Sunday, February 7, 2021

−0°

My iPhone tells me that the temperature this morning is −0°F. Not 0°, −0°. I’m getting a kick out of inserting the degree sign (°) — it’s so easy to do so. Just go to Edit, Emoji & Symbols. The degree sign is in Punctuation. It looks like this: °. It’s not to be confused with the masculine ordinal indicator (º), which sounds to me like the name of a strange rare bird.

Wikipedia tells me that signed zero, −0 or +0, is used in computing. And then there’s this detail:

Informally, one may use the notation “−0” for a negative value that was rounded to zero. This notation may be useful when a negative sign is significant; for example, when tabulating Celsius temperatures, where a negative sign means below freezing.
I’m not sure why the Weather app would want to round up. From what, −.75°F? As if that’ll make it feel warmer?

By the way, It feels like −15°F.

comments: 2

Anonymous said...

Here in Kansas we are having the same weather but we're 10 and feels like -5! And we have another 8-10 days of this.

One January in NH I don't think we saw above freezing the entire month. A tow truck driver told me they were really busy and didn't dare turn off the trucks (diesel) as they knew they wouldn't be able to start them again.

Oddly my dog loves this weather!

Kirsten

Michael Leddy said...

Yikes! Stay safe.