Acquisitions, Part 1
Wow! A whole month! Sorry, anyone-who-reads-this!
Since I arrived here, I have steadily been acquiring more stuff. I was surprised by this until I remembered that I only came here with what I could carry, and thought back to the sheer mass of the stuff I left behind back in Ottawa.
The air has been getting really dry lately in Beijing, and for a while I was waking up with a really dry throat that was pretty unpleasant. So last weekend I decided to buy a humidifier. The air hasn't been quite as dry since then, so I'm not really sure how well it humidifies, but I am pretty happy with it as a kind of surreal objet d'art. So without further ado, I present: My new humidifier.
Yes, that's right. It's a frog, and it shoots mist out of the tops of its eyes. It has a dial on the front, and when you turn it up to the max it can produce quite a lot of mist. One thing I thought was pretty cool about this is that when it's turned up to the max, the mist has a significant cooling effect on the floor near the frog, despite the fact that it doesn't make the floor wet at all.
"But Ben, just how significant is the cooling effect of the frog?"
Well I'm glad you asked, because I measured it with my infrared thermometer!
3.8 degrees Celcius!
I expect it to have a fairly limited lifespan since the water here is so hard, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I took a few other pictures of it this afternoon while I was goofing off, and you can find them in this photoset if you want.
Totally unrelated to the frog: I just finished reading Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End", which is freely available in its entirety at the linked page. I enjoyed it, so props to the author, and doubly so for releasing it for free.
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That is the scariest humidifier I have ever seen.
I mean, it's a huge frog with mist coming out of the top of it's eyelids!
But anyways, great choice!
I like it ^_^
Sorta..
I had the same dry air problem in Waterloo when I first came, and it caused nose bleeds until I got myself a humidifier too. The water here is also harder than Ottawa's, so calcium builds up, but if you can get inside well enough, wiping down/rinsing things with vinegar regularly gets rid of build up.
Oh, my goodness! LOLLERSKATES! Between the "surreal objet d'art" and the primary colours of your infrared thermometer, things are just downright silly at your place! ^_^
This is a test, the whole test, and nothing but the test.