Oh it's hot

I have to do more piano practice before my lesson later but I'm taking a break after practicing and then cleaning the house up a little.

It's really hot out. We don't have a "heat advisory" because apparently it has to be hotter than 96 (air temperature, not "feels like" temperature) for that to happen.

I'm glad my A/C is working.

I finished "Cool" a little while back. I enjoyed it, it was really pretty informative. A couple of later-on facts: Nixon did really badly in the heat; apparently a minor-league dirty trick Kennedy's people pulled at one of the debates was cranking up the thermostat in the venue (Kennedy, apparently, tolerated heat much better). And so, of course, the Sweaty Nixon meme (though we didn't call them memes before the internet) was born.

(I could be misremembering that from the book; other sources note Nixon was running a fever of 102 in that first debate and declined make-up - it was some kind of an out-manlying thing, Kennedy who was younger and more photogenic had also declined. And it was in a later debate that Nixon had his people crank down the AC to a cold temperature and the GUARD it so that Kennedy's people couldn't turn it up. And one site also reminded me of "fangate" in a recent election with Charlie Crist)

Carter, in part because of the oil embargo, pushed for thermostats set at 80 during the summer in Federal buildings (80! That would be okay in Phoenix, where it's dry, but deadly in parts of Texas, especially if it was a newer building where ceiling fans had not been installed - a lot of older public buildings had them and they do help. Our old offices had them - the new ones do not and they can get really stuffy really fast if the A/C is off or if it goes down).

(I very vaguely remember the embargoes. Mainly from sitting in the backseat of my dad's car while waited in line on "their day" to buy gas and while he cussed mildly about having to wait. The 1970s were an interesting decade in the Chinese curse sense of interesting.)

And the guy makes the argument that yeah, it sucks a lot of power, but at the same time - no modern building has been made to exist without it, and big swathes of the country would have to shut down in summers without it, any more. (I think of the opening lines from To Kill a Mockingbird, about Alabama summers, and how women bathed three times a day and suchlike. I can just say, I would NOT be teaching summers if there were no air conditioning.)

I think one of the other things some of the people who are blanket anti-air-conditioning don't think about is that some people do have health conditions (I have bad allergies and lowlevel asthma, and airconditioning makes it SO MUCH BETTER) and that people vary in their heat tolerance (Probably the ONE thing I share in common with ol' Nixon is that my ideal room temperature would be somewhere around 70 degrees.)

If I had to limit my usage for money or whatever reasons, I'd run it at night, or run it colder at night and hotter in the day - for me, I am most miserable trying to sleep if I am too hot - I don't sleep, I lie there and perspire. (I do tend to, as they say around here, "run hot.") And not sleeping makes me miserable and dysphoric. (I'm already not my best in the summers; even with air conditioning I don't feel quite "right" when it's this hot).

I started a new non-fiction book - this is one of the ones I got as part of my "pay" for reviewing a biostats book for Oxford U Press. It's called Ancestral Journeys and is about the early human settlement of Europe. I've long had an interest in ancient history (or, I guess here, pre-history) and archaeology. This is the "newest" book I've read and they're talking about how now DNA analysis can be used for a lot of things - they talk about "aDNA," or "ancient DNA" - the stuff you can extract from teeth and bones. (They also talk about the haplotype issue and how Cheddar Man, sadly, really probably DOESN'T have a patrilineal-chain descendant in Cheddar, and also how those ancestry-place DNA tests aren't all that accurate (which I already knew, based on some of the ones I've seen people get).

I'm just now to the point where they're getting into historical linguistics, which really interests me. (I very nearly majored in something like that, except for two things: 1. limited job market, I realized the only job I could get would be a professor at a school that offered that, and increasingly few do and 2. even then, it was politicized in certain ways that I didn't really like. Or maybe that was just the school I was at. And so I stuck with biology but it does make me smile to see that biology - though not the kind I do - is sort of bleeding over into what I considered majoring in.)

Part of it, for me, is the wondering about how people lived. We can't ever really know for sure (absent some kind of Connie Willis time-traveling) but it's interesting to speculate. What would it be like to be one of the first farmers? (And how did people figure out that sticking a seed in the ground resulted in more, later on?) What would be the reaction of a group meeting up with another group, where one group had wheeled vehicles and the other did not? How did people make sense of the world around them?