Those of you with sharp eyes may have noticed that this site pays inordinate attention to the weather. There’s a section in the side bar giving the weather as I would like to be (actually the current weather in Nassau, the Bahamas) and another section giving the weather as it really is where I live (in Oslo). There’s even a separate page giving a more detailed picture of the weather where you can also find out what the weather is like in other places, should you feel remotely inclined.

So why this preoccupation with the weather?

Well the answer is simply that, apart from relationships with fellow human beings and other members of the animal world, it’s probably the most important thing in our lives. Arguably, just about everything we do is governed to some extent by the weather. So it’s high time we took a critical look at it.
One thing that you can definitely say about the weather is that, generally speaking, there’s a lot of it. I say ‘generally’ because there are parts of the world where it doesn’t vary all that much. For example there’s the Sahara, where the weather tends to vary between hot and hotter. And then, at the other extreme, we have the Antarctic, where it shifts between cold and colder. Unsurprisingly, few people live in either area.

Some weather.

Which brings us onto the subject of snow. If you subscribe to creationism, you probably believe that snow was created by God, although you may prefer to believe that God simply created weather and left it to sort itself out. Personally, I feel that if God actually did create snow, he was showing off a bit. ‘Hey look, I can make frozen rain and make it all fluffy too!’ What’s more, he created lots of it. (Have you noticed how seldom it snows in small quantities? Either we get none at all or we can’t move for the stuff.) Or perhaps, as we are told that He works in mysterious ways, the whole snow thing was simply a way of getting the human race to indulge in a bit of healthy exercise by having to shovel it out of the driveway or occasionally dig out the house.

Then there’s snow’s poor cousin – rain. Now we all recognise the value of rain. We drink it and it makes plants grow. That’s great. But why is it so poorly distributed? I mean in some places it never stops raining (Bergen and Manchester to name but two) while other places don’t get a single drop. That’s pretty poor organisation, if you ask me. Can you imagine, for example, running a web shop and then informing certain customers that you don’t supply their area? Not because you can’t or that it’s too expensive or there are local laws that prevent the importation of certain articles, but simply because you don’t want to.

A glass of ex-rain.

Of course, that’s why rivers were invented - as some sort of primitive attempt to make up for the lack of local rainfall by transporting some of it from one place to another. And where do rivers end up? The sea. Talk about carrying coals to Newcastle.

As well as snow and rain, we have that lovely Biblical hail. If snow was the invention of the New Testament God – He of lion and lamb fame – then hail was definitely the personally supervised handiwork of good old Jehovah, of witness fame. So short of actually hurling rocks at the human race, which stretches the limits of meteorology a bit too far, Jehovah pelts us with lumps of ice instead. The biggest of which can measure 15 centimetres in diameter and weigh half a kilo. That’s a pretty hefty lump of ice and there isn’t just one of them. They come down in flocks!

Some hail.

And then we have fog. If anything were pointless, it has to be fog. Does it contribute anything at all? Apart from obscuring ugly buildings, that is? I suppose it is conceivable that fog was created to keep foghorn makers in business but frankly that sounds a bit far-fetched. And if God (or Jehovah) was in any way responsible (which, actually, I doubt) it must be yet another instance of His rather warped sense of humour that, having given most creatures some form of eyes, He then makes it impossible for them to see anything.

Fog.

The good thing about wind is that it clears away the fog. It also goes some way to distributing the rain a bit more evenly by blowing it almost horizontal. It can be harnessed as a source of free energy (at a price), which is more than can be said of snow. And of course, it’s also responsible for shifting the rest of the weather from one place to another. Mind you, not even the wind can do this truly efficiently. There are some places, like the Nazca Desert in Peru, that are virtually windless and many, many others where it simply never stops blowing at all. Like Holland, for example. The result of this is that Holland gets more weather than you can shake an anemometer at while Nazca gets zilch.

And then there are those wishy-washy weathers like sleet and drizzle. I think those words are so descriptive. For God’s sake, make your mind up. Either snow or rain but not both. And if you have to rain, at least do it properly. Rain, snow and wind all have their aficionados but I defy anyone to say that they actually like sleet and drizzle. However, if I had to choose between the two, I think I’d probably go for drizzle. Apart from anything else, it’s a nice sounding word as in ‘lightly drizzle some chocolate sauce over your ice-cream’. You never hear trendy TV chefs saying ‘ gently sleet the custard over your baked apple’.

Drizzle.

I’m not going to say much about hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. These are just pimples on the backside of normal weather. Okay, if you want a useful tip about how to handle hurricanes or tornadoes, here it is: just ignore them. If you do that, they’ll lose interest and go away. Running around like a headless chicken, piling up sandbags and nailing planks over your windows just encourages them.

To wind up this drivel, if you’ll excuse the pun, I’d like to turn my attention to a philosophical question: is ‘good weather’ actually weather at all? By ‘good weather’ I mean, of course, a pleasant summer day. Sunshine, very little wind, no clouds, you know what I mean. Arguably, ‘good weather’ is the absence of weather, beyond the slight breeze, of course. So you might say that the closer weather comes to actually not being weather, the more pleasant we find it. So what’s the point of the weather in the first place? At best it just leaves us confused and at worst it leaves us dead.

I dare say that there are probably one or two meteorologists who might have some small criticisms of my analysis but then they are usually quite lovable people who never appear to dress correctly and they wouldn’t mind anyway.

I might even sign up as one. Right, I’m taking orders for ‘good weather’ now. Anyone for a Bahamas tomorrow?

Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), in his great Dictionary of the English Language, defined a ‘computer’ as ‘a reckoner, accountant or calculator’. And he goes on to quote from Jonathan Swift:

I have known some such ill computers, as to imagine the many millions in stocks so much real wealth.

From which we may conclude that even in Swift’s day, there was some confusion between perceived wealth in the form of stocks and shares and actual wealth in the form of hard dosh. But we can also conclude that a computer was a person, whose task it was to…erm…compute. As in reckon, account or calculate. So one of life’s little ironies is that while modern manufacturers are doing their best to make computers more human, actual computers were human to start with.

This opens grandiose imaginative vistas when it comes to terms such as ‘hot boot’, ‘cold boot’ and ‘hibernate’. Presumably the hot boot was used to motivate the computer to work in the summer months and the cold boot in the wintertime, when the computer had quite rightly decided to hibernate. Given the fact that this was the eighteenth century, I think the phrase ‘Blue Screen Of Death’ may be taken quite literally. Such were the consequences of false computation.

The hot boot. Desert version.

I yearn for the days when computers were people. You see, the great thing about people is that you can talk to them. Negotiate. Coerce, if need be. None of which are possible with a lump of metal and plastic. It’s unlikely that our human computer – let’s call him Adam Smith – would ever say something like ‘Smith has encountered a fatal error and must shut down’. At least, not unless he was particularly inarticulate and on the point of death.

And ‘Smith has encountered a critical error and will restart in one minute’ could play havoc with your family tree.

So who was Adam Smith anyway? Well, he certainly wasn’t made of metal and plastic. There was probably a Mrs. Smith and conceivably a host of PCs, as in Poor Children. These groups of children were commonly called ‘networks’, a corruption of ‘not-works’, which alludes to the fact that they did not work. Not until the ripe old age of 7 anyway. Smith Senior was also referred to as the ‘server’, because that’s exactly what he did - serve. However, this should not be confused with ‘servant’, who was lower in status than Smith and would often have to boost his performance with the odd cup of tea. And a plate of chips.

Adam Smith and family on a day out.

And let’s not overlook Mrs. Smith, the tired old mother bored. Like it or not – and she very often didn’t - she was at the very heart of the computations. Sadly, she was, by definition, bored out of her mind. And who wouldn’t be with a host of PCs and a server to look after?

What you didn’t get with Adam Smith was a lot of daft questions every time he made a computation. For instance, he didn’t ask your permission to continue. There was no ‘do you want me to delete this file?’ ‘Are you really quite sure you want me to go ahead?’ ‘No, but I mean are you really, really sure?’ And certainly there wasn’t anything as crass as ‘Smith needs your permission to use this’, unless it was to request permission for the weekly visit to the lavatory, of course.

Naturally, Smith had a few drawbacks compared with the modern computer. There was no Internet access, of course. But he did have a well-thumbed copy of ‘Mrs. Bellamy’s Compendium of Useful Knowledge’ in which he could find the capital of Abyssinia, the number of leagues from Norwich to Liverpool and how to bake a perfect apple crumble in less than five hours. What’s more, Mrs. Bellamy’s inestimable guide was totally virus free (except for the chapter on Hygiene) and contained absolutely no pornography (apart from the useful treatise on female undergarments). Mr. Smith could not, with any certainty, tell you the current time in Tokyo but, with the aid of a silver-plated pocket watch with astrolabe backup, he could accurately tell you the local time with a margin of error of only five minutes. There was also no spelling checker but, after all, this was the eighteenth century and you could spel hanything hanieway you demned liked.

State-of-the-art astrolabe backup!

Mr. Smith had both an inbox and an outbox. He also had a useful spike for unpaid bills.

There were also no problems with cross-platform compatibility. An Adam Smith could communicate easily with an Abraham Brown or even a Josiah Jones. In fact, after a few pints down at the ‘Merry CPU’ he had no trouble at all in exchanging data with a Zhi Chen, an Alphonse Dupont or even an Emiliano Quattroporte. Add to which, Adam Smith was entirely transportable, combining the advantages of the mainframe computer with those of the laptop (Fanny Easyvirtue at the ‘Merry CPU’) and the smart phone (at the expense of a bit of shouting).

Further advantages of Adam Smith included an incredibly fast boot-up time (two seconds from Off to Fully Functional after a swift kick), a very long life-cycle (about seventy years excluding dropsy, gout, the King’s Evil and other warranty-voiding afflictions) and minimum system requirements (two meals a day and Mrs. Smith).

Two old cold boots relaxing.

Adam Smith required no system updates and came equipped with an intuitive user interface: if he did not like something he would scowl and if he did like something he would scowl less. Performance could be boosted to turbo by the promise of a raise in pay from threepence to sixpence a week and he could quickly be returned to sleep mode by applying an old cricket bat firmly to the back of his head.

And so, to conclude, if you consider the total abrogation of any form of human rights as a justifiable reason for employing a computer in the Johnsonian sense, then an Adam Smith would have been ideal for you. After all, on paper, it would have had a lot more to offer than its modern version. And it might even have been considerable cheaper in terms of Return On Investment.

Tell that to the sweatshop workers in Mumbai and they wouldn’t believe you.