A few years back when I was messing about with a F/C converter I noticed that -40 degrees is the same in Centigrade as in Fahrenheit. That’s the funny thing.
The not so funny thing is that it’s going to be -40 degrees (C or F, take your pick) in this stupid country the next few days. I really can not imagine why people emigrated here in the first place. It was 0 degrees F here in my town yesterday and the sun goes down at 3 o clock in the afternoon. What the hell did people do to get moved here, I can’t believe my ancestors came here of their own free will.
Pardon the geekery, but it’s not that strange, really.
If you have two straight lines on a graph with unequal slopes, they’ll eventually have to meet somewhere. Since both scales were constructed with an integral number of steps between boiling and freezing for water, and multiples of ten at that, and since those points have whole numbers for those points, it’s not altogether surprising (although not essential) that the coincidence point is also a nice, integer number, rather than, say, -37 5/6.
As a way of example, consider if you used the quickie, easy-to-remember formula for converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit – double and add thirty – instead of the correct formula – multiply by (9/5) and add 32 . You get -30 degrees as the coincidence point, which is also a nice, round integer divisible by ten.
That was always my little joke to my Canadian ex-wife. Things must have been pretty freakin’ bad in England and France a few centuries ago in order for people to want to migrate to an icebox.
One funny thing I learned when I was a kid in Lapland is that at -40 you can take a pot of boiling water and toss it straight up in the air, and the water will literally vanish in thin air.
I was under the impression that the F scale was based on body heat (100) and “bloody cold” (0). And that mr F had a fever (or flawed equipment) when measuring his body heat (0 being the coldest temp he managed to measure?).
Thx for the conversion formula.
No the coldest areas are expected to be at -40 during the week. Here it’s been about 0 F.
*Arctic Explorer: *Boy, was it ever cold! Everything froze outside, including the flames of our cigarette lighters!
Antarctic Explorer: Feh. At our base, near the South Pole, our words froze outside! We had to take them inside and thaw them out to know what we were saying.
You know what, I thought that it said so below my name or something, it usually does at forums I frequent. I’m in east-central Sweden, Norrköping. My apologies.
In my college physics 101 class we were given the problem of determining at what temperature both Farenheit and Centigrade thermometers read the same. The first guy to answer the question (a quarterback on a local minor league football team) determined that it was “Minus 27 Farenheit and minus 34 Centigrade” lol
An even funnier thing is that that’s almost exactly the temperature that mercury, a liquid often used for thermometers, freezes solid at (well, -39.x°).
