Fun Things To Do In Cold Weather.
When it’s minus 43 ° C. (that’s -45 ° F.), you can take some boiling water, throw it up in the air and watch it freeze before it hits the ground. You can see the whole video here. It says in the article
Several times, Ingrid takes water directly from the boiling kettle into a cup and out into the cold. And it turns to snow every time.
In more fun cold things:
Though it’s only -20-ish here, all the fuses in my car blew this morning. I’m hoping they fix it before everyone goes home early.
Other news about the cold weather … No, wait. This one’s about Britain. In today’s Guardian it says:
Temperature in Scottish Highlands dips to -21C, almost as low as south pole, as snow prolongs disruption
But it’s the summer at the South Pole, you nitwits.
Tomorrow: Sixty Minus Degrees.
A Bad Guide 
So, is -20 cold enough for the spit test?
Hmm. I’ll go out and see …
… Nope.
Thanks!
However, a Scottish village (I didn’t get the name) registered -22.3C last night, which the BBC says “was colder than Norway”. Well, apparently your part of it, anyway, AJP “Red Nose”.
Idle thought: Is Trondheim Trond’s home ?
Norway, “south pole”, … whatever.
Is Trondheim Trond’s home ?
It has its own dialect, called Trondisk. Very difficult to understand.
Did you know that Sweden’s answer to Detroit, the place where Volvos and Saabs are (were) manufactured, is called Trollhättan? It always strikes me as a funny name /image. Nearby is the Swedish film industry, in an area known as Trollywood.
Summer or not, “It sits atop a featureless, windswept, icy plateau at an altitude of 2,835 meters (9,306 ft), about 1,300 km (800 mi) from the nearest sea at McMurdo Sound. The ice is estimated to be about 2,700 meters (9,000 ft) thick at the Pole…”
That’s right. According to Wikipedia
Nevertheless, the South Pole is a hell of a lot warmer than the North Pole at this time of year. Whereas the S.P. is -21 C.,
What? That’s the same temperature as parts of Noway. It may be like the south pole in Scotland, but it’s like the North Pole here.
Trollhättan? It always strikes me as a funny name /image.
Do trolls wear hats? How did Manhattan get its name? Ishmael (p. 1 of <Moby Dick) calls it “The Isle of the Manhattoes”. Bishop Hatto? No, that was the mouse tower thing am Rhein. Does Scandinavian Santa have a workshop, with elves? No, wait, that’s not the same as trolls anyway. Elf ‘n’ Safety sounds like Volvo, though.
Pardon the nutty frame of mind; I’m whiling away the time in a hospital waiting area while my 83-year-old mother gets prepared for the installation of a pacemaker. I expect that she is keeping them well entertained in there; she’s quite a kidder.
My mother’s 83 too.
And you have the same birthday as one of my sisters.
What’s this about birthdays ? Where did people find out about other ? Are you all in astrological cahoots with each other ?
Are presents being handed out ?
… about each other …
Is Trondheim Trond’s home ?
That’s what the name says, but alas. It’s Trond’s wife’s childhood home, though.
The town’s name was originally the name of the landscape, roughly what we now call Trøndelag, originally “tronds’ law”~”the league of tronds”. Here trond is an old demonym, what we now call trønder
The etymology of trond is not quite established. Well, it’s from a participle meaning “thriving” or something like that, but it’s not to be known whether the man’s name and the demonym are parallel formations from the verb or the man’s name stems from using the demonym as a byname.
It has its own dialect, called Trondisk. Very difficult to understand.
Trøndersk. The dialect(s) are characterized by apocope, palatal stops, and jamvekt (balancing), a form of vowel harmony, all in their most radical forms east and north of Trondheim.
Did you know that Sweden’s answer to Detroit, the place where Volvos and Saabs are (were) manufactured, is called Trollhättan?
I don’t know the actual etymology (and I’ll have to hurry home and make pancakes to hungry women and children) but superficially it’s “the troll hood”. Hättan is the definite form of a feminine derived from hatt “hat”, Norwegian hette f. Little Red Riding Hood is called (Lille) Rødhette in Norwegian.
I honestly don’t remember how I happened to learn that Crown’s birthday is June 8. We have lots of time to plan the party.
Well, now I have to mention Hatten är din (YouTube) for those who haven’t encountered this ancient internet meme.
I often mention that Frank Lloyd Wright shares my birthday. Recently I discovered someone else; I don’t think it was your sister, unless she’s a well-known architect. I can’t remember, unfortunately. It was someone I really like; Borromini, perhaps. No, never mind, I think it must have been Tim Berners-Lee.
I think Language’s birthday is 4th July. We liked hearing a Swedish song that’s not by ABBA.
No, no, July 1, exactly halfway through the year. (My mother’s was July 14 and my father’s July 11; we were a Julian family until my brothers came along and ruined everything.)
jamvekt (balancing), a form of vowel harmony
Too quick. jamvekt “(syllable) balance” is a prerequisite for jamning “(vowel) leveling”.
I think our host should add a feature to his blog so that we all can schedule our congratulations now and won’t have to remember. No, actually, he should just add a feature that posts greetings on the day from each of us to save us the trouble. Hey, I want a feature like that in my e-mail adress book so that I could get the attention I deserve from everyone on the list.
I’m sure they meant South Poland.
Nobody in the Arab world would be caught dead wearing those outfits.
As far as birth order, being the oldest sucks, but when I complained to my parents they merely commiserated, both of them also being the oldest in their families.
Kron has the same birthday as my father-in-law, two days after my own birthday. Last year we briefly discussed turning the June 6-8 holiday into a three day trans-global bacchanal, but fell asleep before we could do any serious carousing.
This is the sort of thing (“Sortofthing” sounds like a Scandinavian parliament, but I digress) that makes people despair of Elf ‘n’ Safety.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/5693337/the-health-and-safety-culture-claims-another-victim.thtml
Sorry, Hat, but July 2, my wife’s birthday, is the exact middle day of the year.
Mine is July 3, shared with George M. Cohan (who wrote the immortal lines I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy … born on the Fourth of July) and Kafka.
July 2, my wife’s birthday, is the exact middle day of the year
That can be true only in non-intercalary years, i.e. 3/4 of the time. A leap year contains an even number of days, so there is no middle day of that year – not for anybody.
I wondered who was going to say that. Yes, 3/4 (or rather 299/400) of the time the midpoint occurs not at noon on July 2 but at midnight between July 1 and 2.
Boy, I’m glad you sorted that out. How embarrassing. So 1-4 July is a time we can all look forward to. HA HA! Language is born on the same day as Strunk! William Strunk Jr., American grammarian (1869 – 1946). And one of the Chompskys. That’s something I don’t remember reading about at Language Hat. Who else knows the date of their birth, here? Just so that we can make fun of you.
at midnight between July 1 and 2.
And I was born at 10:30 PM on the 1st. Unless your wife was born between midnight and 1:30 AM, I win.
We’ll need some kind of proof, of course.
Doing a little research on this, I find I share my birthday with lots of people I feel I have nothing in common with, like Onassis, David Lynch and (yikes!) Ivana Trump.
I find I share my Aug. 12 birthday with King Christian III of Denmark/Norway, and architect Jean Nouvel (for AJP’s interest)…
.. and a rapper called Del “The Funkee Homosapian,” among others. Wonders will never cease …
It was a Kim Philby trick, you know; on meeting someone for the first time he’d get round to asking them their birthday and then declare “Good Lord, that’s my birthday too.” Are any of you guys Russki spies?
299/400
I mean 301/400, dammit.
My head is not on straight. I meant to say, 301/400 of the time it’s noon on the 2nd and 99/400 of the time it’s midnight the night before. You lose, Hat.
There are 400 days in the year now? That makes my brain hurt. I think I’ll take some more Nyquil and go back to bed.
I think he’s talking about three times out of four, because of leap years. There’s a lot to be said for having decimal years, though: if August occurred in the spring, say, it would make a pleasant change.
he’d get round to asking them their birthday and then declare “Good Lord, that’s my birthday too.”
He was finally caught by resentful people whose birthdays he subsequently never remembered.
bruessel: I share my birthday with lots of people I feel I have nothing in common with, like Onassis, David Lynch and (yikes!) Ivana Trump
If you don’t like David Lynch there’s also Fellini & Buzz Aldrin; there’s really someone for everyone on 20 January.
if August occurred in the spring, say, it would make a pleasant change.
Crown, the first time you published that sentence, it contained “November”, not “August”. Now, I have no beef with the sovereign editorial rights of blog authors. But I do wonder what the reason was, in this particular case, for your exercise of said editorial sovereignty.
So what’s that 99/400 stuff? Leap seconds? I don’t think that kind of math is going to fool Hat, but at this point I still would rather just stay medicated. I mean, either you’re born on a leap year or you’re not, there’s no percents.
Once empty’s mom gets out of the recovery room he’ll think differently, recalculate.
I share my birthday with Susan Sontag, Ethel Merman and Batista. On that day Gibbon died, as well as Ma Barker and John Mortimer. That’s a lot of good material to be getting on with.
Crown, the first time you published that sentence, it contained “November”, not “August”.
And in fact November is a better example, but I thought that possibly, due to decimalisation, Nov. & Dec. might have to be abolished. Sorry about that, we’re moving Xmas to October, the tenth month.
Actually, never mind. We’ll abolish Jan. & Feb., nobody likes them anyway except probably you & Bruessel, who have birthdays then. And Jamessal. But that way October – December could become the eighth – tenth months again.
I share my birthday with Susan Sontag
Jan. 16, then. You & Bruessel are just coming up. Perhaps you could celebrate together on the eighteenth — in Luxembourg, say. No, Maastricht seems about half way.
301/400 of the time it’s noon on the 2nd and 99/400 of the time it’s midnight the night before.
empty is trumping my correction with a further correction.
If year X is a leap year, then X + 4*n is also a leap year, for n = 1,…, 99. However, X + 400 is not a leap year, by official convention. That is a correction for the over-correction that occurs when a whole day is added in leap years. Adding a day every four years doesn’t bring the conventional calendar and the astronomical calendar into exact alignment, but causes the conventional calendar to be slightly ahead of what it should be. Over 400 years, that overshoot will have gradually accumulated to a duration of about 24 hours, so after 400 years no leap day is added, allowing the two calendars to fall back into more-or-less alignment.
So, over the course of 400 years, you have (400/4) – 1 = 99 leap years, and 400 – 99 = 301 non-leap-years. That’s the origin of empty’s fractions.
Thank you, Stu.
Specifically, the year 1900 was not a leap year but the year 2000 was, and the plan is that 2100, 2200, 2300 will be, but not 2400 …
My mother is long since out of the recovery room but still in the hospital until they have both X-rayed and “interrogated” her new device; I hope to spring her from the joint around midday.
Whoops, I mean, 2100, 2200, and 2300 will not be leap years, but 2400 will be a leap year. You see, I just can’t be relied on not to stumble in these matters; it’s a bit like “daylight savings time”.
Would it help if we adopt the French revolutionaries’ ten-month calendar, and maybe also their ten-hour day? Nah, probably not.
Sure, but I wouldn’t start again at year zero; it smacks too much of unsuccessful revolutions. And I certainly wouldn’t change all the names, that’s a typical mistake revolutionaries always make that turns everyone against them. That and the executions.
You lose, Hat.
Curses, foiled again! Maybe if I stopped wearing the black hat, this wouldn’t happen so often…
Wrong again, I am. It was a 12-month calendar — but with new months, as you say, and exactly 30 days per month; I guess the extra 5 or 6 days were bunched all together and used for some annual festivities?
Maybe the 30-day months were also divided into 10-day weeks, with ten new names for the days?
I’m pretty sure there was a new decimal approach to hours and minutes, too. I once saw a clock in a museum somewhere (Cambridge, England?) that used that system. Ten hours of one hundred minutes each? That and the weeks would take a lot of getting used to.
There’s a lot of money to be made by watch producers, though.
I think the whole lot ought to be metric, you could change metres/sec. into km/hr in your head (actually YOU can probably do that already, but I can’t).
a new decimal approach to hours and minutes
Yes, indeed.
Boston’s MFA has a decimal sundial.
I saw a decimal Breguet pocketwatch in a dealer’s catalogue once but it sold pretty fast.
Now that I have graduated to Mucinex and my head is clear of cough syrup, I can make some calculations. Let’s see, from midnight Jan 1 to midnight June 30 is only 181 days this year, so the halfway point of the year in hours would be 365/2=182.5, or noon on July 2. If you count it in months, the halfway point is still July 1 though, and I think that’s a very good memory key. We wouldn’t want Kron to forget about Strunk by next summer, now, would we?
If we changed the standard unit of time (or, or perhaps and, of distance) we could simplify Einstein’s famous equation to E=M.
Boston’s MFA has a decimal sundial.
I’ve been thinking for some years of making a sundial. A decimal one is what I’ll make, what a great idea. I’ll have to wait until this summer, though.
Here’s one that sold for $6,500. It’s not Breguet, though.
the halfway point of the year in hours would be 365/2=182.5, or noon on July 2. If you count it in months, the halfway point is still July 1 though,
One half of a (typical calendar) year is 182.5 days, i.e. from the Happy New Year moment to noon on 7/2. If you did the calculation in hours instead of days you would of course get the same conclusion. If you perversely did the calculation in (odd-sized) months, then the midpoint would be the midnight between 6/30 and 7/1, right?
A pleasant nerdly pastime is to work out your birth moment rather than your birth day, using “astronomical” years of uniform length. So, for example, if Hat was
born at 10:30 PM on July 1, 1949 then he turned
60 at 10:30 PM on July 1, 2009 and he will turn
61 at 4:30 AM on July 2, 2010,
62 at 10:30 AM on July 2, 2011,
63 at 4:30 PM on July 1, 2012, and
64 at 10:30 PM on July 1, 2013.
Here I took the uniform year to be 365 days and 6 hours; a more nerdly and more nearly accurate calculation would use a year length a few minutes shorter.
A pleasant nerdly pastime is to work out your birth moment
But only possible if you can get your mother to remember whether you were born at 2.30 a.m. or 2.30 p.m.–this is one of the advantages of the 24-hour clock, of course.
If we changed the standard unit of time (or, or perhaps and, of distance) we could simplify Einstein’s famous equation to E=M.
If you want to stick with the good old foot for distance then your unit of time will be roughly a nanosecond.
As long as you’re arranging for the speed of light to be 1, you might want to do the same for Planck’s constant by choosing a suitable new unit of mass. And if you want the universal gravitational constant to be 1 as well, then you have no choice: there must be a unique way of choosing units of distance, time, and mass so as to fulfill all three of these requirements (c=1, h=1, G=1) at once. I think I did the calculation when I was in school, but I forget the result.
we could simplify Einstein’s famous equation to E=M
I don’t see how you get the speed of light to disappear. I’ll have to take your word for it Dearie, I know you’re a scientist.
… Ø got in in front of me.
That’s amazing, Ø, you can actually get younger.
I remember looking through this once. It looked like a lot of fun. No ten hour clocks though.
http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Wooden-Sundials-Milton-Stoneman/dp/0486241416/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263111236&sr=8-12
BTW, isn’t it “forty below”?
c=1, h=1, G=1
I had thought a little bit in that direction, but couldn’t get past the following hurdle. It seems to me one couldn’t arrange to have E = M, because the units would be wrong, no matter what you redefine the constants c, h, G to be. At least the units are as they should be in the equation E = Mc^2, namely mass*length^2/duration^2. With E = M, you would have to add the clarification “in terms of quantity, neglecting the units”. So, for clarity, surely you should stick with E = Mc^2, even if c is defined to be 1 length’/duration’, for some redefined length’ and duration’.
It almost seems as if it’s more than mere convenience in physics to define, and work with, constants that are not 1. In other words, constants equal to 1 are to be avoided. Wherever a constant = 1 seems to turn up, you may come to the conclusion that you have been trying to compare two things expressed in concepts which you had assumed to be different, but which in fact it might be more appropriate to consider as equivalent. Isn’t that the very message contained in E = Mc^2, even though c is not 1 length/duration ?
I think the idea of trying to redefine things so that c=1, h=1, G=1 is merely a Physics 101 exercise to fix more firmly in the mind the interrelationships between various equations, constants and units. Having completed the exercise at time t1, you should be in exactly the same place as you started from at time t0, in terms of the knowledge about the world you had at time t0. What you will have done in the meantime is only to have acquired more knowledge about your knowledge. That is not nothing, in fact I suspect that it is all one ever accomplishes by thinking. Which raises questions such as: “what kind of knowledge is that ?”, or “so how could I distinguish my knowledge about the world from my knowledge about my knowledge ?”. The short answer to which is: “you tell me !”.
Aren’t these questions of epistemology?
You bet. And there are, and have been, many different brands of “epistemology”. But epistemologies are themselves forms of knowledge. Only those epistemologies which can be applied to themselves without contradiction – or with productive contradictions – have any value. Apart from what can be learned from them as a pathologist might.
Any epistemologist who thinks he has found an absolute vantage point from which to make incontrovertible, true statements about the world is worth reading only as a basket-case in the history of ideas.
What I am advocating is more like turning and turning in a widening gyre, taking only polite notice of the falconer, and chucking the ceremony of innocence into the dustbin.
But epistemologies are themselves forms of knowledge. Only those epistemologies which can be applied to themselves without contradiction – or with productive contradictions – have any value.
I think this is a moral judgment. It’s saying only statements that are perfectly resolved are worth anything, (and that is where a lot of people run into trouble, especially with questions of moral philosophy).
It’s saying only statements that are perfectly resolved are worth anything
Is that what you take me to have been claiming ?! In fact I am claiming exactly the opposite: that any kind of thought that takes itself to be perfectly resolved is overweening and blinkered !
Maybe it was misleading of me to write “epistemologies which can be applied to themselves without contradiction“. The significant part comes just after that, in “– or with productive contradictions –”.
The important phrase was “epistemologies which can be applied to themselves”. That means, for example, a theory which can give some account of itself, instead of claiming to based on “self-evident principles” that are intended to exclude the theory from being itself subject to scrutiny and doubt in terms of the theory itself.
More concretely: a theory of morality that can give no account of moral theorists, except to claim that they have “privileged access” to what they claim. Or that runs into contradictions or “anomalies” when it tries to give such an account. Or that avoids the issue entirely.
I prefer a theory of morality with built-in, explicit mechanisms to deal with its own limitations. Not limitations in the sense of boundaries marking the edge of what the theory claims to be sure and certain knowledge up to those boundaries. But limitations in the sense that the theory provide an explicit account of how it is, and in what way, the theory can provide something which can be regarded as knowledge, but not “absolute” knowledge.
Of course, you don’t have to have an explicit theory of morality to instill morality in the children you bring up. But a theory of morality should have more to say about itself than “I’m right and you’re wrong”, or “everything is relative and therefore worthless, even myself”.
Oh, I knew I was going to get into trouble here. What I’m talking about, what I can’t stand, is (for example) moral arguments about animal rights being dismissed because of some paradox: lions eat goats therefore why defend lions, kind of thing. Aka “throwing the baby out with the bath water”.
BTW, isn’t it “forty below”?
“Forty minus” is, for me, an odd way of spelling or pronouncing “-40”
“Forty minus degrees” is even odder because it has a crash blossom quality, briefly suggesting to me that something is about to be subtracted from forty.
“Minus forty” is more idiomatic than “forty minus” for me as a name for -40, whether or not the subject is temperature. In particular,
“minus forty degrees” is unobjectionable.
“Negative forty” is the “official” way of saying -40, but nobody would ever use it in talking about the weather.
I.e., “negative forty degrees” sounds stilted.
“Forty below zero” is totally idiomatic, and
“forty below” is a common short form for the latter.
That’s amazing, Ø, you can actually get younger.
Alternatively, one can save all the scraps of time that one can’t decide what to do with, and give them to people who were born on February 29.
“Forty minus degrees” is a direct translation of the Norwegian førti minus grader. That’s just the way we talk around here but it’s no more whacky than “forty below”, in my opinion. Forty what, below what? “Below” is actually more confusing, because with Fahrenheit you don’t know whether it’s “below freezing” or “below zero” that’s meant.
moral arguments about animal rights being dismissed because of some paradox: lions eat goats therefore why defend lions, kind of thing
I’m not sure what kind of animal rights argument you have in mind. Could it be that you meant to write “lions eat goats, therefore why defend goats” ? What kind of defence, i.e. against what argument, would involve “defending lions because they eat goats” ?
Also, what paradox ?
The paradox of defending lions from being hunted when lions themselves hunt.
Don’t see any paradox. Lions hunt non-human animals for food. The “hunting” of lions by men is not hunting in the same sense, since men do not want the animals for food, but for other reasons, such as for a safari adventure.
Note that killing animals is not necessarily rejected by animal-rightists. All you have to do is call it culling.
Stu, I agree. To choose units of distance, time, and mass in the way I described is not to arrange for all of the three fundamental constants to equal 1 (although I may have loosely expressed myself that way), but rather to arrange for each of them to be 1 unit. And I was going to say that to do so seems like a silly exercise, of little value except as entertainment.
By an odd coincidence, I encountered this nonsense elsewhere tonight and found that there are names for these things: Studiolum’s passing mention of Zeno(n)’s paradoxes on another Crown thread led me to a WP article that mentions the Planck length and the Planck time.
Ø: And I was going to say that to do so seems like a silly exercise, of little value except as entertainment
That’s too bad. You and Dearie had me thinking that all we needed to do was decimalise the units and we would all be able to start time traveling.
GS: Note that killing animals is not necessarily rejected by animal-rightists. All you have to do is call it culling
Surely it’s the people who have no interest in animals’ rights whose moral code is mollified by this kind of thing.