While we're on the topic of cold weather...

I heard an interesting and timely piece on the radio this morning: an interview with a guy named Scott Carney, whose new book What Doesn't Kill Us looks at the human body's ability to withstand extreme conditions, including cold temperatures.  The upshot is that even though in modern times we have the ability to live almost exclusively in a climate-controlled environment, our bodies still have the tools inherited from our ancestors for whom seasonal fluctuations were a part of life.

The thing Carney said that I thought was the most interesting was

...you can activate things like vasoconstriction, which are all of these muscles in your veins through your body which contract when they interact with cold. But you have no conscious way to make those muscles contract. You have to get cold to do that. And if you never get cold, those muscles get weak. And so by reintroducing and intentionally altering your environment, you can really do cool things.

You can listen to the piece and/or read the transcript here.

This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with a canoe racer from Parry Sound, Ontario.  The guy operated a fishing boat up there, and had some Native Americans on his crew, and he said that in the middle of winter when the Fahrenheit temperature was forty degrees below zero, those guys would hang out on deck wearing nothing but jeans and tee shirts.  They were simply doing something their ancestors had done for thousands of years.