It’s been several years since I came up with the idea for temperature-controlled undergarments. Anyone who’s ever spent time in Louisiana in the summer will immediately see the appeal of such a thing, and any time I’ve mentioned this idea it’s been met with varying levels of ecstasy and gratitude.

The most common response is:

“Dude, that’s awesome. Seriously, please make that happen.”

Or something along those lines.

Sadly, as useful an invention as that might be, it’s just not feasible. I’m not that smart, but I know they call them laws of physics for a reason — there just isn’t a way around them. And I always have a tough time explaining why, exactly, there’s no way (without some vast improvements in current technology) to give the public the climate controlled undergarments they so richly deserve. I’m torn as to whether this disconnect is due to my own failings in explaining the laws, or just because the average person doesn’t know squat about thermodynamics. Probably a good deal of both. So I’ll use this space to try and better explain what I envision and why it’s just not possible.

The Laws
First law: “You can’t win.”
Second law: “You can’t break even.”
Third law: “You can’t quit.”

The Idea
Basically, my thought was to take a tight undergarment (say, an Under Armour-type tshirt and a pair of boxer-briefs) and interweave them with thin, hollow tubes (they’d need to be flexible and durable, so probably some sort of plastic or rubber). The tubes would all come to a ponytail at the tailbone area of the garment, where they’d feed into a small pump and condenser. The condenser I envisioned as a miniature version of the condensing units that provide the cooling for most of the homes in the world (except my design would use water as the fluid, not coolant…which actually makes it a chilled-water application, not a condensing unit. That’s a little too in-depth for this blog). It’s a simple, straightforward design, and it works. For that application. For this one, not so much.

The Problems
To sum up: the idea is to circulate cool water through tiny tubes, cooling the body through conduction (which is much more efficient than convection [conduction is what happens on a frying pan; convection is what happens in an oven]).

Problem 1: It takes energy to cool water. And not just the electrical/mechanical energy needed to run the pump (which would be suppied by a battery of some sort). It also takes thermal energy to keep the water at the necessary temperature (remember, this design is essentially a heat engine, taking the temperature difference and using it to perform work. This application is governed by the second law, and the clearest way I know to state what’s happening here is this: when two systems are in contact with each other and they’re not the same temperature, their inclination is to get to the same temperature, i.e., equilibrium. This produces entropy, but more importantly in our case, it produces heat.), which basically means the human body is hot and the water is cold. Each cycle (which refers to the time it takes for the water in any given tube to circulate completely through the system) will bring back warm(er) water, which will have to be cooled off before it can go back through the system. This cooling produces a slightly greater amount of heat (2nd law). There’s a reason why the condensing units are always outside; they produce heat. This is also the reason the back of your refrigerator produces heat. Exact same design.

In order to circumvent the heat produced, most condensers are remotely located (that is, outside for our house analogy). Unless I want my design to include a Radio Flyer on a leash, this isn’t an option for me.

Problem 2: the design would be really freaking unwieldy. This is just a miniaturization problem. This application probably wouldn’t need a real big compressor, but I’m not sure how small you can make on of those things. Additionally, it’d have to run on battery, which means it’d have to be really energy efficient. Batteries are ridiculously dense, which adds even more weight. If problem 1 went away, a workable solution to problem 2 wouldn’t be that daunting.

Problem 3: the design would be really expensive. Without having done so much as setting pen to paper, I’d guess that the whole system (specialized undergarments and a fanny pack for the cooling apparatus) would cost a few hundred bucks. That’s prohibitive. To realistically market the thing (y’know, outside the pages of the Sharper Image) you’d want the price in the $100 range.

Conclusion
If I want to build my design as it currently stands, the prototype would leave the wearer with a much cooler torso and 2nd degree burns on his lower back. Also, the thing would probably weigh 20 pounds and cost several hundred dollars. Back to the drawing board.

Popeyes. Taco Bell. Best Buy. Wendy’s.

That’s the list of businesses that I’ve filed a formal complaint with for god-awful service in the last three years. Poor customer service is tolerated by management, but not by corporate. So I complain where it’ll do some good — to corporate. Since I’ve started doing this I’ve also filed several positive reports, in instances where I received outstanding service. I figure it’s only fair. Plus, since outstanding customer service is so rare, it’s not something I have to do often.

But now I can add Bennigan’s to the list above.

A group of coworkers and I went to Bennigans on Vets this Monday. I won’t tell you the story of that meal, but I will include the text of my complaint email to Bennigans for your viewing pleasure.

We came into the restaurant at about 11:15 or 11:20 am. There’s a group of us who work nearby, and we eat lunch at a different place nearly every day of the week. We have a regular rotation that, prior to this visit, included Bennigans. We typically go to lunch at the same time in order to beat the rush, and it works.

We were seated immediately, and we ordered our food about 5 minutes later. At this point, the restaurant was practically deserted (as you would anticipate, it not yet being even 11:30). Now, the last two trips we’d made to Bennigans had taken an extraordinarily long time, so we made sure to make it known that we only had an hour lunch break.

Still, 45 minutes had gone by and no sign of our food. We asked our waiter what the wait was, and he said that the kitchen had gotten busy. Whether or not that’s the case, the simple fact is that we placed our orders before the restaurant got crowded. And furthermore, should it really take 45 minutes to prepare 4 burgers and an order of nachos? I think not, especially after we specifically mentioned that we’re in a time crunch, here. We escalated our complaint to the manager, whose name I did not catch (she was a black woman, in her mid-30s, I’d guess). She apologized for the wait, but offered us no assurance that the slowness we’ve come to expect from this particular franchise was a problem she was attempting to correct.

52 minutes after we placed our order, our food came out. All four of the burgers had something wrong with them (bbq sauce on a burger that didn’t come with it, a plain burger with lettuce on it, another with bacon that was ordered without bacon, and one without bacon that came with bacon [those last two didn’t simply go to the wrong people, either, they were completely different burgers]). Not only that, but 3 of the 4 burgers were cold, as were the nachos. The manager began to apologize profusely and gave us 50% off of our bill.

This is not the first time we’ve had this problem with particular restaurant (although it’s the worst visit of the three bad ones), and they don’t seem to be making any effort to correct it. We like the food at Bennigans, and it’s conveniently located. But you can bet that none of us will be returning to this location anytime soon.

Criminally slow service, orders that were more wrong than right (and we didn’t have the time to wait for them to get fixed), and a staff with a cavalier attitude towards customer service. Bad news.

I would normally offer a better summary than I did in the final paragraph of this complaint, but their online for online allows you to input 2500 characters, and I was at 2499.

So long, Bennigan’s on Vets. We hardly knew ye.

Some of you may have gotten an email recently about not buying gas on May 15th. Here’s the body of the email:

Don’t pump gas on MAY 15th

In April 1997, there was a “gas out” conducted nationwide in protest
of gas prices. Gasoline prices dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight.

On May 15th 2007, all internet users are to not go to a gas station in
protest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in most
places.

There are 73,000,000+ American members currently on the internet
network, and the average car takes about 30 to 50 dollars to fill up.

If all users did not go to the pump on the 15t h, it would take
$2,292,000,000.00 (that’s almost 3 BILLION) out of the oil companies
pockets for just one day, so please do not go to the gas station on
May 15th and lets try to put a dent in the Middle Eastern oil industry
for at least one day.

If you agree (which I can’t see why you wouldn’t) resend this to all
your contact list. With it saying, ‘’Don’t pump gas on May 15th”

Sounds like a great idea, right? Wrong. This is an urban legend that’s been around since at least ‘99. It doesn’t work, and I’ll try to briefly explain why.

It requires no sacrifice, hence no change in consumption. No one’s being asked to reduce the amount of gas (and therefore oil) they use — they’re simply asked to shift which day they purchase it on.

The gas companies don’t suddenly find themselves with an excess of product (which, if they did, would theoretically drop prices — supply and demand, and all that jazz). All that would happen, even if everyone who read this email participated in the boycott*, is that there’d be more gas purchased on May 14th and May 16th and less on May 15th. It’s like skipping lunch; you’ll just make up for it by eating a bigger dinner. Continuing that analogy, if you want to lose weight, it requires a prolonged commitment to calorie reduction.

The only way for action at the consumer level to lower gasoline prices is to decrease demand, which can be done two ways: driving a more fuel efficient car, or reducing consumption (aka driving less).

JT

*Boycott isn’t really an accurate description of what’s happening here. If I want to boycott Spiderman 3, that doesn’t mean I wait until Saturday to see it instead of going opening day. I refuse to watch it altogether.