It’s cold!

January 11, 2016 • 6:19 am

When I was a wee kid, my father used to tell me one of his patented jokes, always at bedtime. Here’s how it went:

Floyd: Jerry, did you ever hear about the kee-kee bird? It lives at the North Pole!

Little Jerry:  No, dad. Why do they call it the kee-kee bird?

Floyd: Because it sits up there at the Pole and calls, “Kee kee kee kee KEE-RIST, it’s cold!

And so it is in Chicago today; I damn near froze my face off on the 11-minute walk to work:

Fahrenheit:Photo on 1-11-16 at 6.11 AM

Celsius (note the minus sign):

Photo on 1-11-16 at 6.12 AM

At that’s not even near as cold as it gets!

But of course, that’s nothing. When I was a lad in Yorkshire, the temperature used to be close to absolute zero when we walked to school (uphill both ways).

50 thoughts on “It’s cold!”

  1. You’re mirror is defective. Everything is reversed!

    Cold morning in South Florida too. 57F at 7 A.M, only getting to a high of 72F today.

    1. Up here by Daytona it’s 43º. Coldest I’ve ever seen: two weekends in Chicago in 1982 when it was -23º or -80º with windchill.

    3. I’m in South Florida as well. One thing you’ll notice about these rare cold days is that they’re strongly correlated with north winds, suggesting that the air is coming from the colder places we moved away from.

  2. prefer that to what we had last weekend (40’s – celsius) and the coming weekend – 39 – probably 40 again – celsius. to say nothing of the terrible fires down in the south west

  3. Well, here in Melbourne, Australia, this is the seven-day outlook:

    Mon: Max 35C Min 18C
    Tue: Max 29C Min 16C
    Wed: Max 41C Mib 16C
    Thu: Max 21C Min 16C
    Fri: Max 20C Min 11C
    Sat: Max 24C Min 10C

    Quite a variety, particularly Wed and Thu.

      1. Much the same here in Adelaide. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday 30 C or above, then a cool change.
        In December we had five consecutive days over 40 C…..
        We hope for a paucity of thunderstorms or of arsonists.

  4. Professor, you can take screenshots of your phone by holding the power button and the down volume button together for a couple of seconds (on most android phones – although there’s enough variation there that you’d probably want to google your particular make/model/OS number) or by doing the same for the power and home buttons on a iPhone.

    3. If the Swedes have that saying, they stole it from the Noggins.
      Actually, I seem to remember seeing it in an advert for Helly Hansen (a Noggin foul-weather clothing brand), many years ago, though whether it originated there or was merely being used by them I don’t know.

          1. Obviously not Swix if it was -11F – Swix purple is a near-freezing wax. I was out for a nice classic ski last week at -23C/-9F – Swix VR30 was the wax du jour of the day.

      2. Timely, I just saw the Nth attempt at modeling ice friction. (Which has been somewhat of an obsession among Scandinavians.)

        Seems this time they got it right, the theory predicts the friction in cases where the old ones failed. [A Linköping University work, IIRC.)

        The interesting thing was that the very first hypothesis was correct, it is friction and not pressure that melts the ice as has been a popular idea later. The physics of water filled ice is such that you can friction melt ice and have good ski “före” down to about -35 degC.

        But when the Scott expedition failed in Antarctica they experienced down to -40 degC. They reported that skiing then was like skiing on sand, confirming the model, a circumstance that contributed to the catastrophe.

          1. My cross country skis require waxing & there is nothing more disappointing then spending copious amounts of time, muscling in wax to your skis only to find out the weather has changed & you have the wrong kind applied so your skiing will be horrible; you’ll either have no glide & gather snow all over the bottom of your skis or you’ll glide too much & slip all over the place.

  6. “When I was a kid in Yorkshire, the temperature used to be close to absolute zero when we walked to school (uphill both ways)”.

    ooh, you were lucky.When I were a lad ……

    4. It was so cold where I lived, each neighborhood had its own glacier.

      It was so cold that when you let a match the flame would freeze solid. You had to put it in your armpit to warm it up.

      It was so cold my shadow would freeze to the sidewalk and me old Pa would have to shovel it up so I could walk to school.

      1. Laces out! I truly feel bad for Blair Walsh…but being a Seahawks fan, I can’t say I didn’t jump for joy.

  10. Never could understand why someone would live in a place that gets that cold, unless they absolutely had to.

  11. But of course, that’s nothing. When I was a kid in Yorkshire, the temperature used to be close to absolute zero when we walked to school (uphill both ways).

    Pshaw! Such luxury. When I was a lad, entropy was reversed, and temperatures were below absolute zero….

    It’s actually really winter here, such as our winters are. It was very, very wet this past week. This coming week it’s clear skies every day…but the highs are only in the lower 60s and the lows in the 30s. Probably won’t freeze again this season, though it still might. But last week I was scraping an eighth of an inch of hard frost off the windshield one morning….

    b&

  13. Here on the Southern tip of Vancouver Island (British Columbia, Canada) we just finished an uncharacteristic cold snap. It was quite annoying, I had to put on a jacket, toque and gloves when I went outside.

    It was below freezing for about two weeks.

    This used to occur every year when I was young (30 – 40 years ago) but this is the first I’ve seen in quite some time.
    At least this is how I remember it. Usually I have to dress for rain rather than freezing temperatures.

    It’s back up to 7 – 8 c or 46 – 47 f.

      1. haha! Never put baklava on your head, and never eat baklava while wearing a balaclava…also very messy.

Comments are closed.