"The mosquitoes are eating us up, my pillow is soaked with sweat, and Dah, last night she was up and down all night, this morning she is in a terrible mood. I see by your blog that it's just going to get worse for the next month, I can't stand it, I'm taking her to Singapore for a couple of days." Jack called me and suggested I might like to stay at his place for a bit, maybe come up with some practical solutions. "Practical" is the word he used, meaning that my research on tropical comfort was somehow lacking in that regard.
"I'm thinking of changing the blog to "Tropical Comfort Hacks", what do you think?"
"I don't care what you call your blog, Ron, just try to help me out on this, would you please?"
My girlfriend had started to talk about a "salary" which was a new and unwelcome idea to me, so maybe it might be a good idea to take a little vacation from our relationship.
Jack and Dah's place wasn't bad, in an old fashioned sort of way. Dah fixed up the guest bedroom pretty nice and Jack slipped me 5000 baht on his way out. I was a little tired. I walked around the corner to a little shop and bought two bottles of Singh, a plastic bag of what looked like little sugar-coated donuts, and two plastic bags of ice, then I went back to the house and sat in the room and smoked a nice cigar that I had found on Sukhumvit, 400 baht for a box of ten, and settled in for some pleasant reading. It was still a little warm inside the room at 8 o'clock, 31 degrees and the ceiling about 33. Outside the world was 28 and the sky about 11. I couldn't figure why the roof wasn't losing more heat to the sky but I was too lazy to climb up on something to check the roof temperature. I fell asleep reading about the origins of the Stefan Boltzmann radiation constant, it was another one of those scientific ties, like Newton and that german guy with the calculus.
------------------------------------------
The next morning I woke up early and made some coffee in this cool little french coffee machine that they had and then offloaded data from the two Hobos that I had given Jack, one to put in the bedroom and the other out on the deck. During the night it had been on the warm side under the mosquito net and I was sweating even with no clothes. But it cooled down and by the next morning it seemed just about right, you didn't wish you had aircon at all.
First thing I wanted was to compare the temp at the house with the Wundergound temps at Don Muang and Asoke. After and hour or so I had the little comparative graph you see here. This confirmed my sense that you couldn't say what the "real" temperature was at Bangkok, it wasn't something you could find like that gold meter bar with two little scratches on it that the french said they had in a museum in Paris. They said that it was the "real" meter. I remembered reading that in a book in a course called "scientific french", that's how old I was getting to be these days to remember ancient history like that.
So temperature in Thailand is a little like morality nowadays. It depends on your local situation. After all, the sun can't heat the air, you can't do anything to air with radiation (almost true, anyway) you had to heat it by convective transfer from local things. Don Muang was pretty hot maybe because of all those asphalt taxiways soaking up the sun. Jack's deck was better, it was partly shaded by a nice big mango tree, though the other part was shaded by the roof overhang, which most likely a warm underside. Asoke I couldn't figure, maybe it was on the cool side of a building. Who knows, it might give readings that were tow high in one season, two low in another. My bedroom wasn't too bad, it lagged the deck by a couple of hours, but at night as I had discovered it stayed two or three degrees warmer than most earthly things in the neighborhood outside. So here was a good problem: could I figure a way to drop the bedroom temp a little. so it was more like the outside? Or maybe was I myself helping to raise the bedroom temp, the observer interfering with the observed?
No comments:
Post a Comment