; and we do variably prioritize convenience when assessing the weight-complexity tradeoff.
I go mushroom picking in the Oregon forest every year. The only real dangerous moment I ever had was getting soaking wet, and when the storm cleared, I stopped like a fool to eat lunch in a sunny for breezing opening. I finished lunch, and realized I was shockingly cold. Like, dangerously cold. I did jumping jacks as long as I could and then started walking uphill even though that wasn't where I wanted to go really. Weird moment.
I used to lead hiking trips and being wet (and/or exposed to rain a bit above freezing is generally more dangerous than being mostly dry in colder temperatures
I didn’t wear my rain gear hiking uphill in a quarter inch per 4 hours downpour and started feeling sleepy by degrees until I caught myself looking for a place to lie down for a nap. At that point I realized I’d better turn around posthaste.
It must just be that the way the stillsuit functions is because of the limits of Herbert as a engineer and designer had been reached and he did not think or realize that there was a more efficient system than the sip tube possible.
Dunno. I'm content analyzing the analogy as if authorial limitations did not apply; it helps fend off the entropic forces of IDIC given the necessity of using flawed examples to communicate at all.
What does Ansel mean?
Most likely Ansel Adams, famous landscape photographer.
Oops, yes, this, sorry!
Their bar graph showed that in almost every category except for accessories, the weights were pretty much identical.
"Pretty much identical"
Add up the numbers in the bar graph and you'll see that the old gear sums to two kilograms heavier than the modern gear.
Add body weight and the old gear sums to about three percent heavier than the modern gear. I'd say total weight matters more than gear weight alone, doesn't it?
I've done a lot of long hikes (200+km in the sahara, 6000+m mountains in kazakstan), and 2kg extra means a lot, like the difference between carrying extra fuel/food versus just clothing.
Anyway, you can try it yourself, wear a 2kg wax cotton jacket versus a 500gm technical jacket and see how you feel after a day's hiking.
No it does not.
Two kilograms extra is gigantic.
If you have a friend who hikes or backpacks, ask them to take you along for your first time and try it out for yourself.
Until you take your gear off, and it's in your pack. I'd much rather lose a kg of pack weight vs. a kg of body weight.
No. Weight x distance from center of mass is the real metric of burden.
Carrying your lunch on a 10-foot pole, keeping it off the ground at all times, versus slipping it into a fanny pack - or eating it and carrying it in your very center of mass.
I noticed while ultralight hiking (full kit without food, fuel, and water under 9 lbs, for multi-day excursions) that how close your backpack was to your back mattered. Unfortunately, if it was tight to your back it overheated you, so a standoff of an inch or so was essential. I considered dividing it front and back, so each was about half as "thick" (far from my body), but there isn't a lot you can carry in front of you without seriously impeding movement.
Anyway: force times distance equals work.
Isn’t there a chart showing weight by body part midway through the article?
Yeah, it shows the old gear is about two kilograms heavier than the new gear, which is huge.
Considering that someone carrying 2 extra kilos will also be generating more body heat etc, the focus on heat over the rest of the article is in question.
To clarify slightly: it shows the old gear is significantly heavier in three areas: head, hands, and ‘accessories’. I think that suggests where investment in technical fabric has been most successful at improving the burden of mass in surviving extreme cold.
Wool, down, silk and leather are still commonly used in technical apparel and compete on weight.
2 big new innovations that matter are Gore-tex and Nylon fabrics that are very durable and wind resistance for their weight.
Tech fabrics were a prerequisite to the widespread use of down in adventure clothing. Earlier fabrics were either too heavy, like leather, and would collapse the down and negate its insulating properties, or would get wet like cotton/linen and saturate the down.
Small temperature difference, potentially large difference in watts
Important-- when they say "cotton" in the article they're talking about gabardine cotton as a water repellent layer.
Neither one of these dudes is wearing cotton base layers, midlayers, socks, etc. It's too slow to evaporate moisture which can cause blisters on feet and rapid drop of body temperature drop in cool/cold weather.
If I look at the Wikipedia article for gabardine, it's supposed to be tightly woven wool, which makes more sense to me since the exterior of the fibers are supposed to be hydrophobic. Kind of confused at the existence of gabardine made of cotton which is hydrophilic... Polyester seems like it would be cheaper and more effective... Maybe in the past it was the economical choice, but cotton gabardine is still sold today. Seems like the worst material choice for gabardine of today, but maybe I'm wrong.
Gabardine is a type of weave, irrespective of material. Classic trench coats are cotton gabardine
This is a massive oversimplification.
The challenges of technical gear are:
1. managing active body temperature by radiating heat effectively
2. managing passive body temperature by retaining heat effectively
3. managing internally generated moisture by allowing evaporation
4. managing externally generated moisture by preventing absorption
5. minimising weight
6. maximising toughness
This article talks about point 1 as though it's the entire story, but maintaining a comfortable active body temperature is by far the easiest point. You can do it with a tshirt under most circumstances. Wools do have an advantage with regard to point 3, which is why a lot of technical gear is now made of merino wool. The entire selling point of goretex is that it provides a reasonable degree of 3 whilst giving an excellent degree of 4, which is simply not possible with antique gear.
Modern technical gear is genuinely incredible stuff, it's possible to pack something that will keep you warm and dry down to 8°C in a space less than a large cup of coffee and a weight less than a glossy magazine.
Not to mention that from a scientific perspective, experimenting on a single pair of twins adds essentially zero statistical power to the results. This is theatre.
Don’t forget agility/mobility. Also a polar fleece that sheds water vs a wool sweater that absorbs it will both keep you warm, but one will be heavier with water weight.
Key paragraph:
> The data proves that the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
That was the key takeaway for me as well and is very consistent with articles I've read in the past about mountaineers with gear that was adequate except when it was not - and that can make the difference between life and death.
We’ve had the ability to make water/wind-proof garments long before Gore-Tex. The crucial thing is that Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable. So it has a way better ability to shed excess heat without needing to take off a layer.
Traditional materials still have a place though. Material science has not beaten down feathers or wool yet, for the most part.
> The crucial thing is that Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable.
While dry, or intermittently wettened (so it can still shed water). Numerous independent tests show that it doesn't breathe at all, once the surface is fully wet. Also, Gore-Tex is no longer best-in-class amongst rain-shedding breathable fabrics; it simply has name recognition.
To be fair, few things do breathe once their surface wets... but wool's surface is so convoluted by the twisty, hydrophobic threads that it rarely gets fully wet on the surface.
> Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable. So it has a way better ability to shed excess heat without needing to take off a layer.
It's a way to shed water: Wearing waterproof, non-breathable layers often is worse than not, because the moisture your body releases and that gets trapped soaks you from the inside as surely and rapidly as the rain. (Maybe it's a bit warmer.)
Did anyone else feel like something is off with this content? Like it was written as an ad or something?
It’s AI.
It's utter LLM shite. You can always tell, amongst other things, by the clunky headings. Eg, "The Catalyst: A Broken Neck".
It's such an interesting premise that I was especially disappointed to start reading and see all the usual signs of it being written by ChatGPT.
I was wondering if they’ve taken into account that one of the test subjects had a prior fractured vertebrae (and the other not). I know a lot of time has passed, but I expect that it would probably never be possible to fully recover from an injury like this? And therefore there would be differences in overall fitness between them?
For example … skeletal and muscular compensation. Nerve damage. Damage to lymph system due to surgeries.
I thought weight would be where the modern wear performed best.
More surprisingly, the footwear of yore was apparently lighter
Conclusions in article are strange.
1) 1.8⁰C on body is very big difference, it is like difference between person who is slightly warm and one who barely can move because of cold. It is huge.
2) Tone like «we are victims of marketing, we can use simple equipment instead of high-tech one» is in same article as «Custom boots for Mallory were been developed for many month». Yep, very simple equipment, of course.
> Today, their biometrics are tracked by ingestible sensor pills that monitor core temperature from the inside out
I wonder if those are pills they've developed themselves, or if it's an existing product available to consumer?
I've read about them being used in other studies.
Identical twins is a neat idea, but it still feels like a very small sample size for drawing broader conclusions about "a century of innovation"
> “We had a midlife crisis at 17,” Ross explains. “Life got put in perspective.”
> They needed to live and test their limits. They started by rowing the Atlantic to raise funds for Spinal Research, a UK-based charity they’ve worked with for years.
Going to guess the sample size for identical twins who never needed to work is even lower.
This video on the subject of testing old vs. new camping gear is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Us6AVVkx_8
Awful llm writing for what it seems to be some sort of ad but I can't quite figure out what's the ad for...
Yep:
Now, here’s the fun bit for gear geeks like us: it’s not cosplay; it’s rigorous historical reconstruction. … Their rule is strict: materials must be 100% natural—wool, silk, cotton, fur, and leather.
No rule against LLMs, or for rigorous human writing.
The twins didn't write this.
nice pics, nice font, pity the text went through translopification
Couldn't help but think the same. Clearly they went through a lot of work to do the experiment and take all these pics, and then it's all let down by such bad text.
I remember sleeping in old canvas tents - in the heavy rain - on boyscout camping trips around seattle as a kid. I remember waking up in a puddle, cotton lined bag soaked through, not being dry even after 12 hours of laying it out after the rain stopped.
By comparison my RIE UL2 is 100x, no 1000x better in every single way. Same for my 15 degree duck down mummy.
Are sweaters better now than then?? I don't know, maybe. But seriously, get out of here with the general notion that 19** is within a hundred miles of good modern backpacking gear.
About boots, unless you are in snow, boots are scam. Period full stop with whatever expansive definition you want to use. Comfy $30 sneakers from Big 5 are great. I do have some trail running shoes I use personally that cost me about $100. I'm sure they had great options 100 years ago.
I find sneakers uncomfortable on rocks. The heavy sole of boots is worth the trade off if n anything rocky.
Higher boots can prevent twisting your ankle when you're tired at the end of a long day.
> $30 sneakers from Big 5
Big 5 seems to be a western US sporting goods chain. I wonder if there's an equivalent in other parts of the country?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_5_Sporting_Goods
Yes, big box sporting goods stores exist outside the west coast. They’re quite common, in fact.
"Julia Child's recipes aren't within a hundred miles of modern cooking, because I used to burn ramen in a hotpot in college."
Your scouting experience was in no way, shape, nor form like Mallory's expeditions. He knew a few things 12-year-old you didn't. And these guys have tested their theories; you have not.
I do and did know about backpacking around Seattle (and the Sierra Nevadas, and the Uintas). I should have been more clear that I wasn't trying to make a comment about Everest expeditions, my comment is about extrapolating generally to "modern equipment is a scam" to an audience that is 99% people who do medium to low seriousness backpacking - who would in 1985 have been sleeping in canvas tents with cotton lined bags, just like I was.
> On the vast, blinding expanse of the Greenland Ice Cap
But not double-blinding. If I were the twin in the retro gear, I'd subconsciously be trying harder to try to make a point.
Plus according to recent research being twins with same DNA doesn't mean they have same body parameters today, especially as one experienced traumatic event in juvenile age. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
If you like this stuff, have a look at the Vikings and their logistical problems.
https://www.quora.com/While-at-the-sea-what-did-Vikings-do-f...
I feel like downplaying 1.8 degrees C of performance is a weird choice in the article.
1.8 degrees C is a huge temperature change in biology. Human bodies keep thermal equilibrium in a margin smaller then that.
Also weird phrasing: "a staggering 1.8 degrees" begs the reader to think of it as a large number (which in fact it is, as you point out) yet their intent seems to be, ironically and paradoxically, to diminish it.
I felt like that’s more like a rhetorical device for shorthand-saying “one might expect a ten or twenty degree difference based on modern marketing”, and I’m annoyed the article didn’t say that because it’s a pretty good point delivered rather poorly.
A 20* swing in body temp would render you dead…
Yep! That's what makes marketing against the imaginary foil of death so impactful: the alternative, "if not for our technical fabric, you'd have to fluctuate between zero and six layers of fabric based on exertion, humidity, inclement weather, and personal thermal comfort", is a lot less manipulative than "wear our fabric or die before the peak". Sure, it's true that you have to wear something or die (unless you're a statistical anomaly, anyways), but marketing based on glove weight doesn't cause as many sales as marketing based on frostbite.
Yeah, for "real" mountaineering, weights a concern, but not as much as "I don't my limbs to freeze off".
For my use cases (backpacking/bikepacking), it's all about the weight. But, I tend not to camp when it drops below 40*F (I do, but I have a travel trailer for that).
One might expect to be dead if following Modern marketing guidelines.
It would be hilarious if they did find a 10 degree difference. “Old gear keeps you chilly but fine. Modern gear straight up kills you!”
Because a machine wrote it, not a human.
I’m useless at recognizing AI writing sometimes; so, if this is that, email the mods and ask them to flag it off the site. (Explaining why you view it as AI writing will save a round or two of reply.) I’m all for what the twins are doing but AI writing should be purged here.
I didn't quite clock what they meant in that paragraph. I'm pretty sure that a 1.8 degree drop in body temp is approaching hypothermia.
Also: Freezing right away when you stop moving at 8k altitude? I was just skiing at 11k and it never even crossed my mind.
8k meters. There is no place at 11k where you can ski.
You could be on skis they might make it harder to control your parachute.
People who paraglide often launch (and land) on skis and can then use thermals to ascend above their launch site. No-one's flying to 11,000m though!
(The highest recorded paraglider flight was 10,054m – unintentional, got sucked into a cumulonimbus cloud updraft - also lost consciousness).
My friend skis make it easier to use your parachute https://youtu.be/3CDyQXtBGBw?si=YMXZOqvkCLaaLamy&t=1457
Yes. They were talking about 8,000 metres of altitude. (Talking about Mallory should have been a clue too.)
Not right away. But a lot depends on the wind.
The article says meters, not feet.
That's pretty cool. They talk about how getting period clothes basically required custom work.
Must be pricey.
My wife studied costume design with a focus on historical European garments a few years back. Fascinating field!
And yes, when you can't mass produce clothing it goes up in price massively. Most mass produced clothing costs slightly more than the fabric, but even a very fast couturier will spend hours on a single piece. On top of that, it's one of those industries where price sensitivity inverts at the upper end.
> it's one of those industries where price sensitivity inverts at the upper end
What does that mean?
Custom clothing is used to signal wealth, so past a certain point, more expensive actually becomes more desirable.
It happens when something is supply constrained and a costly signal. Universities are the classic example, Harvard would never lower its prices to be more appealing than Yale.
Apparently further beyond "Veblen", price stops being a signal because the very wealthy have money. The signal has to change to other more scarce resources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265889
Harvard’s signal is how hard it is to get in. There are less prestigious universities with a higher sticker price. Bad example, but I agree with your point in general.
> Universities are the classic example, Harvard would never lower its prices to be more appealing than Yale.
This would sound more convincing if Princeton hadn't already done that exact thing.
Well, obviously there's an upper limit to that game, but I would bet Princeton's issue wasn't that they were failing to fill classrooms at the higher price point.
The Turner Twins website has sections on their – fairly significant – PR/Media work and Brand Partnerships.
There was a time not all that long ago that the most expensive thing most people owned was clothing.
"Dear Mother: school is fine. I'm getting good grades. Please send money for a new tunic, as I have torn my only one. Love, John" - gist of an actual 15th-century letter home from a university student.
really interesting - except the charts are impossible to read for colour blind people.
People are trying to pick this apart technically instead of realizing it's an AI generated ad.
Is that an iPad?
One of them used an iPad and one used parchment to take notes.
I generally prefer natural materials for both look and feel. If I wear hiking boots with Gore-Tex in the summer, my feet will sweat and boil. But hiking boots with leather lining are much more comfortable.
> it’s not cosplay; it’s rigorous historical reconstruction
...
Taking it at face value, this is more theatre than science for a few reasons:
- twins don't magically mean two identical bodies
- food intake has a much greater effect from thermogenesis than most laymen realize; I don't see that the two men consumed the same diet at the same meal times each day, nor does the article mention what they ate at all?
- no control for their own body quirks, they should swap gear every so often
- the focus seems to be on warmth and moisture management, but in a weird way. Was the historical gear twin actually cold on summit day, or are we just assuming warmer=better? Warmth alone is useless. In my circles, good gear performs well at the intersection of performance(warmth per weight for insulation, as high moisture vapor transmission rate with as low cubic feet per minute airflow per weight for windshells, ability to shed external moisture while avoiding internal moisture buildup per weight for outer weather layers, breathability and speed of drying per weight for base layers) crossed with durability and your price point.
>Modern gear allows for a “set and forget” mentality
No the heck it doesn't!!! Every climber, long distance backpacker, and mountaineer reading this article surely got hit with a blast of Gell-Mann Amnesia just like I did. Layering for active and static usage and frequent adjustments to clothing/gear according to changes in body temperature and weather are still very much part of the game!
If you're comparing the pinnacle of gear tech 100 years ago to today, you can't compare to generic off the shelf Patagonia and Arcteryx clothing. A more apt comparison would be a modern ultralight kit with bespoke gear made by cottage companies like Timmermade.
I posit the primary function of modern gear is not that it performs better as a rule, rather it weighs less while performing the same or better. Other commenters have minimized the weight savings of 2kg with modern gear. As someone who regularly backpacks in winter conditions, I must say 2 kilos is a LOT of weight to shrug your shoulders at. It's over two full days of food at 4,000 calories per day. It's more than my snowshoes and spikes weigh combined!
I think this may sound smart and counterfactual to common knowledge as a layman, but to anyone who regularly goes outdoors in extreme conditions, this article and experiment is horseshit.
> I think this may sound smart and counterfactual to common knowledge as a layman, but to anyone who regularly goes outdoors in extreme conditions, this article and experiment is horseshit.
LLM slop in a nutshell.
If today's LLMs could shake their annoying verbal tics, they might be indistinguishable from Malcolm Gladwell.
Turing didn't go far enough. The next level is the Gladwell Test: Indistinguishable from a human who is persuasively confused.
The idea that full grown identical twins are identical humans for purposes of analysis is also fundamentally flawed. Just because they share DNA and look the same doesn’t mean anything about their relative health, fitness, metabolic rates, etc.
It means that they are much closer than other human beings would be. Many studies have been done on identical twins for various purposes.
On the one hand I think critical assessment & deep review is vital.
But this feels so not far from anti-Wayland pro-X11/Xorg grumblers. You'll hook 15% of people by being against the modern world. Theres a niche demanding rejection of modernity, current offering. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448328
There are some valid areas of investigation. I want deep critique. But mostly it's just noise, is filler, to give people their outlet against reasonability. Mostly it's not serious. It doesn't have to be: these marks want to believe. And alas alas, that 15% of fans you have against modernity: they are hot to go be loudly obnoxious against any and everything new or popular. They will be unreasonably loud for you.
How humanity copes with basically anti-informed vice-signalling is our most outstanding problem of the 21st century, is our noospheric challenge.
Wrong thread?
TL;DR Modern gear is actually much better than what they wore a few generations ago. More flexible, waterproof, requiring less thought, better and overall lighter. Even with lots more effort and investment, there remains a significant difference between two brothers when one insists on wearing recreated ancient gear.
Well, whadaya know!
But I bet you didn't know that you can find modern pro hiking shoes that are even heavier than the old ones they recreated!
absolutely terrible writing.
I've seen worse. I found the premise interesting at least.
Fun experiment, but it doesn’t really prove anything. On a good day, elite runners like Tyler Andrews can run up Mera and more difficult peaks with minimal gear. Next time, try testing them on a cold, windy, and wet ridgeline traverse.
”[The twins] realized they possessed the ultimate scientific tool: a perfect control subject and a perfect variable. Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas. Any difference in performance could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.”
It’s a great idea and these men are undoubtedly incredible athletes, but I’m not sure “ultimate” and “perfect” are the right words here.
A killjoy would bring up double-blinding or n>1 and I don’t want to sap the fun out of this being about an interesting people-centric piece.
There’s no mention though of a more basic trick: having them alternate clothes every expedition or season! Pfizer it ain’t, but it would still take it up a notch on the scale of interesting/fun to “ultimate/perfect”.