5 February 2009
It’s getting a little nippy out there
Posted by Jessica Ball
Having lived in the mid-Atlantic my entire life, I’m finding it a bit hard to get adjusted to how cold it can get around here sometimes. (If any of you live in Alaska or the Dakotas or Minnesota or other such places, you’re allowed to scoff, but I’m sure glad I’m not living where you are!)
For example, here’s what I saw when I checked Weather.com this morning:
Being a good scientist, of course, I switched over to metric:
And, because I’ve got to have something to amuse myself in my windowless workspace, I checked XKCD’s “Guide to converting to metric”:
Yep, that’s about what I said this morning. I’m hoping we don’t get to the “spit goes ‘clink'” point.
Jessica Ball is a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, researching volcanic hydrothermal systems and stability, and doing science communication for the California Volcano Observatory. She previously worked at the Geological Society of America's Washington DC Policy Office, learning about the intersection of Earth science and legislative affairs. Her Mendenhall postdoc and PhD focused on how water affects the stability of volcanoes, and involved both field investigations and numerical modeling applications. Her blogging covers a range of topics, from her experiences in academic geosciences to science outreach and communication to her field and lab work in volcanology.
Ha ha!Sorry to laugh … but I grew up there and went through it. Good times.
hehe I live in Fairbanks, AK and the funny thing is -40F and -40C are the same! And yes its really cold!
Oddly, I found the XKCD temperature scale very useful lately, when someone asked how cold it was at altitude for a skydive (it was fuckfuckfuckcold).Shouldn’t you add a few temperatures to the top of the list, like ‘temperature while standing on lava’ and ‘temperature inside caldera’? 🙂