The Null Device

Mediterranean drinking and café cultures may so far have eluded Britain; however, a scientist at University College London says that Britain will have to adopt mediterranean-style siestas by the second half of the century to help people cope with global warming and prevent them from dropping like flies as the mercury increasingly hits the 40s.

An artist's impression of a British siesta, circa 2060.

Which is odd, because Australia (and, I believe, the US south) keep Anglo-Saxon working hours and have quite hot days in summer. Either British temperatures are expected to exceed current Australian temperatures significantly, or the Australian solution of installing air conditioners everywhere has been ruled out (perhaps because there won't be enough fossil fuels to power air conditioners by then?)

¶ climate change culture global warming the prisoner uk weather 1

Blogging ambulanceman Tom Reynolds talks about the weather, or, more precisely, about how the weather influences the sorts of accidents and incidents that occur:

If the weather is grey and overcast, we tend to go to more old folk who are sitting indoors, or more commonly, falling over indoors. Sometimes you get the impression that they just want someone to talk to -- or to not be alone. There also seem to be more suicide attempts as well -- and it is fairly well known that suicide rates go up in springtime. So on those rainy spring days you end up seeing a lot of Paracetamol overdoses.

Spring and Autumn rains (and in England, Summer rains) bring with them car vs car collisions, as an infrequent rain lifts off the layer of rubber and pollution left on the road by passing cars and the roads become a skid pan. Fallen leaves on the road don't help, and neither do the effects of the rapidly changing hours of daylight on a drivers bodyclock.

The hot weather also brings out the people who start drinking at lunchtime, and continue throughout the day, tie this in with a lot of sporting fixtures, and we find ourselves going to a lot of fights in a lot of pubs.

¶ psychology weather 0

From tomorrow's weather report:

Monday
A little rain early in the morning. Some rain developing again late in the day with the risk of a thunderstorm. Moderate north to northwesterly wind, freshening during the day.
Min 23 Max 31

"Risk of a thnuderstorm"? Hope of a thunderstorm, more like it.

¶ weather 5

An industrial design student at Brunel University in Britain has designed a toaster which burns the weather forecast onto slices of bread. The device, programmed in Java, retrieves the weather from a telephone number (presumably by modem), and uses an 11x11 heat-shielding mask to print it onto the bread.

¶ gadgets toaster weather 0

I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate... it's prolonged spells of hot weather. Two of the posters in my room have gotten into the habit of falling off their respective walls, most probably because the heat has deteriorated the Blu-Tak (or, more precisely, the bright green Blu-Taklike adhesive) holding them up to the point of unusability.

¶ annoyances wayne kerr weather 0