Thursday, December 18, 2008

BIts and pieces

The most important part of a television is its remote control. This has been brought forcefully to our knowledge over the past fortnight, ever since our remote stopped working. Such things didn't matter when I was growing up, as in those days we had only three television channels which could be hand tuned. Now we have over forty, plus AV inputs for dvd and video. It's impossible to get the tv to use those AV inputs using the manual controls. Fortunately today I finally got a replacement remote, and hopefully it will work with our tv.

On the way to get that remote control, I walked several kilometres in Tel Aviv. We are near the end of December, and the temperature was around 25 degrees Centigrade! I read an entry in Jeff Duntemann's diary about the temperature being minus 6 degrees - and he's using Fahrenheit. This works out to around minus 20 degrees Centigrade! There's a bit of a difference in temperature between where he is (Colorado) and I am (Israel).

But as we know, temperature is only a relative sensation: we can only say whether things are hot or cold, as opposed to saying 'hmm, it's 16.4 degrees in this room, better turn the heat on". So when I wake up in the morning and move from a warm bed into a cold living room, I only know that I am in a colder environment, and rely on the thermometer to tell me that it's 16 or 17 degrees. That could be the temperature of someone's warm summer day.

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