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Reply to "Wow. It's HOT!"

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So that was a psychrometer I was messing around with in fourth grade science class.

We called it a ‘wet and dry bulb hygrometer’, which was impressive-sounding enough for me at the time, but Mr. Google says the two are pretty much the same thing, only ‘psychrometer’ has fewer syllables.

We made the thing out of two dime-store thermometers (we had ‘dime-stores’ back then) taped to a milk carton that we filled with water. There was a shoelace from inside the carton that we wrapped around the bulb of one of the thermometers. The ‘wet-bulb’ thermometer was supposed to read less than the dry-bulb thermometer (due to all that stuff that Stan explained) and there was a chart from a book that let you look up the relative humidity based on what the two thermometers read.

That was probably the first time I ever thought about relative humidity (in the fourth grade you don’t think a lot about things you can’t see). But that probably planted the seed in my head that told me I would eventually have to move to California.

For the record, the current humidity in Santa Barbara (OK, relative humidity) is 50 per cent. And here's what the next week is looking like:



SantaBarbaraWX



I'm guessing that no one in Santa Barbara has any idea what a dew point is.

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