Overview

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a penguin. You hang around on ice floes, in extreme cold, for weeks on end. Standing there, in bare feet, you are able to sustain a temperature differential between your own body and the outside environment of eighty degrees Celsius. Every now and again, when you re feeling hungry, you jump into the icy water, catch a fish, and then clamber back onto a sunny beach. You do this without ever over- or underheating. The secret behind this impressive thermal performance lies in your dense feathers: When a nasty wind gets up, they reduce airflow around your body so that it slows down and warms up, like the water inside a wetsuit. Your feet are also remarkable: They open like a fan to get rid of excess heat when you land from a flight then, back on the ice, they act like radiators and heat up the ground where you re standing. ^[1]

I often wish I were a penguin when contemplating the Honeywell Chromotherm III central heating controller that sits on the wall of my home in Amsterdam. This little box is covered with arrows and buttons and words and of course a digital display. It was designed to look technical and smart, and I don t doubt that somewhere inside its little head thoughts, of a kind, are clattering around. But the Chromo s interface is, to me at least, incomprehensible, and the fifty-page instruction manual long ago disappeared. So it leads a life of its own.