Dog Days

 

 

The Dog Days received their name from the ancient Romans, who noticed that the dog star Sirius rises and sets with the sun during the summer months. Interestingly, the word Sirius comes from the Greek Seirios, which means burning, or hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk. The Romans believed it was the combination of Sirius and the sun that made it so hot and humid. Now, of course, we know that’s silly—it’s the heat index. Just kidding. Actually the heat index is an arbitrary combination of the temperature and humidity that was concocted by meteorologists who needed a seasonal counterpart to the wind chill factor so we could feel more miserable than either indicator alone would allow. This proves that we really have progressed since ancient Roman times. Not only do we have the heat index, we now know that since Sirius is 8.6 light-years away—which is twice as long as the line to get into Space Mountain on a typical summer day—it has no effect on the heat build-up during the summer months. That, it turns out, is actually caused by a hot air mass that gets trapped over the country as a result of everyone talking about global warming.

 

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