Lord Kelvin snickers in the afterlife

Temperatures have been distinctly below normal for most of the last week, and are about to become more so; moreover, we're expecting snow — not a blizzard or anything, but not a mere dusting either — to drop upon us tomorrow.

Which wouldn't be a big deal, of course, except that local media are anxious to impress upon us the severity of it all, largely because it's been nine or ten months since we had any winter precipitation at all and they assume that we've totally forgotten what it's like in the interim.

Then there's this:

Emphasis added. This is the first really compelling argument for the adoption of the metric system I've seen in some time: with the normal high for this time of year about 10 degrees Celsius and the expected high tomorrow about -8, nobody is going to look at those numbers and conclude that it's going to be twice as cold as usual. (Comparing to absolute zero, the only way to obtain a meaningful comparison, the difference is about six percent, regardless of whose temperature scale you use.)

And you know, I'm not even grumbling about the farging snow: we haven't had any measurable precipitation in this neck of the woods since Halloween.

Hmmm. I just spun over to Lileks, and he said this:

Maybe that's the proper attitude.