Beware the Fans!

So, I arrive at work at 7:30 this morning to sit in on an 8:00 meeting, only to find that the meeting has been canceled. For a graduate student, this is not a good way to start the day.

So, I could either get started on going nowhere (i.e., do work), or I could browse the internet.

As a result, I've spent the morning learning about Fan Death, death as a result of leaving an electric fan running all night while you sleep in an enclosed room. This phenomenon is very peculiar. For one thing, it happens only to Koreans. Despite numerous attempts at reproducing it by Japanese, Americans, Europeans, and yours truly, it appears that only Koreans can commit suicide by closing the window and turning on a fan.

In theory, fan death seems to work in one of two ways:
1) The electric fan lowers the temperature in the room enough that, while the victim is sleeping, their core temperature drops dramatically and they die of hypothermia.
2) The electric fan reduces the amount of oxygen in the air, or causes asphyxiation by exposing you to moving air.

I will give people who know science a minute to pick themselves off the floor.

Method one involves violating the laws of thermodynamics, which so far have been fairly reliable. And the effects would be quite noticeable. Being in cold air is unlikely to give you hypothermia. In fact, passing out drunk in a snowbank for a night is unlikely to give you a lethal case of hypothermia. Air, being a worse conductor of heat than snow, is very unlikely to kill you.

Method two involves either atomic processes - creating loose Oxygen radicals in the air, or extreme pressures. The first is unlikely, as the side effect would be a massive explosion whenever someone lit a cigarette near a fan. The second is also unlikely - people can breath just fine in wind speeds greater than those created by a fan, and when skydiving. It's also been rigorously tested, mostly by kids who enjoy speaking into fans to hear their voice vibrate.

So that leaves the possibility that Korean physiology is so different from the rest of the world that, at night, they become cold-blooded, meaning that it is easy to suck the heat out of them with convection currents. Another possibility is that the Korean media uses the term "fan death" whenever they don't want to discuss the actual causes of death, as in the case of a potentially embarrassing suicide, but that's just crazy talk. The level to which this belief is widespread has not yet been independently ascertained, but rumors on the internet claim that it is very common among Koreans (and virtually unknown elsewhere).

All in all, I wonder what it's like to live in a country that believes things like that. It must be as weird as living in a country where people sometimes rename the 13th floor to avoid bad luck.

Goddammit.

Gorilla Warfare

National Geographic reports that Mai Mai guerrillas have launched several attacks on ranger stations in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo this week, killing one World Wildlife Fund worker and injuring several others.

To make a bad thing worse, they have threatened that any attempt by the rangers, or other government forces, to retaliate in this matter will result in them slaughtering the park's population of endangered mountain gorillas. The Mai Mai are apparently already famous for killing a great number of Virunga's hippo population both to make money and gain Western attention. Presumably, they feel that this is a logical extension of that policy.


There's low, there's despicable, and then there's this. I'm really hoping that the Congolese military has gotten good enough in the past few years to track these guys down.