A Little Taste Of Winter

We're in the middle of our second cold snap here in Vancouver and it's still November.  Well, it's the last day of November but technically it's still fall.  But it was minus nine this morning and we are not in Saskatchewan if you know what I mean.  I have looked at the fourteen day forecast and it is going to begin to warm up starting today and the next couple of weeks will be around seasonal values, or between five and ten Celsius.  I still sometimes use the word Celsius, as though it's something unusual.  I have done this since I was seventeen when metric became official in Canada.  But I still think in imperial.  But who the heck was Celsius, anyway?  I looked him up on Wikipedia (what did we do before Wikipedia?  How did we cope?) and here is this bit of information: 

In 1742, Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701–1744) created a temperature scale which was the reverse of the scale now known by the name "Celsius": 0 represented the boiling point of water, while 100 represented the freezing point of water. In his paper Observations of two persistent degrees on a thermometer, he recounted his experiments showing that the melting point of ice is essentially unaffected by pressure. He also determined with remarkable precision how the boiling point of water varied as a function of atmospheric pressure. He proposed that the zero point of his temperature scale, being the boiling point, would be calibrated at the mean barometric pressure at mean sea level. This pressure is known as one standard atmosphere. The BIPM's 10th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) later defined one standard atmosphere to equal precisely 1013250dynes per square centimetre (101.325 kPa).^[4]

Are you still awake?  That was pretty dull going, eh?  Now if I was doing a brief bio about this guy I would have included information about his marital status, what kind of a husband was he, how did he treat his kids, what kind of food did he like.  What did they use in place of toilet paper in eighteenth century Sweden.  You know, interesting stuff.  This is the problem with brief bios about famous scientists.  We're not given a single clue about what they were like as human beings: as though whatever went on in their heads was completely divorced from the way they lived their lives.  No wonder our civilization is so screwed up.

We have snow now.  Just an inch or two, and I can't remember the metric measurement.  I still think in imperial as I said but I try to speak in kilometres and grams anyway, but not with a lot of success, I'm afraid.  I think I also like the human scale of imperial, you know, one foot being the length of the foot of an English king, one inch being the length of, well, who only knows.

So it is still ass-biting cold but you know, we could do a lot worse here, and besides, it gives the spoiled rich kids with the enormous good fortune of living here something to complain about.




^Are