Random thoughts of Terry Hamblin about leukaemia, literature, poetry, politics, religion, cricket and music.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Warm weather
Thank God for the Gulf Stream Drift. Here we are at 51 degrees North and the temperature is 61 today (16 for the European Union).
In the garden Camelias, Cyclamen and Azalias are flowering.
8 comments:
Anonymous
said...
poor terry.....talks about a glorious winter day. he too can dream upon the king my father's wreck!
if you are near the sea it must have been splendid....that sense of utter mildness,suddenly from nowhere,that robs some antiquity of fragmented myth......good ol' gulf stream drift.
further along the coast.....west.....i remember lulworth cove,west of lyme regis.....living out under the wooded cliffs ,about 1972, for some days.....gave up smoking,cream teas in lyme.....the deceptive automony of it all.
I'm not sure what you mean by 61 degrees in the UK and 16 in Europe. Where in Europe is it that cold? Not in Italy, I'm sure.
It is very hard to believe that you are warmer than Sacramento, which is at 38 degrees, 556 minutes north, about the same latitude as Rome, Lisbon and Washington, DC. This makes Sacramento a 'southern city' in the US.
It's just my protest against metrication. The EU uses centigrade and tries to impose its values on Britain. I hanker for the days when there were 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard, when there were 16 ounces in a pound and 14 pounds in a stone, when there were 8 pints in a gallon and four dollars to the pound.
If you hanker for feet, inches, pounds, gallons, ounces and the like, obviously the US is nirvana. We do have 2 liter bottles of soda pop (fizzy drinks to you), and our roofing shingles are now one meter long instead of three feet (which makes matching new shingles with old a difficult thing. The switch over come about 15 years ago or so, well within the lifetime of asphalt shingles.)
I like to drive 65 miles an hour, not 115 kilometers an hour or whatever it is. And our record temperature of 115 degrees one summer sounds a lot hotter than 40 degrees or whatever it is.
Paradoxically we retain miles, but all other linear measurements are in metres. Beer is still in pints but we buy our milk in litres. Temperatures are Fahrenheit when it's hot but Centigrade when it's cold. We buy petrol in litres yet still talk about miles per gallon not kilometres per litre.
Have I told the story of a medical journal which criticized one of my papers because I described mean cell volume in fl (the abreviation is for femtolitres - 10 to the minus 15 litres) The abreviation was queried. Do you mean fluid ounces? I was asked. The abreviation for that is fl. oz.
Can you imagine a red cell 105 fluid ounces in size? Can you imagine 5 million of them in on cc of blood?
Temperature in F when hot and C when cold is so weird but just seems to work better.
The odd thing about being in the US is constantly doing calculations between imperial and metric - probably good for the old mental arithmatic.
Two further oddities. Car engine sizes are now in the US generally in litres rather than cubic inches (except on ancient muscle cars) and pints are not the proper size - which is probably a good thing as beer is routinely 6% abv here.
8 comments:
poor terry.....talks about a glorious winter day.
he too can dream upon the king my father's wreck!
if you are near the sea it must have been splendid....that
sense of utter mildness,suddenly from nowhere,that robs some antiquity of fragmented myth......good ol' gulf stream drift.
further along the coast.....west.....i remember lulworth
cove,west of lyme regis.....living out under the wooded cliffs ,about 1972, for some days.....gave up smoking,cream teas in lyme.....the deceptive
automony of it all.
joe
poor terry.....i meant no replies!
I'm not sure what you mean by 61 degrees in the UK and 16 in Europe. Where in Europe is it that cold? Not in Italy, I'm sure.
It is very hard to believe that you are warmer than Sacramento, which is at 38 degrees, 556 minutes north, about the same latitude as Rome, Lisbon and Washington, DC. This makes Sacramento a 'southern city' in the US.
We were in the upper 40s as a high today.
It's just my protest against metrication. The EU uses centigrade and tries to impose its values on Britain. I hanker for the days when there were 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard, when there were 16 ounces in a pound and 14 pounds in a stone, when there were 8 pints in a gallon and four dollars to the pound.
61 Fahrenheit is the same as 16 Centigrade.
If you hanker for feet, inches, pounds, gallons, ounces and the like, obviously the US is nirvana. We do have 2 liter bottles of soda pop (fizzy drinks to you), and our roofing shingles are now one meter long instead of three feet (which makes matching new shingles with old a difficult thing. The switch over come about 15 years ago or so, well within the lifetime of asphalt shingles.)
I like to drive 65 miles an hour, not 115 kilometers an hour or whatever it is. And our record temperature of 115 degrees one summer sounds a lot hotter than 40 degrees or whatever it is.
Paradoxically we retain miles, but all other linear measurements are in metres. Beer is still in pints but we buy our milk in litres. Temperatures are Fahrenheit when it's hot but Centigrade when it's cold. We buy petrol in litres yet still talk about miles per gallon not kilometres per litre.
Have I told the story of a medical journal which criticized one of my papers because I described mean cell volume in fl (the abreviation is for femtolitres - 10 to the minus 15 litres) The abreviation was queried. Do you mean fluid ounces? I was asked. The abreviation for that is fl. oz.
Can you imagine a red cell 105 fluid ounces in size? Can you imagine 5 million of them in on cc of blood?
Temperature in F when hot and C when cold is so weird but just seems to work better.
The odd thing about being in the US is constantly doing calculations between imperial and metric - probably good for the old mental arithmatic.
Two further oddities. Car engine sizes are now in the US generally in litres rather than cubic inches (except on ancient muscle cars) and pints are not the proper size - which is probably a good thing as beer is routinely 6% abv here.
When we did imperial sums we worked to so many bases that mental arithmatic became autometic.
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