Friday, November 04, 2005

A temperature poem

Those of us who grew up as red-blooded Americans tend to be unfamiliar with the Celsius temperature scale, sensible though it may be. We probably know what 0 and 100 are, and we retain some vague notion from elementary school science that you can convert to Fahrenheit if you use some formula involving weird fractions like "5/9" (or is it "9/5"?). None of that is much help if you're on vacation in, say, Manitoba, and you turn on the morning weather report, and you want to know what it means when the weatherperson says there will be a high of "21." For all of you, I offer this poem, which was on the wall of my 7th grade pre-algebra classroom.

0's freezing,
10 is not,
20's pleasing,
30's hot.

This will be my last temperature-related post for at least a week, I promise.

2 comments:

Squishy Burrito said...

What about when its -21? That's a bit more realistic for Manitoba.

Fishfrog said...

What's with you and celsius? Do you have a vendetta?