Oh, dear, lemmiwinnks, your question comes at a bad time for me! My birthday is over two weeks away, and I am down to my last few GB of brain storage until then, so this will be very inexact. On the bright side, I shall omit discussion (thank you Mantis Goddess) of the first two laws of thermodynamics and stuff about specific heat and just give bread and butter examples.You are right, of course, about any form of radiation obeying the law in theory. The problem is in choosing an apropriate unit by which the sound is measured. Sound obeys the same law, but when you measure the sound in decibels at a given point from a source, you will get a drop of 6 decibels every time you double the distance. Also, there are practical ways, like introducing reverbration in a concert hall, to mitigate the law's effect.
Certainly (and yes, this a cop out!) you cannot apply it to temp in degrees Fahrenheit. If you heat an object with a source 1ft away (when will we have the sense to convert to the decimal system like everyone else?) to 100C and then double the distance between object and source,you should end up with a heat of 10C (for water, anyway). But in Fahrenheit, the same strategy would reduce 212F to 14,56F, which is below freezing!
Perhaps, if we are lucky, lemmiwinks, my answer will get some one so irritated that they will post the Straight Dope. If so, I shall study their answer next month.
