Willis Carrier

There should be a special place in heaven for whoever invented the air conditioner. I am deeply grateful to him, and to all the engineers of the past hundred years who improved the safety and energy efficiency of these wonderful machines. I think I'll go downstairs and say something nice to the operations manager who arranged (last winter) for our company to move into this building with reliable climate control.

cooling thoughts

It's about 90 degrees F out there (33C). That's the outside temperature, which would be reasonable, were it not for the humidity over 60%. I'm afraid to go home. I'm thinking of the pleasant evening last week, when the temperature was under 70F, and I walked home thinking it might be cool enough to have the oven on for an hour and make some cookies. Hot air in the lobby of the apartment building made me think this might not be the best plan in the world, but there are water heaters and such near the lobby. As I went up the stairs, it kept getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter. The little digital thermometer on my dresser fuzzes out above 95F, and my oven thermometer won't read below 110F. So all I know about the temperature of my apartment on that pleasant evening is that it was somewhere between those temperatures, at least 25 degrees hotter than outdoors. 25 degrees hotter than today's outdoor temperature scares me.

I can close the blinds to keep the sun out, take the fans out of the windows and close the windows so I don't pay to chill the outdoors, and turn the air conditioner on. It works better in one room if I close off that room from the rest of the apartment.

Maybe I'll just go to the library and stay there until the sun goes down. (That would almost certainly be better for me than staying here at work or going to the ice cream shop, though all are air conditioned.) With the sun down, the outside air will probably be cool enough to make it worth bringing inside. I can open the blinds, open the windows, try to maximize airflow through the apartment. One problem is that vigorous air flow through vertical windows tends to destroy vertical blinds. There's no way to tie the [obscenity] things back, not really. You can tilt them sideways or lay them flat, and distribute them over the window or cluster at the sides, but there's no way to keep them from flapping over a window fan, especially when that window fan has to be at the side of the window.