I don’t think John Lennon slept with him…
Nice to know I’m not the only one to use a fan for that purpose. I thought I had issues.
The appeal to authority because he’s an “attorney” is meaningless. I’m unaware that attorneys had special insight into heat transfer and human physiological response to ambient conditions.
He “cites” a couple of general CYA admonitions in a document on an EPA server (and I’ve personally helped the EPA remove erroneous information from their web servers in the past) and some professor. Most of the rest of his “cites” are links to Wikipedia definitions to make the article look more credible (such as his “cite” of “wetsuit”; I’ve seen this trick so many times before, including here on the SDMB, and it’s old). Then he takes that little bit of semi-supporting evidence to conclude it’s possible. Well hellfire, a lot of things are “possible.”
It’s “possible” he will.
Just to clarify, are you talking about the trick of adding a footnote or reference or whatever, and it turns out to be a link to what is, essentially, just the definition of a word? Thus bolstering the citation list without really citing anything of substance?
ETA: I’m asking because I haven’t read the linked article arguing that Fan Death is real, so I’m guessing about what you mean when you say his “cite” of “wetsuit”…
I just slept in a room last night with the window closed and both doors shut and the fan running. I didn’t even think of this.
Now all you need to do is tug on Superman’s cape, spit into the wind, pull the mask off that ol’ Lone Ranger and mess around with Jim and I’ll be impressed! 
Don’t leave us hanging in suspense-Did you live??
Well, yeah, I feel fine so fa-
Inspector Duggan: “Be on the lookout for a crazed stalker, Lieutenant.”
Lt. Perkins: “Why, Inspector?”
Inspector Duggan: “It’s written right there on that note she made before she died-‘Killed by my #1 fan.’”
rises from the dead
sees horrible joke
dies again
Keep it up --you’re in good shape for Halloween.
Moderators-could you please close this zombie thread?
All right, girding up my loins.
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In retrospect, I should have titled this thread with the word COULD instead of DOES.
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For all the people who haven’t died yet, it generally happens only once. (Possible exception: JC.) As for the zombies, we will have to wait until Monday night to ask. Get out the clipboards.
It wasn’t an appeal to special attorney qualifications so much as the answer to this question posed by Musicat: “Why do you feel that one Korean article (a blog, no less), in a country where that myth is rampant, trumps everything Cecil says? Do you have any new evidence?”
I should have been clearer in my response to Musicat. A) I don’t feel that one article trumps everything Cecil says. Quite the contrary, I was simply trying to open up a discussion on an argument Cecil didn’t address. B) Yes it’s a blog, so I mentioned the attorney thing mostly to point out that this wasn’t quite like linking to a random wacko, not that attorneys can’t be wackos. C) That the article is Korean (which it is not, as I pointed out) should not be relevant unless the same disclaimer can be applied to all of Cecil’s articles on American myths. Since Korea is the only country with this belief, it’s the country producing the most writing on it. D) No, I have no new evidence. I did not realize that we were to come prepared to the commenting board with evidence. What I had hoped was that by mentioning the convection oven in my original post, I hinted enough at the underlying premise of the argument, which is, in and of itself, an interesting topic of discussion with or without sources. Some interesting points have been brought up already.
All right, slap-down taken. But I wasn’t trying to establish, once and for all, that fan-death is real (my apologizes on the careless thread title). I was doing exactly what you are accusing me of: posing the “possible.” I understand that cutting-down is a necessary critical aspect to science and that we must be skeptical. However, does this thread not leave some room for building up too? Isn’t that what we’re here for?
- My question to the group here then is this: Is this not an interesting issue? Am I the only one curious about this? Would dehydration even be necessary? A cake, despite being wet, overcomes the cooling from evaporation and bakes up just fine. At what temperature would convection heating be enough to overcome the cooling capacity of even a well-hydrated person? And has no one else noticed what I noticed–that a good fan on a very hot day can sometimes make you feel worse?
We don’t know, do we? And that is a snippet of ignorance I was personally interested in…well, not fighting (I’m kind of busy) so much as maybe discussing. I hope I was right that a comment board on Cecil’s articles is the right place to bring that discussion.
No, I have nothing new, nothing rational at all to offer, I’m Just Asking Questions. There’s a term for the “Just Asking Questions” ploy. It’s called JAQing off." .
Which strongly suggests that it is a cultural myth unless you can produce some evidence that Koreans are more likely to suffer from this medical condition than anyone else.
It certainly helps, if you want a reasonable discussion to ensue. You want to discuss this? Provide more substance than pure fantasy and speculation, which Cecil covered already.
Not to mention that he was killed outdoors, which has to be at least as good as an open window.
I think we have a difference of opinion. The convection angle is new, I don’t see how it’s not rational (though I admit that it’s improbable), and it’s interesting to me (though not to you, I see). My question doesn’t strike me as dissimilar from many new questions Cecil has addressed over the years when revisiting old issues. Often he poo poos it, which is fine, but sometimes it had led down new paths and new conclusions. I am not going to reject fantasy and speculation if it has some grounds. Fantasy and speculation are the foundations of new inquiry.
We can delve into cultural oddities, and this is one notion that Korea seems to have that no other country (to our knowledge–which is limited–even Cecil hadn’t heard of it when he got the original question yet it was common knowledge in my Korean-American upbringing) has either. I don’t believe that this alone makes it invalid. Most discoveries are not made in many places at once, after all. So how did Koreans come around to this one? I’d theorize that it was probably just observed correlation gone wrong. During heat waves it’s not uncommon for susceptible people, particularly the elderly, to die of heatstroke. If a lot of these people are found dead in front of fans I can see how some people would start to wonder if there’s a link, especially if fans are a newfangled contraption.
I’m sure we can all come up with plenty of examples in many countries where bad science is passed along without support (drink 8 glasses of water a day to stay hydrated, don’t go out with wet hair or you’ll catch your death, etc.). The whole point of The Straight Dope is to refute these things. By far, my favorite articles have been on when something that seems counter to all common sense actually turns out to be true. It’s exciting. It’s with that excitement that I wrote my original post.
I find it new information to consider. It doesn’t explain how Koreans are so hung up on it when the rest of the world doesn’t experience it. It doesn’t explain how even knowledgable medical experts attribute it to other causes like hypothermia and suffocation, things that are pretty ridiculous.
But it does offer a possible explanation for why Koreans with fans in closed rooms might die - heat stroke. And thus miscorrelation and guessing at explanations ensues.
I’d still be interested to know how 86 deg can lead to death of someone who is not already really impaired.
Of course, what do I know, if the air gets to 86 deg I use an air conditioner.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think it required a perfect storm of circumstances. First, there’s the simple correlation I mentioned above: people die when it’s hot. Second, a closed-off, war-torn, Japan-occupied country with many superstitions became industrialized in an extremely short period of time, and it’s difficult to let go of superstitious patterns of thinking so fast (heck, many Americans haven’t manged it). Third, there’s the usual underlying fear of new technology. Fourth, South Korea went from being mostly rural (before the split, it is my understanding that North Korea was the industrial center) to becoming intensely urbanized, which enabled news to travel faster, further, and more reliably, thus being capable of feeding urban myths (they don’t call them rural myths, I note). Fifth, Korea, despite its rapid growth, is fairly stable, so the news can focus less on how many people were slaughtered/tortured that day and more on issues with North Korea, government corruption, and, uh, fan death. Sixth, Korea has four seasons, leading to more noticeable rises in heat-related death during the summer rather than having the heat-related deaths spread out throughout the year, leading to heightened seasonal focus rather than a general year-round focus.
Therefore, a country that’s not especially urbanized might not notice an “epidemic” of fan deaths simply because the population is more spread out and the the news couldn’t offer alarming statistics on heat-related death in a concentrated population center. A country that’s hot all the time wouldn’t notice a rise in heat-related deaths during certain times of the year and so they’d stand out less. Poorer countries might not have the news outlets or might be unstable. Stable warm countries might have been stable longer than Korea or didn’t transition quite as quickly, allowing them to get used to technology sooner. As for those countries that did follow Korea’s development pattern (not sure how many there are), they probably just didn’t happen to think of it. But I’m sure they have their own urban legends.
Sometimes a cycle of news is hard to break, like some of the urban legends in the U.S. that never seem to die. My parents believed the fan thing when I was young, and I remember a Korean children’s textbook with drawings of a child sleeping and a big X over the running fan. But as I got older and they got more Americanized they realized it was silly and we all slept in front of fans all the time. Those in the country just turn off the fan and don’t spend much time thinking about it when everybody else is doing the same thing.