Sun Sun Sun

Heat. It rises off the ground and it curls around you and it tickles your skin and sometimes it makes you too sleepy to care about your dignity.

Yesterday was a bit like that. Thunderheads on the horizon and some rain, but mostly heat. It is good for a man to see the sun, but not head on, and not on the head.

Sometimes waiting for the heat is its own reward and punishment. Or crime and punishment. I think I'm suffering from heatstroke.

Workless

It's one of those hot and undecided days that the tropics throw up every now and then. Like warm puke, it is humid, stinky, offensive, neither hot nor cold, so lukewarm that it just could not be tolerated anywhere near the mouth.

It isn't that bad a day, and I have seen many like it. But it is one of those days that leaves you sticky and wondering why on earth you have bothered to try to do anything. It started out well, with rain, but did not continue.

I watered the plants again this morning. Everywhere was packed mud. The old steading has a roof corner about to fall apart. We'll have termites next, again, the damned things. They are truly like the lemures of legend, mindless and misbegotten cockroach-cousins of some nether Hell. Worse, they eat books.

I think I have done some work today, but it is ghastly, patchy, with holes in it. You can see right through it, and it makes you feel queasy, much as driving in a rust bucket might.

Today is one of those days. I'm sure it is better than it looks. I will go and take a look, and maybe report back.

Thermodynamics & Computing

The one thing I have always had problems with in my pursuit of computing power is... heat.

I used a Prime computer in the early 1980s; it needed air-conditioning to function well, and the whole room had less computing power than my old iBook. By 1986 I was using a Honeywell. That machine needed constant cooling, huge vents, and a dehumidifier. It was said that you couldn't get any work done over 290K, where the K stands for degrees Kelvin.

The problem seems to be that thinking is exothermic. Most of the energy consumed by my machines is emitted as waste heat. My friends tell me to use fans, coolants, all kinds of heat sinks. But that doesn't change the fundamental problem: heat has to be disposed of somewhere, and all those devices (which I've been using since 1980!) are just heat-transfer machines. They don't reduce the wastage, they just make you waste more energy elsewhere.

I suppose I could try to harness the heat flow to drive a turbine or something. But that would probably mean a loss of portability, and also a loss of convenience, elegance and simplicity. The coolness factor might go up a bit, but that doesn't reduce the heat.

Sigh. In such moments, I am drawn to the prophetic talent of William Shakespeare, who penned these lines, unforgettable since my schooldays:

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going,
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still...

Indeed, this is an apt description of life at the terminal end.

Frozen

One very good thing about the Tropics is that it is generally warm. The downside is that my asthma sometimes wanders by, like a scholarly ghost, not particularly potent but slightly irritating. The upside is that my old shoulder injury is kept at bay; when he is active, it is more like some thuggish yob who puts you in an armlock just for the fun of it, all the while yelling, "Hur hur hur, who's a pre(tt)y boy then!" in some awful Lunnon accent.

Down here, my shoulder isn't often frozen. That's wonderful. Except when it is.

Heatwave

Where I'm sitting right now, the average temperature is about 33°C and the droning of grasscutting equipment fills the distant air. It's a vengeful onslaught presaging a really hot summer. Or so you would think, if you hadn't just had a really cold rainy few days prior to this.

It's hard to think about higher average temperatures when you've been having the occasional bout of record-breaking lowest-ever local temperatures. It's hard to think about global warming when everyone seems to be wondering about nuclear fireballs. It's easy to think of American strategy in the Middle East as an aberration of foreign policy.

But the average temperature is going up, the desire for nuclear playthings likewise, and American strategy in the Middle East is something we've come to expect from certain kinds of administrations. Back in the latter part of the 20th century, America backed India with arms shipments (which India then used to absorb the smaller states of Goa, Hyderabad and so on) then switched to Pakistan as a counterbalance (and supplied them F-15s, believe it or not). Thus, the two big South Asian democracies (yes, India is indeed the largest democracy in the world) were put at each other's throats to the benefit of the US military-industrial complex.

Who do you think is to blame for the fact that both Pakistan and India have some kind of nuclear capability? Maybe China; it's convenient to blame them. But the first arms traders to make a killing in South Asia were the British, followed by the Russians and Americans. And the killing hasn't stopped.

I think the problem that Americans have in seeing all this is that Americans don't have a very detailed mental map of the world. The Onion's Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth (73rd Edition) is a masterpiece of lampoonery directed at mainly American stereotypical perceptions. Unfortunately, the fragments which substitute for a mental map are indeed a lot like the funny bits lovingly assembled by The Onion's team.

And so outside my window, the heatwave continues. The haze rises off the ground, and you can see little of clarity beyond it. The drone of the grasscutting machines fills the air with white noise and green flecks. And everything hangs, uncertain.

Heat

The last few days have been sultry, and not in the alluring kind of way, but like a humid and suffocating embrace. The heat is on, as the classic says. And I am beginning to wilt.

It isn't the heat on its own, of course. The killer is the high humidity. I remember in my younger days, when I was running a computer centre. To enhance performance, we sealed the CPU room, and turned on two airconditioners and two dehumidifiers. The temperature fell to 12 C on average, with a humidity way below the normal 99% or so. Those times were the best times in my life.

Nowadays, my advice to computer users is still the same. Keep the room cold, dry and dust-free. Insulate it from sunlight with curtains and suchlike. In the long run, it will pay off in terms of the longevity and effectiveness of your computer. And you know what? I would give the same advice for silicon-based machines.