So last night I was in bed, trying to turn my brain off to go to sleep. My brain rarely cooperates in such things. It tends to wander off to find other things to think about. Like crickets.
I can’t blame the blame. The crickets were making noise and distracting it. That’s one of the things crickets know. How to make noise. Just one cricket in the house can sound like a sports stadium filled with screaming fans. At least the decibel level seems about the same at 3:00 AM when the rest or the world is quiet.
The other thing crickets are said to know is the temperature. So hearing a cricket chirp, I suddenly felt the need to figure out the temperature according to the crickets. This all comes from an 1897 scientific paper published by Amos Dolbear, who was the one to notice crickets knew stuff.
There are a few problems trying to get crickets to tell you the temperature. First, you have to count the chirps. Doesn’t sound too tough. But what if there is more than one cricket around? How can you tell the sound of one cricket from another? Near as I can figure, you have to base most of it on direction, although a couple a competing crickets in the same area could really drive the temperature up. So cricket identification is important.
Next, the formula. There is an actual formula for crickets and temperature. For some reason, crickets seem more attuned to the Fahrenheit scale, since the formula is more direct. Just count the number of chirps in fourteen seconds and add forty. There’s the temperature.
Celsius is a bit more complicated, but maybe Dolbear was working with American crickets and that’s all they knew. But for Celsius, you count the number of chirps in twenty-five seconds, divide by three, add four and there’s your temperature.
There are a few issues here, especially if you are really trying to get to sleep and don’t care that much what the exact temperature is.
You need something to use as a timer. And we’re talking seconds, not minutes or hours. Counting off seconds in your head is not easy, especially if you are trying to count cricket chirps and keep track of which cricket is doing the chirping. If you don’t have a watch with a second hand close by, probably the timer most of us would have access to would be on our cell phone. If you pull out your cell phone, you don’t really need the timer because you could just check the weather app and find the temperature in less than fourteen seconds.
Also, with the formula for Celsius, you might need a calculator. Again, cell phone. The calculator is right there, pretty darn close to that weather app.
So I finally figured out crickets are redundant. They may have come in handy in 1897, but these days we have other sources for our temperature.
After I worked my way through all this, I finally gave up on crickets and went to sleep. The exact temperature didn’t matter. It was warm. So I turned on the fan in the window to cool me down and drowned out the crickets. Maybe they only know one thing. How to make noise and keep you awake.
