This whole article is kind of a straw man anyway.

Warmth of clothing isn't actually what people care about. What people care about, and what the article does not mention, is warmth per unit weight.

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altairprime 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I disagree. People also may care about the cognitive load of thermal management. As the article notes:

> the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.

In modern terms, this means that stopping to take a photo — whether Ansel or selfie — would carry a material risk of harm in the classic gear that is addressed by modern gear. The example of a selfie is perhaps too easily dismissed unconsidered, but the cognitive load is real for casual hikers, and is a benefit to modern gear that deserves the mention it gets. If I had to choose between a cap that has perfect heat management and a cap that weighs 10g less but requires me to constantly take it off and put it on every five minutes to allow evaporation, I would choose the heavier and lower annoyance cap. Each person’s preferences and skills apply; if one seeks to minmax weight/thermal then that’s a negligible price to pay to improve — but only some truly do strive for the limit of lowest mass without regards to complexity.

There was an enviro-scifi book from the eighties that noted that a few people will pursue ‘one piece of apparel serves all functions’ skinsuit to the exclusion of all other concerns (such as natural fabrics or apparel design), at which point we would plausibly expect to see at one extreme the folks who make a discount-ultralight vented bodysuit out of FedEx envelopes. I am taking for granted that someone has tried this, because of course someone has tried this! And that starts to verge on why, in a different enviro-scifi book of that same relative era, the stillsuit existed: the lightest way to have convenient purified water in an absurd climates. Even the stillsuit as we see it described prioritizes convenience, the sip tube, over a more efficient system that doesn’t expend calories on pumping water up. That’s purely because human beings have a cognitive annoyance limit; and we do variably prioritize convenience when assessing the weight-complexity tradeoff.

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throwawaytea 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I go mushroom picking in the Oregon forest every year. The only real dangerous moment I ever had was getting soaking wet, and when the storm cleared, I stopped like a fool to eat lunch in a sunny for breezing opening. I finished lunch, and realized I was shockingly cold. Like, dangerously cold. I did jumping jacks as long as I could and then started walking uphill even though that wasn't where I wanted to go really. Weird moment.

	▲	throwaway173738 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I didn’t wear my rain gear hiking uphill in a quarter inch per 4 hours downpour and started feeling sleepy by degrees until I caught myself looking for a place to lie down for a nap. At that point I realized I’d better turn around posthaste.

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bryanrasmussen 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It must just be that the way the stillsuit functions is because of the limits of Herbert as a engineer and designer had been reached and he did not think or realize that there was a more efficient system than the sip tube possible.

	▲	altairprime 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dunno. I'm content analyzing the analogy as if authorial limitations did not apply; it helps fend off the entropic forces of IDIC given the necessity of using flawed examples to communicate at all.

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stevejb 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Their bar graph showed that in almost every category except for accessories, the weights were pretty much identical.

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margalabargala 9 hours ago | parent [-]

"Pretty much identical"

Add up the numbers in the bar graph and you'll see that the old gear sums to two kilograms heavier than the modern gear.

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foxglacier 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Add body weight and the old gear sums to about three percent heavier than the modern gear. I'd say total weight matters more than gear weight alone, doesn't it?

	▲	xarope 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've done a lot of long hikes (200+km in the sahara, 6000+m mountains in kazakstan), and 2kg extra means a lot, like the difference between carrying extra fuel/food versus just clothing. Anyway, you can try it yourself, wear a 2kg wax cotton jacket versus a 500gm technical jacket and see how you feel after a day's hiking.
	▲	gregoryl 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Until you take your gear off, and it's in your pack. I'd much rather lose a kg of pack weight vs. a kg of body weight.

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7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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next_xibalba 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn’t there a chart showing weight by body part midway through the article?

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margalabargala 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, it shows the old gear is about two kilograms heavier than the new gear, which is huge.

Considering that someone carrying 2 extra kilos will also be generating more body heat etc, the focus on heat over the rest of the article is in question.

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altairprime 9 hours ago | parent [-]

To clarify slightly: it shows the old gear is significantly heavier in three areas: head, hands, and ‘accessories’. I think that suggests where investment in technical fabric has been most successful at improving the burden of mass in surviving extreme cold.

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Fricken 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Wool, down, silk and leather are still commonly used in technical apparel and compete on weight.

2 big new innovations that matter are Gore-tex and Nylon fabrics that are very durable and wind resistance for their weight.

	▲	margalabargala 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tech fabrics were a prerequisite to the widespread use of down in adventure clothing. Earlier fabrics were either too heavy, like leather, and would collapse the down and negate its insulating properties, or would get wet like cotton/linen and saturate the down.