I like Miso Soup

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

No, I haven’t been taken over by a random word generator : I genuinely like the stuff. Not just because it perfectly complements some Sashimi or a Bento Box; but because it helps me think about air-conditioning and heat. Miso soup is a mixture of stock – or dashi – with paste – or Miso. It’s supposed to arrive hot, and if you leave it in a coolish room you can see the little particles of paste circulating in an almost textbook perfect case study of convection: something very few people actually believe is really going on around us, despite being taught about it in school (by a mad Welshman with crinkly wavy hair, a la Dilbert, in my case, but I digress)…

When the weather is hot, and I’m standing in people’s server rooms and they are going nuts with fear and loathing about their precious servers going into meltdown, I like to ask them about Miso soup: and if they get all confused (and then angry and then don’t pay my bill), I ask them how much they think the air inside the typical hot-air balloon actually weighs.

Very few get it right: the answer is, about five tons. Once you get that idea into your head, getting emergency cooling for servers sorted out starts to make a good deal more sense – and those elephant’s-trunk so-called aircon units which harassed managers tend to put in as a reflex action during these periods, start to look more like a way to throw kilowatts into the air for very little benefit, than like a smart way to stop your servers going into meltdown.

Got any good “boy stood on the burning deck” stories from extreme heat or wild weather?