January 14, 2004

• Zero Degrees Fahrenheit
  

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  It is the number zero that seems to make a difference.  It signifies Nothing.  A lack of anything, nada, neyt, zippo.  When you step outside and that first blast hits, even in the calm still of dawn with no wind at all and the blast is more felt than an actual physical force  you realize you are feeling not the lack of warmth but an absence of heat; a vacuum for your inner core.  It hurts to breathe.

  
  

  It is days like today that I find it tough to keep the home fires stoked; my inner light feels pale and dim in this unrelenting sucking at my flames. 

  
  

  On the way to work my eye spots the pale blue horizon and I instantly have 20 x 400 vison.  Everything is clearer in the cold air, clear and concise, a perspective of impossible clarity and infinite depth; warmth is felt as a relationship to something (someone) else.  You can feel warm and content in these environs when you realize the relative point from which you are viewing the world.  Gods eye must be like this; impossibly cold because it is impossibly warmth; absolute 0 Kelvin, absolute everything.

  
  

  The day gets better when you can differentiate between the cold and the living and what that really means.

  
  

  The Peanut Butter Jar

  
  

  The Peanut Butter jar laid on its side split open around its rim, it top missing in action.

  
  

  I was walking to the Post Office to mail some CDs, hat on tight, head down as if the cold only picked off the unwary who looked out of the warmth of their muffled collars; keeping your head down was just a way to delay the sucker punch of the artic winter air.

  
  

  The peanut butter jar was one of those huge plastic ones, clear, a container that should have held a gallon of juice or some other foodstuff  less dense and more pallatible. 

  
  

  When the jar hit it had split and spit its contents forth, about a third of the way out of the jar, where it had frozen solid.  Here, like a light brown toothpaste tube squeezed by gravities hand, was a cylinder of oozed peanut butter half out of the jar but not hitting the ground arcing toward the sidewalk inches above it not reaching it as it frooze.

  
  

  Who Was Farenheit Anyway?

  
  

  From Science Trek we see his profile

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736)

  Gabriel Fahrenheit was a German physicist born in Danzig, Poland. He lived in Holland for most of his life and was involved in the manufacture of meteorological instruments. In 1714 he created the first thermometer to use mercury instead of alcohol. He devised the Fahrenheit scale of temperature recording, which is used today throughout the United States. The freezing point of water on this scale is 32 degrees and the boiling point of water is 212 degrees. He also invented a hygrometer to measure relative humidity and experimented with other liquids discovering that each liquid had a different boiling point that would change with atmospheric pressure.

  
  

  Googling "Farenheit" sends us off to the The Farenhit, San Diego's Independent Newspaper.  And we can't let this pass without Formal scales and definitions from NASA

  
  

  Baby Its Cold Outside!!!

  • 6:45 pm
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