It's been a good week

Got some work done, it is only 92 degrees now and it will cool off nicely this evening. While posting a picture I noticed a picture I took on January 17th - how quickly we forget.

That snapshot made me think to take another one right now from the same vantage point:

What a difference five months makes.

No particular reason but I do like the Staple Singers.

Sublimating bombogenisis

Yep, we got some weather. Tedious subject, I know, as this is now the second post in a row where I have mentioned it. Oh well, it's too freakin' cold to talk about anything else.

Went for walkies Wednesday evening, it was brisk out, a bit dampish, and when I got home I found that the recliner was calling my name. I wrapped myself up in a blanket, started watching Serpico, when next thing I know I get a call that there is a blizzard going on. No way - I was just out there, what are you talking about - sure enough - there was already over an inch of accumulated snow.

Next day dawned clear and bright:

But since then it has been below freezing, with temperatures drifting into single digits. Those whose job it is to sensationalize the weather are now saying that we will set a record for the longest sustained period below freezing EVER! Well, in 30-something years, anyway. It won't get above 32 until Monday, and I know many of you are all like "Dude, heatwave!"

So, how cold is it? I just went for another walk and it's so cold that everyone I saw out walking was wearing a parka. That's how cold it is -- we are wearing freakin' parkas! In the South! Cue Ron White! We all look like freakin' Frosty over here! 

But enough about that -- how about something completely different, Renee Fleming singing Casta Diva from Norma. The architecture, the 3+ minute long pan shot that opens this video, not to mention the sublime singing warms my heart.

Renee Fleming is an American treasure. What coloratura - I am in awe.

I don't like it

How cold is it? It's so cold I saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets.

I hope that wherever you are you are managing to stay warm. 

Maybe some music that suggests the tropics will help.

Chilly at work?... blame men

"Ms. Mahannah, 24, who wrote on Twitter that at work she felt like an icy White Walker from “Game of Thrones,” said a female co-worker at her digital marketing agency cloaked herself in sweaters, too. But the men? “They’re in, like, shorts.”"

Right. It happens every summer: Offices turn on the air-conditioning, and women freeze into Popsicles.

Finally, scientists (two men, for the record) are urging an end to the Great Arctic Office Conspiracy. Their study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that most office buildings set temperatures based on a decades-old formula that uses the metabolic rates of men. The study concludes that buildings should “reduce gender-discriminating bias in thermal comfort” because setting temperatures at slightly warmer levels can help combat global warming.

"A GIANT Slushie!"

Have you ever seen anything like this? Nearly frozen waves off Nantucket, MA. Photo: Jonathan Nimerfroh pic.twitter.com/8zofd6iCFN
— Tri-State Weather (@tristateweather) February 26, 2015

Video: What Your Fridge Says About You

Baby, it's cold inside

""We're going to study matter at temperatures far colder than are found naturally," says Rob Thompson of JPL. He's the Project Scientist for NASA's Cold Atom Lab, an atomic 'refrigerator' slated for launch to the ISS in 2016. "We aim to push effective temperatures down to 100 pico-Kelvin."

100 pico-Kelvin is just one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero, where all the thermal activity of atoms theoretically stops. At such low temperatures, ordinary concepts of solid, liquid and gas are no longer relevant. Atoms interacting just above the threshold of zero energy create new forms of matter that are essentially ... quantum.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that describes the bizarre rules of light and matter on atomic scales. In that realm, matter can be in two places at once; objects behave as both particles and waves; and nothing is certain: the quantum world runs on probability.

It is into this strange realm that researchers using the Cold Atom Lab will plunge."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I sometimes envision our social relationships, as a species, in the same manner.

The turmoil of the sun's surface versus the relative seeming peace of the moon. The moon a dead thing, essentially, of course.

As similar to the huge cultural differences amongst the various cultures in the world, versus two people, of any culture, strangers, sitting on a park bench, or on a plane, or a Greyhound. Mostly we ignore the opportunity to learn of another, preferring instead our fortified castle. Sometimes though, through what quirk I know not, we talk.

-XRay