Air conditioning, frat sex, and self reliance

These days the world thinks, mistakenly I believe, that it is high class to have air conditioning. Not always true, as an old Boston lawyer friend writes me:

My first experience with A/C was when I was employed during Law School as a clerk at a major Boston law firm, in the early 1960’s. The firm had no A/C generally although many of the Partners had individual units in their offices which then had windows that could be raised or opened in the Office Tower on State St  Boston. There was an obvious moral tone exhibited by several of the more Senior Partners who eschewed the individual units. On the opposite side having an  A/C unit was all but a necessity for the more Junior Partners to mark their newly acquired status in the firm. The library which served as my Office was a veritable oven, nevertheless I concluded that  the older lawyers  were basically right. Mick Jagger  (attendee – London School of Economics ) confirmed this essential truth to me 20 years later - “ You can’t always get what you want, but you may find out you have what you need “.

Old law partners learned
 to keep cool the hard way

The idea that it was once classier and a source of pride to not have air conditioning, as with these senior partners, is mostly forgotten and even unimaginable to the world, all the more so in upwardly striving Bangkok with its ethic of conspicuous consumption. It's a bit like boats without engines or wood coffee tables with ancient dents, burns, and saw marks which were once seen as far more distinguished than motorized yachts and that crappy plastic Euro furniture that people want in Asia now. 

But I'll bet those old Boston partners shrewdly figured out the offices that didn't get late August afternoon sun. This intelligent planning never occurs to anyone now and few apartment or condo buyers here in this part of the world ever think of sun exposure when they buy a unit. Just go ahead and pay a 300 dollar a month electric bill later. Hardly a sustainable way of life.

This reminds me of Camille Paglia's comments on the current date-rape campus hysteria. She says that girls once knew that it was not smart to walk around mostly undressed and drunk at 2 am frat parties. So now instead when they think the day after that maybe after the party they may have had sex with a frat boy while in a drunken stupor they are demanding a new layer of rape investigation and disciplinary adjudication to be dispensed by campus committees of students and professors as naive as they are themselves. The police and the courts, of course, wouldn't understand their pain.

Surely the decline of the traditionally powerful societies in the face of leaner and tougher people is in large part a loss of individual foresight and self reliance, an aggregation of expectations that the company or the employer or the state or the college will take responsibility for everyone's lack of foresight and mistakes in the face of reality.

Mango shower

Mangos on our deck at Ekkamai

Yesterday my wife brought a couple of nice fresh yellow mangos in from the big old tree that pokes through our deck at our teak house here in Bangkok, and sure enough last night we had our first mango shower which broke the recent hot weather and, as one of our local twitter wits points out, gave our poor air conditioners a rest. This mango showers is an old and romantic weather term used from India to Cambodia, I remember it from my early days in Thailand fifty years ago. It refers to small afternoon or evening rains that begin usually in March, come along every week or two, sometimes with a growl of thunder, and take the edge off the hot season which bears down on us at this time of year.

Boston scorchers: will aircon strip away our best memories?

From the free download chapter

We are much inclined to think that air conditioning is a necessity, but I have to wonder these days whether this and much of the other technology said to be so wonderful is really important at all. One of the chapters in the book that was fun to write was my memories of those days old people in Boston used to call scorchers, though my mother preferred the ancient term dog days. On those canicules my grandmother would take me on the streetcar from her walk-up South Huntington Avenue in Jamaica Plain downtown to the Boston Common. I still enjoy looking at the details in this photo, the necktie, the newspaper. Was this man a bum? An unemployed veteran? If so, he made an effort to dress properly. Or was he just a lower paid adjuster from one of the insurance companies that dominated the skyline, lacking in those days even the first John Hancock building behind the Boston Common? 

To this day nothing beats the shade appreciated by this fellow, even here, in the tropics. Were they elms, those great feathery trees? From this same place you could hear the shouts of boys splashing about roughly in the Frog Pond.

Many of these most vivid memories serve as backdrops for the wonderful dreams that entertain my sleep these days, three quarters of a century later. They would not exist if the "benefit" of aircon had existed in those times, the mid 1940s. Will they now be as satisfactorily replaced by memories of sitting in air conditioned "family rooms" watching TV?

Bangkok weather BS I: heat wave

We read today in our morning Bangkok Post how the temperature is going to be 41 (104F) today, with various Thai experts competing to explain why that will come to pass. No surprise to this observer that it is 33 with max 34 anticipated now at 11 am. Oh yes, it "feels like 41" whatever that means (it always feels like 41 when it's really 33 in Bangkok?)

Why this nonsense? The public discourse on weather and climate in Bangkok is becoming so foolish that it warrants a special series of posts here, beginning with this one, with some more coming up on such matters as the evidence for drastic warming in SE Asia, the coming drowning of Bangkok, etc.

I have a farm up in Isan, the elevation is about 200 meters. Last year my neighbor asked me if there was a danger of the sea reaching this height. 

You might think that only simple Asian peasants would think this way, but I can assure you that many of the people at a dinner party I attended last year in Atherton, California, richest town in the world, had pretty much the same idea.

Free air conditioning from neighbors: role for radiant cooling in the tropics?

Hot muggy weather these March mornings, the hot season is moving in to smother us. Wet bulb temperature 27C (81F) all morning. 

I have discussed elsewhere in this book the wonderful after-effect of my condo neighbor's air conditioning: cool walls in my condo that make air conditioning unnecessary for me during the hot afternoons now approaching. This raises some interesting questions, one of them being the possibility of radiant cooling in Bangkok's steamy hot season.

We recognize that the humidity here is very high, with dew points in the upper 20sC (mid 80sF), rare in temperate climates.  If we don't deal with humidity (impractical in most condo/apartment buildings)  and also want to avoid condensation on cool surfaces, a general no-no, we are limited to cooling surfaces at or above the dew point which for the hot spell last early May would mean no lower than 80F:

Bangkok May 2015; red=Tdb, green=Tdp

You might say that an 80 deg (27C) cooling panel is useless, but I will claim that this is an assertion worth questioning in the particular environment we have in the tropics. We plan to reexamine this issue  in some upcoming posts during the coming hot season.

Hospital air: pleasing but unhealthy?

Although they have solar panels on the roof below my room on the sixth floor of Samitivej Hospital, which I take to be a manifestation of political correctness, they also blast air conditioning all over the place. I expect that it would take more than 30 square meters of panels on a typical hot but murky Bangkok afternoon (with about 200 watts/sm of sun power) to power my 24000 BTU room aircon machine. Whether it's the temperature or dryness of the air, it hurts my skin. 

Solution: call for a 30 watt fan, which they readily bring.

Number 2 setting, blowing off the quarter or whatever sailors call it when they are tacking against the wind. Much better!

Hot places, USA: You wouldn't have seen it if you hadn't believed it.

Curious research finding: people who live on the US Gulf Coast see evidence of warm days based more on their politics than on the temperature. "Political orientations rather than local conditions drive perceptions of local weather conditions and these perceptions—rather than objectively measured weather conditions—influence climate-related attitudes." -- Shao, W. and Goidel, K. (2016), Seeing is Believing? An Examination of Perceptions of Local Weather Conditions and Climate Change Among Residents in the U.S. Gulf Coast. Risk Analysis. doi:10.1111/risa.12571

Night ventilation: a marginal benefit in the tropical condo

Greasy black soot everywhere....

I discuss certain exceptions in the book: when my wife cooks her aromatic fish fries, for example...the doors and windows fly open.

But for the most part night ventilation doesn't do much for us here in our condo in Bangkok's hot season, now approaching. Outside air is warm and humid -- sometimes approaching 80 deg F db (27 deg C) and 100% RH at dawn -- but most of all, it is the dirt that bothers us. Even when we lived in our Thai-style house, pleasantly surrounded by shady greenery, keeping windows open nonetheless soon resulted in a layer of black grimy soot everywhere, I assume vehicular hydrocarbons from the local traffic.

On the seventeenth floor in our condo, the dust is more brown and gritty after several days with partly open windows or sliding doors, the floors sprinkled with odds bits of debris. I never knew the air was so dirty a couple of hundred feet above the ground. And as for necessary minimal air changes, the usual breeze, height, and leaky sliding doors throughout seem to take care of that without any need for auxiliary venting.

Newly arrived expats like to talk of the delights of ventilation and natural breezes, but those of us who have been here a while tend to close everything 24/7. Would it be the same if we were on the coast? Keep in mind that our surface sea temperatures here are about 30 degrees C (86F) in the warmer months, so there will be no cooling from those breezes.