But we like our seasons...

We had collard greens last night, cooked with onions, actually very delicious.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win

Are you bragging or complaining?

Then you should be ecstatic when you get cremated.

Absolutely beautiful dog. What is that other ugly creature with the short nose?

Cite?

No problem. Just go watch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie.

Bragging, mostly. The low temps are interesting if you're in a nice warm cabin. I don't like to ski below about 20F, but the oficial temp is at the airport, which gets a lot of radiation cooling at night so it reports extreme lows. It was up to 25 by the time we had breakfast and dragged our butts up to Sugar Bowl.

England is apparently frozen, with some concern reported about running out of gas for heating.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Shouldn't waste my time responding to cretins, but there's this...

Plus numerous reports out of NYC asserting the same. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142    Skype: skypeanalog |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
     It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

I appreciate the link, sir.

I like the weather round here, except for the month of March. My west-coast DNA tells me that March is a spring month, and out East, it ain't. Our power has been out for over 24 hours, which is part of it. (*)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) (Currently camping at the lab, which now has internet again, hurrah. Con Ed is showing 69k households with no electricity, down from 71000 this time yesterday, so it looks like it'll be awhile. A 4-kilowatt generator will be here Tuesday, so that should be as bad as it gets. I'll get some dry ice on the way back from church tomorrow morning.)

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
https://hobbs-eo.com

Folks, we have a real genius here.

Heh heh, nothing like a trigger word to extend a thread :-)

While it is known that the death rate increases during the winter, when there is cold outside, so there are some correlation.

The flew epidemics occur usually during the winter, which causes extra deaths. People tend to be in closed spaces and hence, catching the flu is more common.

The absolute humidity of cold air is very low (even though the relative humidity can be quite high). When this air enters a building and is heated by 30 to 60 C, the absolute humidity remains the same, but the relative humidity can be well below 5 % which can cause problems to some people.

While there is some correlation between cold temperatures and death rate, this does not prove that cold temperatures cause extra deaths.

There's been some hype here...

The weather forecasters are on the horns of a dilemma. Since there is a recent tendency to falsely blame them for Bad Things Happening, they tend to emphasise the negative.

The cancellation of flights, trains etc is a little more baffling. The attitude seems to have become "better offer no service than to offer a partial service and have people get stranded".

The sensationalist media (Express, Daily Mail, Sun and that ilk) love to milk a scare story - "The Beast from the East" is the buy-the-newspaper scare headline.

Overall it has been worse than most winters but by no means exceptional. It has, however, happened later than usual due to an excessively warm area over Siberia. The reasons for that are not well understood.

Yes, due to two factors.

1) There has been a breakdown in the Norway->UK gas transportation system.

2) the free market companies have for long refused to invest in the necessary gas storage facilities, so we are vulnerable to "events". Presumably they have a "Ford Pinto" attitude to a few deaths (corporate, human) and the like.

You just did. Cold weather keeps people together, causing disease to spread more readily. That's one vector for more deaths, right there.

Robert Service covered that situation:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold;

--sp

How 'bout the best of both worlds? I'm ready for spring, /and/ I'm growing collards :-)

(Hardy buggers. Came up last fall, and their roots survived a week of teens and below.)

Cheers, James Arthur

Our collards often survive the winter too, but last year's crop didn't survive the squirrels. We didn't get any.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win

A small cage of welded wire solves that for cheap, along with a metal post or two from Home Depot.

But my squirrels aren't interested in collards. That falls to the slugs.

Deer are my biggest pests (but they're so cute...). They feign innocence with their big browns eyes & look at you quizzically, as if to ask "Horrors! Me? What on earth made you think that?," then turn their back to finish munching the flowers off your tomato plants.

I made some solar concentrators out of shiny 20x20cm scraps of stainless steel this year, stuck in the ground behind each lucky plant. They love it.

Cheers, James Arthur