Murphy’s law of heat domes

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Murphy’s famous law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Another law, less known to the general public but important in physics, Coulomb’s law, states that the force between electrically charged particles relates to the particles’ charges, and has an inverse-square relation to the distance between the particles. 

Before you close this page, it should be said that this was the last bit of physics in this article.

Details of Coulomb’s law can be left to classrooms and research labs for the time being. But the notion of electric power is important here. The heat dome that descended on New York in late July brought power outages in its wake – a cause-and-effect relationship that can be described by another law, in the spirit of Murphy’s and Coulomb’s ones. 

It can be called the Riverdale law of temperature, and it goes as follows: The likelihood of the air conditioner failing in your home relates to the level of heat outside, while the dependability of your AC unit has an inverse relationship to your desire to have a functioning unit. 

In other words, air conditioners fail when people need them the most. 

Temperatures reached upward of 95 degrees last week, and air conditioners predictably kicked the proverbial bucket in scores of Riverdalian homes. 

The city cannot do much about this seasonal phenomenon of AC failures, it seems. Allan Drury, a Con-Ed spokesperson, said the city’s power grid is old – so when it gets hot outside and New Yorkers crank up their air conditioners, the city’s electric equipment starts to fail. 

Another unpleasant side effect that a heat wave usually brings is a spike in crime. But New York’s criminals appear to be less predictable that its power grid: The crime rate citywide actually went down when New York baked under the heat dome. Overall crime rates dipped 4.4 percent on July 18-24 – the week when the heat dome arrived and hovered over the city during the weekend – compared to the same period last year, according to NYPD data. 

The only type of crime showed substantial increase both in the city as a whole and in the 50th precinct was car theft. Perhaps it had something to do with cars being equipped with air conditioners independent of the city’s grid. 

Citywide, the car theft rate was up 23 percent to 164 cases on July 18-24, compared to 133 in the same period last year. In the 50th precinct, the number of car thefts doubled – although the total incident count stood at only two cases on July 18-24, up from a single case during the same period in 2015. 

Temperatures finally dropped to lows in the low 70s this week. But rainstorms came along and flooded sections of the subway. This was where another part the Riverdale law of temperatures came into play. It states that when temperatures get cool enough to enjoy traveling around the city, something will go wrong with the transportation system. 

In case any of this seems overly pessimistic, it might help to formulate yet another theoretical law. This one can be called the law of conservation of trouble, and it states that when something goes wrong, something else is certain to improve. 

Or so, at least, it should be in theory. 

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