Finally, Morris has achieved winter-like weather: snow and 0°F temperatures. We’ve been puttering about with temperate nonsense like a warm, wet October and an early November with temperatures in the 30s °F, and I’ve rarely had to bother with a coat, until today. It’s about time!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
That sounds amazing. I’m honestly getting sick of this 80 degree weather in late November.
What’s this Farenheit rubbish in real terms?
Not to make it sounds worse, but in my hometown of Hallock, MN it was -13F this morning.
Dad said his car started like a charm.
(Now if he could only get it to start like a car.)
Fahrenheit rubbish ?
Goes along with all of that other incomprehensible rubbish like lbs, inches, feet and such.
But here it is: take your fahrenheit degrees, subtract 32 and divide the rest by 1.8 and you get the real temperature. Been doing it for years…
The real challenge is to get any kind of meaning out of 4 feet and 3/8 inches…
True, but unwieldy without a calculator, if you want to just do the arithmetic in your head. Double the temp and add 30 was my “close-enough” heuristic when I lived in Germany, so subtract 30 and then halve the difference would work to convert it the other way.
Ha! Here people were still going to the pool in October in 30 degrees Celsius. It is still not down to zero Celsius but gets close at night….
It’s great. I’ve been looking forward to the snow all year. We have around and inch down here in Fargo so far. Now I get to wear the YakTrax and the hat with the Deputy Dawg ear covers.
As Vaughn Monroe sings at the end of Die Hard II
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…”
BTW, speaking of swing, I came across the ideal piece for PZ – Dance of the Octopus by vibraphonist Red Norvo.
Shhh, The Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers monitor this blog.
I’ve just looked in my atlas, and you are further north than Toronto, roughly as far north as Montreal. Brrr.
Does it just freeze now and stay frozen until spring?
I’m in the UK. We might get snow, we might not. It will mainly be grey and dull. At night, the clouds and the city combine to remove the starscape entirely. I can see how proper winters would be nice.
I live in Florida, after growing up in Washington state. Whenever I utter statements along those lines, people look at me crazy. I’m sure they are thinking, why would you WANT it to be cold.
We Northern types usually want it to be cold because it makes people who ask such questions go away.
Despite being across the US’ “northern border,” I’m actually further south than PZ by a long shot (approximately the same latitude as central Oregon!), but it’s been colder than that here because I’m also further east. I just loooove when the jet stream does one of those big zig-zags across the continent and shuffles all the warm air off to the northwest… *grumble grumble*
If it stayed in the positive numbers in degrees C all winter long, I’d be a happy person. While I don’t mind snow per se, where there’s snow, there’s ice, and ice and I have a long history of armed skirmishes.
Yeah, when you look at the weather maps and see that big bulge of arctic air pushed down over the midwest, we’re usually somewhere in the middle of it. Pretty soon it’ll drop below freezing and just stay there until the spring arrives.
PZ – winter greeted us with a slap yesterday – 28 C (that’s about 20 below F). But hey, it’s a dry cold!
Up here on the Canuckian prairies it is -22C with a -35C wind chill and 5cm of snow on the way.
I would be more than happy to collect samples of this cold weather and ship it collect* to any who desire the experience.
*Plus a small handling fee.
I’d like some snow. I almost never feel cold when there’s snow out. It’s this ten-below-freezing in the morning with no precipitation crap that bothers me. Or always hovering at just above freezing and rainy and wet all the time, but I think that’s mostly a November thing. We get snow in Boise sometimes, but never when it’s cold enough to actually last.
Here in southern Italy, we’re having highs in the mid to high 50’sF (mid-‘teens C). When the wind starts blowing the smog away, you can finally see the mountains. It can be really beautiful here in the winter.
I guess that’s what they mean by “Mediterranean Climate.”
We northern types like it to freeze so we can stop worrying about the mud. We had 2″ (5.1 cm) of snow on Thanksgiving here on teh south shore of Lake Ontario.
Here in Texas, my football game was constantly being interrupted by a news crawler announcing a “winter weather advisory.” The urgent news was temps in the low 40s (F) and light rain.
Snow and -16°C (3°F) here in Edmonton. I’m happy as long as it stays above -20°C. (I’d be happiest if we had the climate of Honolulu. In fact, I used to wear loud Hawaiian shirts and tell people I was hoping to fool God into returning me to my homeland.)
Normally, we’d freeze in mid to late October and stay frozen until Spring, but this year it’s been warm right up till yesterday.
At 8 o’clock this morning in Browerville Minnesota the temp was minus 2 F, minus 18 C (1/2 hour past sunrise). At last, winter is here and I can wear my beautiful heavy sweaters and mittens. Time to load the car with survival gear in case one becomes stuck out on the road. In years when the November, December, and January temps stay around freezing, not lower, and there’s no snow for skiing and other outdoor winter sports, folks around here begin to go about their daily activities with bewildered expressions, unfocused and listless. Really pathetic, being unable to cope with “unseasonably warm” weather! Tonight, the Alberta Clipper is to roar through the area again and bring temps even lower than minus 18 C. Yea! Walking down the sidewalk in town, everyone’s wearing a knowing, gleeful smile: we’ll have a “real” winter this year! Honestly.
Temperature scales ….
F is 5/9 ofC degree in size, and the two scales cross over at -40.
So ….
F-to-C …
ADD 40
divide by 9
multiply by 5
subtract 40
C-to-F
Add 40
divide by 5
multiply by 9
subtract 40
So -17.7C, then ……
The past few years we’ve had fall temperatures all the way up to New Years, and then lots of snow in February and March. So it was real nice to actually get 5 inches or so of snow last Wednesday.
The trouble with conversion factors is that you’re always trying to do math in your head rather than evaluate the temperatures in the unfamiliar system by how they feel. So I try to think of it roughly this way:
0-10 C: Cold winter afternoon with coat and maybe gloves to mild fall afternoon.
10-20 C: Brisk jacket-wearing weather to pleasant spring weather.
20-30 C: Light jacket or flannel shirt weather to pleasant summer conditions.
30-40 C: Summer weather, oppressively hot at upper end.
Bear in mind that this is from the perspective of someone in a dry, temperate climate. I also have no scale below 0 because it rarely ever gets below -10 where I live.
Ha ha northern hemisphere suckers! Here in Queensland it’s a comfortable 28 C with not a single cloud in the sky. I know there isn’t a single cloud in sight because I just went outside to check, chuckling as I went. Sometimes it just rules too much to live in Australia.
I find it interesting how people evaluate temperature based on what they’re used to.
In Edmonton, where our winter temperature averages between -10C and -20C and a temperature of +40C would be a serious heat wave, we consider 20-30 being shorts and T-shirt weather (hell, people around here will wear shorts and T-shirts for quick trips in the car when the temperature hovers around freezing) with anything over 25 C requiring a pool or a patio with copious amounts of cold beer.
Yeah Brownian, I live in Edmonton too. It’s funny seeing those teenagers at the bus stop in the morning wearing a sweater or jean jacket when it’s -20C and blowing snow trying to look cool without looking cold.
Of course no one really gets seriously concerned about the cold until you have to worry about stepping in puddles of liquid nitrogen.
I work in electronics manufacturing and we have had quite a few Americans come up from “down south” and they all ask about why the cars are all plugged in. They think we all drive electric cars!
Apparently Winnipeg is the coldest city of its size, with the possible exception of Ulan Bator, Mongolia (which is colder but may nat be as large).
COnversion: just wait until it’s -40 and you don’t have to convert.
Oh, easy. A foot is 30.48 cm, and an inch is 2.54 cm. So usually you can treat a foot as either 30 cm or 1/3 m. (The errors this introduces are staggeringly large when it comes to dinosaur lengths, however.)
At least it would be easy if I were capable of doing primitive calculations in my head at any reasonable speed.
Flannel shirt? I used to wear flannel shirts in winter, from +5 °C downward… ~:-| From 20 °C upward I don’t need a jacket. After all, that’s average room temperature.
I agree, but plenty of people consider 30 °C oppressively hot, too. 37 (or rather 36) is body temperature after all.
Oh, easy. A foot is 30.48 cm, and an inch is 2.54 cm. So usually you can treat a foot as either 30 cm or 1/3 m. (The errors this introduces are staggeringly large when it comes to dinosaur lengths, however.)
At least it would be easy if I were capable of doing primitive calculations in my head at any reasonable speed.
Flannel shirt? I used to wear flannel shirts in winter, from +5 °C downward… ~:-| From 20 °C upward I don’t need a jacket. After all, that’s average room temperature.
I agree, but plenty of people consider 30 °C oppressively hot, too. 37 (or rather 36) is body temperature after all.
Okay, so I was a bit hasty in my characterization of 20 C. Plus, I wear flannel shirts nearly every day, and unless it’s pretty warm out, I don’t really like having bare arms.
Ugh!
I know what you mean.. I live in Las Vegas and the lows have been dipping into the 40s. I have to wear a windbreaker at night now. How I long for spring!