Silence

Beijing is a really noisy city. 

Cars honk at the mere suggestion that you might be within their path. 

Little 3-wheeled electric bike/delivery units beep while taking over the pedestrian/bike paths. 

Some cyclists like to warn everyone of their presence by constantly ringing their bell. So that way you hear them from a couple hundred feet away. (Experience from this morning no less!) 

Then there's the constant hum of air conditioning at work (too hot at my desk), or the drone of air purifiers taking little particles out of my indoor apartment air. 

It's only on rare clear air days when I turn all my filters off and the refrigerator isn't rumbling, that I get to experience something that we all take for granted: a moment of silence. Otherwise, it always seems like there's someone screaming in your ear (like the overly enthusiastic helpful waiter today) or some car getting ready to cut you off. 

In other air quality news...

New York Times article on China / India Polluttion
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/upshot/the-next-big-climate-question-will-india-follow-china.html?abt=0002&abg=0

You know how I know if it's going to be a good day?

When I wake up, glance at my air quality monitor in my apartment, and see a number like 157 on the readout.

The next thing I do is immediately check the outdoor air quality published by aqicn.org.

Then I open my curtains, and if it's not freezing, my windows.

Thus is the reality of living in Beijing.

brrrr....it's cold

On the air
We've just had two days of fantastic air due to super strong winds that came in and blew all the pollution away from Beijing. See? Look at those views:

Of course, as I type this note, the air pollution index has reached 150 -- which is pretty much what Beijing averages most of the time. It doesn't look like that anymore. It's grey. :(

It has also hit freezing here -- last night, I was walking towards the nearby subway station and on the sidewalk were patches of ice where cleaning workers had dumped pails of water that froze over before it could seep away. Definitely a tripping/slipping hazard.

In other news, I think my office is still 30C. I also purchased a small air purifier for my office area, so I'll be running it when the air quality gets bad, in hopes that I can substantively improve the air quality in my area (we shall see - the monitoring device is at home today, so no data yet).


On transit
I had a meeting this morning at a client site which was at least 1 hr away by taxi (if I could find one) through heavy traffic. Unfortunately, it was 9am when I left the house and there was a massive traffic jam outside near where I lived because the traffic lights at intersection were down. Huge mess -- left hand turning traffic was completely blocking the movement of almost all other traffic. Subway would have required me to walk 15 minutes, and then transfer twice (at a cost of 5 minutes ea) -- too much trouble.

I ended up taking a "hybrid" approach -- I took a taxi from west to east (along the route where a future subway line will be coming online early next year), hailed using the traditional hand-raising method (as opposed to the popular, though often useless taxi-hailing apps), and hopped onto a north-south subway line that took me within 3 minutes walk of the client office. Easy.

Why can't a billion Chinese people rise up and overthrow ...

http://www.quora.com/Why-cant-a-billion-Chinese-people-rise-up-and-overthrow-the-Communist-Party-and-make-China-democratic

This is a great quora thread for perspective on China.

some observations on air quality, size of room, etc.

so... last night I returned home to my apartment and my Dylos sensor (it's a $300 laser-based particle counting device) was reading 18000 on the "small particle count". I think that is equivalent approximately to 175 on the standard AQI reading scale.

That's not too bad, considering that outside it was 300+ AQI, but I always start to get uncomfortable when the AQI is around 150, so I turned on my SmartAir Canon, and BOOM! (haha. get it?) the particulate count started to drop. 

picture stolen from the smartair.com website

And y'know? This thing really works. When the AQI was 300+ outdoors, the canon (located in my living room) was so effective that it was able to help clean the air in my bedroom down to "good" levels (maybe AQI of 60-70) over a span of 1 hour. 

The big problem with this? Well, perhaps it's my own fault: I have too much space. A single canon, on the worst day in Beijing (like right now, where AQI is nearing 500 in many places), is simply not enough to deal with all the air that's coming in to my apartment. 

That last picture is from me, sitting in the living room of my apartment, with the canon on full blast, and 450+ AQI reading outdoors. A 47.1 microgram/cubic meter reading is "unhealthy for sensitive groups" according to this chart: 

By the way, I can actually smell the difference between the treated air in my bedroom and that of my living room. Scary huh? It smells smokey / ashy in the living room. 

Since it's late, and I'm getting a bit lightheaded from all the pollution exposure today, I'm going to head into my cave bedroom, shut all the doors, and crank up all my filters up to full blast. 

See ya guys later! 

that ain't fog, folks

Signing off from hazy Beijing (picture to come), 

Fred

an update on the heating situation

it is 30C at my desk at work (with the AC running). Air quality outside (using Haidian Wanliu reading from aqicn.org) is 76, indoor air quality monitor is showing between 15-20 micrograms / cubic meter.

Pictured above is my new monitoring device. This picture was actually taken last Friday when all of a sudden, a cold front (or wind front) moved into Beijing and completely dispersed the previously 350+ AQI situation, dramatically improving the outdoor air quality. The window was open when I took that photo (and it was still 28C!).

I've been using that nifty little sensor on my desk to get an understanding of what the air quality is like inside the office. My conclusions so far? On days where AQI is 350+, the indoor air quality in the office is "hazardous" by international standards (in the 200s). The air quality in my apartment, if I aggressively treat the air with all my air filters, can be as low as 50-70 when it is 400+ outside.

At this point, I am planning on frequently requesting to work from home whenever the air quality outside reaches a certain point. Hopefully I don't have to do it that frequently. But we shall see. Beijing is a place that frequently exceeds  imagination.

the hottest summer I've ever experienced was a winter in Beijing.

This is really a continuation of last week's post.

Ambient heating turned on in Beijing on 11/15. Which means that the office is now much hotter than it was last week. My apartment is also warmer by quite a bit now. The heating units here aren't anything like the electric-powered forced air units in California (where it never gets that cold, really) but are more similar to college/institution style radiators. Think a bunch of large "coils" that have some sort of liquid running through them.

Generally speaking, this works just fine. Except when you're on a south-facing side of the building and the default heating level is set to 25C. That's where the air conditioning comes in. I find it absolutely ridiculous to have air conditioning when it's 0C outside, but that makes sense when the air quality is...

The other unfortunate thing is that you can really only control the indoor air quality if you are talking about very well-insulated, enclosed places. My office is not one of these. It's "holey" -- lots of holes all over the place, including people going out on the balcony to smoke, the stairwells connected to the basement carpark, etc. So the air quality in the office varies a lot.  

I haven't quite figured out exactly how much it varies, but I'll start doing some testing on that soon. Hoping some of the data will help to justify additional filtering in the office. Or... some other change? We shall see. I've already started working from home in the worst circumstances.

Now this is interesting

Who would have thought that I could create a blog using blogspot under my own domain that's purchased with Google domains? This is pretty cool!

The real reason I was going to write this post though, was because I'm sitting here at work in my t-shirt and jeans, and I'm still too warm. Why is this? I don't know! It's 13C outside (55F) with a lowest temperature today of -1C. Sure, my side of the building faces south, so we get more sun, but this is absurd!

Supposedly, central heating doesn't kick on in Beijing until tomorrow (11/15), and we have our individual air conditioning units set to cool our area at 20C. Yet my feet are still sweating.

This is China. 

this is on a slight detour from work

When I get to work, I start peeling layers off. On my walk to work today, I wore the following layers: tshirt, thin cashmere sweater, cotton hoodie, down jacket, and a light jacket. Right now I'm sitting here in just a plain ol' tshirt.

On the other hand, my friend at the *ahem* other tech industry office a stone's throw away is freezing her butt off, bundled up in multiple layers and hats. Crazyness.