Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Restore our world



And just how does the Westin St Francis hotel "restore our world"? By encouraging us to use only one of the two provided mega-power shower heads!! woo hoo! I didn't even know there existed showers with two heads.

Talking of uncontrolled consumption, because it is so cold in the air-conditioned rooms at the Moscone Centre, today James went on an expedition to The North Face on Union Square to buy me an expensively warm deep pink scarf. We had looked at the weather forecast, and so left our thick sweaters at home.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

James, why did the scarf have to be pink?

James Annan said...

An ice blue one wouldn't have been as much use as a hot pink one! Though it wss probably more for reasons of colour matching. I don't pretend to understand these things, I just do what I'm told...

Nosmo said...

I once had a gift certificate for a massage at the SPA in the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. The shower there had 11 shower heads (two over head, and on three walls at shoulders, chest and waste level). Probably used more water in that one shower then I do in two weeks.

jules said...

Of course, in a Japanese onsen, many cubic metres of water slosh all over the place... but I had heard that California may not have quite as much of that particular resource...

Roger Romney-Hughes said...

You stayed at the Westin St Francis? Claims that climate scientists are on an over-funded gravy train are proved!

James Annan said...

One indisputable benefit of our 2-body solution to scientific careers is that expenses go a lot further when the hotel costs are shared! Though actually it wasn't much more expensive than the relatively humdrum (but still perfectly adequate) and far less well located place we stayed at last time. We only paid $148 per night for the room, which isn't much yen these days. Maybe the AGU got us a good rate.

C W Magee said...

The faulty physics of the second shower head assumption has been demonstrated here:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/02/the_faulty_fluid_dynamics_of_h.php

James Annan said...

Hm...I'm with the commenters who argue that the 2nd head is likely to increase the flow a bit, even though in this case there was no way of changing the pressure independent of temperature so I couldn't ramp it up to taste. The real reason I didn't use it is that it was too low to be much use!