MAKE comes through for us Geekdads again, with a piece on how to figure the temperature by counting cricket chirps. This one is pretty much guaranteed to make your geeklet’s eyes pop at least a little.
By counting the chirps, especially of one species, the Snowy Tree
Cricket (Oecanthus fultoni), you can get a fairly accurate temperature.
Here’s how:
- Find yourself a cricket (a chirping one will be a male. A Snowy
Tree Cricket (seen here) is the most accurate, but in a pinch, any cricket will do)
- Count the chirps in a 14-second interval
- Add "38" to the total
- That’s the current temperature, in Fahrenheit
The discoverer of this phenomenon, known as Dolbear’s Law, was American physicist and inventor Amos Dolbear, in 1897.
