Why do Bedouins wear black robes in hot deserts? (1980) | Hacker News Reader

Why do Bedouins wear black robes in hot deserts? (1980)

nature.com

11 pointsthunderbong8 comments

In my limited experience in Arabia, the women wear black, optimized for losing heat inside, and men wear white, optimized for reflecting direct light outside - at least that was my instinctive explanation.

  >black, optimized for losing heat inside

Black colored clothing does not lose heat faster inside.

You're probably thinking this because of "black body radiation"[0], but room-temperature objects glow in the far IR, not in visible light. So what actually matters for radiant heat loss is to be 'black' in the far IR part of the spectrum, which is true for most non-metals.

Additionally, I doubt that radiative heat loss is a major cooling mode in clothing, vs convection and evaporation. I expect wearing black was more about protection from UV skin damage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body_radiation

Leading off a scientific paper with a mythological quote doesn't instill confidence. "Survival in hot deserts has always posed a problem for man; Moses had to solve it in order to lead the children of Israel through the wilderness of the Sinai"

"The majority of scholars see the biblical Moses as a legendary figure, while retaining the possibility that Moses or a Moses-like figure existed in the 13th century BCE" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses

Some relevant context here is that this paper was published in 1980 by the Department of Zoology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. I would expect such references to be pretty common in such works.

Religious bs comming from an university make it worse. Can't you see it?

Yeah, I don’t think I follow, just because the university is in Tel Aviv means they have to conflict mythology with science? Seems very condescending.

No worries. Just context to help with why they did it. Similar situation would be that we would expect ancient Roman writings to refer to their gods as matter of fact.

I stopped reading at "Moses had to solve it in order to lead the children of Israel through the wilderness of the Sinai". I was here for reading scientific litterature, not religious mumbo jumbo.

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