Sleeping With the Fan on Funny
Ari Shapiro/NPR
It's a hot and humid 24-hour interval, similar there's a thick blanket of air sitting on top of Seoul, when I visit the city's bustling Namdaemun market. The identify has everything from alive eels to military surplus gear, and I become to a corner with rows and rows of electric fans.
Kim Yong Ho has run an electronics shop here for 4 decades. His grandchildren are running effectually. And he says he would be very careful about letting them autumn comatose in a room with an electric fan sitting adjacent to them on a desk or the floor.
"I would plow the timer on and make sure the winds were blowing very gently," he says. "I'd also make sure the fan head is rotating around the room."
Every culture has its old wives' tales that are unsupported past science. American parents tell their children not to swim after eating, even though there's no existent prove this is unsafe. In Republic of korea, many older people fearfulness that if y'all sleep with an electric fan in the room, you may never wake up.
Ah Yun Choi, a 25-year-erstwhile shopper, is familiar with this myth.
"I heard that people sometimes die because of the wind, because the temperature goes too low," she says. "Just I call back that's quite nonsense."
Suddenly her mother Kim Jong Suk, 53, speaks up. You can survive with a fan on all night, she says to her young girl. But, she adds, for senior citizens it'due south dangerous.
The South Korean news media and scientists keep trying to debunk this notion, just it won't go away.
A Tv set ad came out just this summer for a fan called Baby Current of air, specifically designed to be safe for children.
"Winds that care most the baby's sleep," the ad says. "Equally gently equally fluttering leaves, free from worries about falling temperature. Automatic off function after 2 hours, even later on mom falls asleep."
Lost In Translation
Do a bit of inquiry on fan death, and you'll detect an American climatologist who — at least according to the Net — says it's a real thing.
That human being is Larry Kalkstein of the University of Miami, and he says if you're dehydrated, sitting in forepart of a fan in a hot room tin can make you more dehydrated. That tin can cause medical problems.
But, he's quick to add, "fans do not chop up oxygen molecules in the centre of the night, they can't lead to hypothermia, they can't suck oxygen out of a room. None of those things can happen."
This lost-in-translation moment came a few years ago when Korean journalists interviewed him in Seoul.
"One of the women asked me if I believed in fan death, which I'd not heard of, then I said, 'Yes. Fans tin create a trouble.'" he recalls.
"But they thought I meant that I believed in traditional fan decease, when I did not, so that fabricated a bit of a stir, and that's probably why yous're calling me right now, because my proper noun became associated with fan expiry," he adds.
So for the record, Kalkstein does not believe in fan decease.
An Actual Experiment
In 2008, Chun Rim, a professor at the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, decided to really test the hypothesis.
He says information technology was hard to find anyone to have part in this and then-called unsafe experiment. So he used his 11-year-former girl.
"Every five minutes I checked her body temperature, blood pressure, and also the temperature of her mitt," he says.
She survived the night. Her vitals barely changed. And at present, the whole family sleeps with fans blowing on them.
"Not necessarily a very strong fan, but we no longer recall that this is a real danger," he notes.
That written report got some attention when it came out. Simply 7 years later, it doesn't seem to accept done much to make this persistent conventionalities accident away.
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Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/08/09/430341089/south-koreas-quirky-notions-about-electric-fans
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