Boiling Point

Our living room has dragged and Sonnet notes: "it pays to take a zen like approach" which, I concur, a philosophy to be applied to every situation. Take today: our carpet supposed to arrive several weeks ago and we cannot do the final wiring until in place. Next week, we are told, maybe. The electrician, meanwhile, in hospital so there goes the lights. Stay cool. At work, my notebook crashes and will require a reload of the operating system which I learn moments before being abruptly disconnected from Sony Support at 35p a minute. Breathe deeply. My office voice mail kicks into an unknown directory after 5:30PM and, most unusually, my unused Yahoo email shows up on my blackberry jamming me with spam, porn and travel offers. The Gulf oil spill continues. Some dude in Cumbria kills 12 innocent people. There are many joys to being one's own boss but days like today I wanna choke the living s*** out of someone. Like Sony. Microsoft, Vodafone or BP would do. My mood dampens further upon learning that England captain Rio Ferdinand suffers a knee injury his first day of team practice for the World Cup. No wonder kids watch cartoons.

The boiling point, dear reader, is when an element or substance is the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the liquid equals the environmental pressure surrounding the liquid (David Goldberg, 1988, "3,000 Solved Problems in Chemistry," McGraw Hill). A liquid in a vacuum environment has a lower boiling point than when at atmospheric pressure. A liquid in a high pressure environment has a higher boiling that when at atmospheric pressure. In other words, the boiling point of liquids varies with and depends upon the surrounding environmental pressure (which tends to vary with elevation). Different liquids (at a given pressure) boil at different temperatures. Ergo, my day.