The weather forecast for the peninsula region of the Bay Area, taken from the National Weather Service webpage:
Looks like the cold spell will be with us for some time:
Anyone doing a low-temperature experiment should head to the Bay Area for the weekend and leave your cryostat systems at home!
PS: Sorry these images are rather blurry - best I could do!
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
May 11th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Finally some justice.
May 11th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
I daren’t look to see what is in store for upstate New York.
May 11th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
PS: Sorry these images are rather blurry - best I could do!
They came from a web page? Screen capture?
May 11th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Anon: actually, it’s a photo of a print-out of a web page…. This web page appeared at 6 AM (a time of day of which I am not aware exists) and a friend left the print-out in my mailbox.
May 11th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Well that proves that global warming is just a liberal myth. -30,000 F is kind of unseaonably cold for California isn’t it?
May 11th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Unseasonably cold for this universe. Colder than the reception that President Bush would get at a Pride rally (which temperature we might take as an alternative definition for Absolute Zero).
May 11th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Makes sense. The more you energy you pump into the Bay Area, the smaller your space of accessible configurations becomes.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
I’m starting to worry about my heating bill.
May 11th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Stewart Granger recited this poem at some public event as a young man (according to his autobiography):
Cold, Cold, Cold
Cold as a frog in a pool
Cold as the tip of an eskimo’s tool
Cold as charity, and that’s pretty chilly
But not as cold as our poor Willie
He’s dead, poor bastard
He’s dead.
May 11th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
JoAnne, why not go back to India for the weekend, see here
May 11th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
Hmm, it’s nice and warm in the East Bay. These microclimates!
May 12th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Geez, it is perfectly lovely up here in the inland northwest. By Sunday it is supposed to be in the low 80’s, a far cry from the freezing temperatures of two days ago. And to think i was, just yesterda,y bemoaning the fact that i would not find enough adequate, outside heat to prepare for summer-tour season, that starts in CA in a couple of weeks.
May 14th, 2006 at 11:40 am
“…actually, it’s a photo of a print-out of a web page…”
That’s disgusting.
“Anyone doing a low-temperature experiment should head to the Bay Area for the weekend…”
I’d think even non-low-temp people would be excited to experience temperatures a few thousand degrees below absolute zero… ^_^
May 15th, 2006 at 6:55 am
-30000 is a poorly-thought out “catch all” sentinel value within the text formatters to indicate no data. Apparently the forecaster forgot to publish the low temperature grids to the web server.
Another amusing text formatter incident involved the use of floats instead of integers. For about one-hour on a NWS web site, the text formatters were creating wind phrases using float values using waaay too many significant digits, e.g., “southeast wind 5.7612109-11.9176151 mph”
May 15th, 2006 at 11:08 am
82 degrees in the shade on the south side of the house yesterday the 14th. This is Palo Alto! The weather guys are totally wrong!!!!
May 15th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
DilbertDogbert: Who can believe a weather forecast, anyway! Lucky for us this time, eh?
Zeke: Thanks for the info. I was hoping somebody here could explain.