Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

melannen is making a cloak, and asked how many secret pockets it should have. My thoughts, some of which I posted as a comment:

Whichever number of secret pockets you pick, you shouldn't tell the world the answer.

The thing about secret pockets is that it's tricky to use them for everyday items, because -- for example -- my winter coat has an inside zipper pocket that contains a small amount of emergency cash, a pen, and a pair of earplugs. The earplugs are there because I want to be sure they don't fall out/get lost, and the cash is there in case of random pickpockets.

The earliest version of this, the inside pocket contained a subway token and a quarter for a pay phone. None of the subway systems I now ride still uses tokens, and pay phones are a rarity, so these days it's a $5 bill. I have other coats with similar pockets; they each have a $5 bill and a pen. That's a total of fifteen or twenty dollars; I've occasionally gone into the coat closet to get money to pay for a food delivery and refilled the pockets later.)

Any time I use the earplugs, the most casual bystander could become aware that I'm using an inside pocket; it's not secret, but feels safer than the outside pockets. (This coat has four outside pockets, two with zippers, and two inside pockets, the other large enough to hold my kindle; the manufacturer labeled it as the place for my hypothetical ski goggles.)

/[not in that comment, as even less relevant:] Right now the various front pockets contain gloves, a small tube of NSAIDs, a lightweight silk scarf, and at the instant are getting my house keys when I go out. The large inside pocket is being used for a hat -- a cheap felt "pussy hat" that I am still wearing, two years after the Women's March, because it's the snuggest warm hat I own -- and a reusable shopping bag, both of which fold flat. If the temperature gets significantly below freezing, or I'm traveling without a backpack, my kindle will go there: Jo, who lives in Montreal, says that model is okay to about -10 C; it might get colder than that in the outside backpack pocket, but if it's not safe in the inside pocket of a coat I'm wearing, I have much larger problems.

I'm shopping for a new parka, which at the moment involves looking at catalogs. The L.L. Bean catalog indicates what temperatures they think their coats are good down to (for light and moderate activity), and I was sitting looking at the catalog, doing math in my head, because the numbers are listed in Fahrenheit, and I think about Montreal weather in Centigrade. (I'll be wearing it here too, but the conditions are less extreme here.)

Since the coat I was looking at had -40 as the moderate activity rating, the easy thing to do was to work from there: how many degrees F is it from -40 to the light activity numbers, divide by 9, multiply by 5. Add that to -40. And no need to deal with 32s or slide around the Fahrenheit zero. (Yes, I have assorted machines that would do the job, as fast, but first I'd have had to grab one and open the appropriate program.) Conclusion: the coat in question will do, if I don't find another I like better.