Feeling the Temperature-01

by S.B.Asoka Dissanayake Visit www.writeclique.net

There is a bizarre (somewhat insane) discussion going on local English Papers. This is something .I penned down many moons ago. Reproduced here for any sane person's perusal.

Finding a suitable Thermometer

I lost my email connection due to no fault of mine but that was a blessing in disguise. It was a painful experience and I could not gain access to my writings at www.writeclique.net It forced me to have an alternate email which was useful in any case and I registered myself again dropping my professional designation.

So all my relatively scientific writing would be at this alternative space from now onwards. This would be one of my opening writings that would be posted there.

I had some interest in temperature ever since the indoor temperature of my room hit 90 degrees (90º F) and when I could not sleep. Since then I kept a record of the indoor temperature at random and it has became almost an obsession.

The other reason is that I should have a record of Kandy temperature for future perusal when the coal power plant is operational in three years time. My record for the next three years if I am alive and well by that time would be an eye opener to our future energy planners.

My gut feeling is that there would be drastic and erratic changes in temperature even though Kandy is far away from that site.

I do not want to delegate this responsibility of recording the temperature to the meteorology department since I am told some of the filed officers never take any interest in recording accurate data. I am also told some of them look at old data and send a doctored report to head office and they are like our foresters who are never found in the forest where lot of illegal felling of trees and gem mining is going on.


After the tsunami the little respect I had for them also evaporated with the waves.


I had two red alcohol thermometers which bought for less than two pounds a piece at Woolworth Stores. One of them stopped working but the other one is still in working order and accurate (to 0.25º F) for domestic purposes.

My intention is not to write about it but to write about how I found a new one.

After surveying the entire Kandy city I found one Jumbo Size thermometer at a supermarket (Chinese made) but its recording got stuck at 78 º F and during the period it was recording the temperature it had an error of 2º F.

There supposed to be more than five Super Grade Schools teaching science in Kandy and I wonder how many of them have a thermometer in their laboratory.

I went to all the reputed pharmacies and only a few of them had clinical thermometers but none had an ordinary thermometer.

THAT WAS A REVEALATION.

When I asked few of the shop assistant I need a thermometer and not a clinical thermometer one of them sent me to an electrical shop thinking it is some sort (form) of a meter that record electricity.

That brings me to a point of an anecdote and the standard of English as it is taught (I come to that point later in an article) today in our schools.


I was barely fifteen years old still wearing shorts (those days one starts wearing a trouser when one is competent enough to speak in English and not before. Now when I come to think about it some of them are wearing it inside the mother's womb) and a young bloke (wearing lounge) came to me and asked me "what is your chronometer?

I was not amused and I told him the time and asked him why you can't speak in simple English. This bloke never gave me eye contact again and I never saw him in any academic circles too, thereafter. This was the way some city boys took Mickey out of those who could not speak English (and were not wearing lounge suit) and if the same yardstick is raised again how many of our English Teachers would pass this acid teat I wonder and wonder.

I have become chronic and teach my students acute and chronic inflammation to begin with and any word with meter aliased with electricity is a reminder how science is taught in our schools.

However, with some soul searching I managed to find a digital thermometer with two sensors and a clock and by January first I started recording the temperature both at home and my room in the faculty.

By the way the university is also not without blame. When I joined the university after long lapse I wanted to find a digital balance for some research purpose and I could not find one in our university (faculty).

It took three years for me to get one that is also from "Japanese Aid".

By that time I had finished my data collection.

I paid my own money to buy a suitable electronic balance that also after six months of searching in Colombo.

This is the way we do research in our universities. So we (higher education) are no better than the education department.

This is where I have a "hearty laugh" when people in Colombo are talking about nanotechnology.