No sweat!

For many decades I've heard others (or myself) reply to a statement that infers one has been caused to worry or to expend effort, "No sweat!" From Idioms Online comes, "Saying no sweat is a slang expression that is similar to no problem. It means, figuratively, “helping you was not hard work for me and it did not cause me to sweat.” This idiom is very informal." However, to some people, no sweat, has another meaning - that we are unable to sweat.

Although I have no genetic inability to sweat caused by absence of sweat glands, I am one of many who are unable to produce enough sweat to provide sufficient cooling under high heat conditions - first noticed when I passed out from heat at age 12 following a hurried bicycle ride of only 1/2-mile to purchase some supplies for my mother who was preparing a picnic lunch for our family. I came to, hearing people praying over my prone body. This insufficiency of my cooling system caused me to pay attention to an NPR interview with the author of a new book: Sarah Everts, author of "The Joy of Sweat". During that interview, Ms Everts said, "...instead of thinking of sweat as gross, think of it as an "evolutionary marvel." She even calls it a human superpower and a highly efficient one at that. "We effectively dispatch water to our skin and, as it evaporates, it whisks heat away from our bodies." I purchased the book from Barnes & Noble as Hunky Husband and I left his last appointment with his audiologist.

As is evident from the image in the above photo, the book is slim - a mere 285 pages. However, I abruptly and unexpectedly came to the end of it this afternoon, discovering that 44 of those pages are notes and 17 comprise entries of the Index. That caught me (pleasantly) unawares. I include some of the more interesting or intriguing statements from the book, below.

• Page 27: "Certainly sweat glands can be trained to be more active--that's acclimation--but everybody has a different baseline."
• Page 49: "...clinical armpit sniffing is not performed willy-nilly: She [professional sniffer] follows a scientific protocol developed for professional armpit sniffers worldwide that is described in the Standard Guide for Sensory Evaluation of Axillary Deodorancy."
• Page 53: "The strongest evidence that there are no two armpit odors exactly alike, Preti [the late George Preti, research chemist] said, comes courtesy of canines. Dogs can often identify individuals with just one sniff of something they've worn. (The exception is identical twins living together and eating the same diet.)"
• Page 59: "Some researchers are convinced there's a way to diagnose diseases such as ovarian cancer because dogs can pick out patients from an otherwise healthy lineup." [My understanding is that some canines are trained/in training to detect COVID-19.]
• Page 62: "What's fascinating about anxiety odor is that it can sometimes beget fear even when we're not conscious of it."
• Page 70: "...who cares if you both share a love of, say, taxidermy or Murakami novels? You'll eventually smell the body odor of your lover, and it's probably going to be a make-or-break moment. Smell dating skips to the chase (or, more accurately, it entirely skips the chase) and uses body odor as the first elimination round for mate selection--or date selection, at any rate." [Sometime in a recent post or comment thereto, I mentioned that Hunky Husband is the opposite of me. He has always perspired freely. Fortunately, the fragrance of his sweaty body is not offensive or unpleasant. After reading this book, I can remember our first "date". Probably his pleasant body odor had a lot to do with my saying, "yes", to a second...and third....]
• Page 74: "From birth, we rely on our sense of smell to learn the body odor of individuals we love or need the most. A newborn baby, though helpless and immobile, will skootch preferentially toward its own birth-mother's odor...."

"Newborn noggins inspire many to inhale deeply. 'Family-friendly crack cocaine,' is how a friend of mine once described the smell of a baby's head."

"Sniffing the odor of our loved ones--whether consciously or unconsciously--continues throughout our lives. Siblings and married couples are able to correctly identify the smell of people with whom they cohabitate. Even adult siblings, who haven't seen (or smelled) each other for more than 2 years can still correctly recognize their brother or sister's unique odor print, the signature mixture of chemicals floating off their bodies."

• Page 209: "For most individuals, body-wide eccrine [active in thermoregulation] develop in utero between week 20 and week 30."

From the Mayo Clinic website article on Sweat glands comes the graphic, below.

Comments

[Liz Hinds]

Wow! That is fascinating! I might see if I can get hold of copy. I like the 'clinical armpit sniffing is not performed willy-nilly'!

[Ole Phat Stu]

Totally off topic<.
What was wrong with the Kansas water slide that decapitated a kid riding it?
Design error, or did something breaK?

[Cop Car]

Liz: Ah, yes, what an esoteric world in which sniffers operate.

Stu: IMHO It was an all-around fiasco. The death of the 10-year-old boy was in 2016 and, from what I can determine, resulted from design flaws, the lack of reasonable governmental regulations and oversight, and just plain carelessness on the part of the park operators. From a law firm posting I lift the quote, below.

"A subsequent in-depth investigation into the park published in Texas Monthly revealed several terrifying insights into the dearth of regulation over water parks around the United States: the ride’s designer had no qualifications to design water slides, he did not have a college degree and had never studied physics or engineering. Water parks are subject to no federal regulation, and oversight is left up to state governments, which vary widely."

There is a CNN article on charges filed here.

[Stu]

Oh, that old huh? It was in our German press today, so I assumed it was breaking (sic!) news. Sorry.

[Cop Car]

Stu--Don't bet too much on it, but I think that you and I exchanged emails about the Schlitterbahn at the time (2016). As I recall, at a later date, the slide was dismantled. If there has been something more recent, I haven't heard about it.

Strange. It must be the time for recycling old news. Last evening, a USA TV newscaster said that they were going to cover something interesting "after the break" - but I didn't stick around for the coverage because it had happened a year ago to the best of my remembrance. Of course, I can't pull out of memory what the subject was on that item.

[Joared]

Interesting article on perspiring. Reminds me of a saying from my mother's horse and buggy days when I had the impression sweating was considered to be somewhat of a gross act and term, "Horses sweat, men perspire and women glow."

[Cop Car]

Joared--The book's author did make mention of terminology applications. Me? I glow - bright red - from the capillaries moving to the skin surface in a vain attempt to cool me down since my sweat doesn't do the job.

My semi-emergency cool-down is to hold my whole head under a water faucet that is spouting cold water. The people in the Experimental Flight Test hangar thought I had lost my mind one day when I used their 360-degree handwashing station for cooling down my head; but, I had just flown a service test flight culminating in my standing atop a ladder breathing fumes as I re-fueled the airplane - in 104-degree Fahrenheit temperature, in the sun. Gah!

[Cop Car]

Stu--My brain is a bit slow, but it just came up with the subject of the "after the break" item that I mentioned a couple of days ago: it was a piece about a little kid who kept riding his tiny bicycle up onto a man's driveway - and the man's response to it. See the video here.