Same heat every year?

Brother jack let it be know that Bangkok's horrible heat and humidity was the game, and that he expected solutions from me. "You're the guy from MIT," he said.

I had a couple of days before leaving and instead of buying gift chocolate figurines of Mickey Mouse or Parodi cigars as gifts for all the people I was going to meet I went for the UCLA library and loaded up on data. I found a huge collection of Bangkok weather data from some American military spy agency and almost missed my flight transferring all the files to a CD.

Our ultimate concern here is the weather within a room, or between your shirt and your skin, not the world at large. Although we are not particularly interested in grand questions such as global warming or pressure ridges in China -- I know nothing of these matters -- one of the first things that I asked myself was whether the weather, or more specifically the heat, which is my enemy here, is always the same in Bangkok, year by miserable year.

This extract from my massive data file (which you can have, for free, if you have some good purpose)gives a quick answer to this question. It shows the daily mid afternoon temperature, which is almost always the hottest temperature of the day, for fifteen years, starting in 1982.

Given that you are going to start to sweat at 30 degrees even at rest, you can see that a brisk walk at three pm is not going to be enjoyable.

Especially if it happens to be 1983.

But will jogging be more pleasant at six in the morning?