What does it mean when the weather presenter on the telly says it's -40 degrees Celsius and weatherman on the television says it's -40 degrees Fahrenheit? Obviously, it means that it's...COLD! But for viewers on both sides of the "pond" it also means the temperature is the same!

The Fahrenheitand Celsius scales come together at: -40 degrees below "0" zero.

I've personally witnessed the convergence of the two scales. In fact, the coldest temperature I've ever experienced, first hand, was -58 degrees F (-50 degrees Celsius)! I was just outside Laramie, Wyoming. It was unbelievably cold! Add a howling north wind to that subzero temperature and the official chill index plunged to -125 degrees F. How anything can survive unsheltered in those temperatures is beyond my comprehension. Yet wildlife and farm animals do. You can even mark the direction of the wind by looking out over the landscape at the herds of antelope and cattle. They both do the same thing. They turn their rumps windward then bury their faces in the snow. You don't need a "windsock" to tell which way the wind is coming from, just look at the direction the livestock are pointing there nether parts. Apparently their noses and eyes are the most vulnerable in subzero temperatures and by keeping their faces and heads buried in the snow they can maintain a temperature of 32 degrees F or 0 degrees Celsius for those delicate parts of their body. And you thought that you werelooking forward to Spring! These Arctic blasts can last for days so the next time you snuggle up against the fireplace with a warm cuppa in your hands, remember how miserable and how bored these poor creatures must be!

FAHRENHEIT and CELSIUS

Zero "0" degrees on the Fahrenheit scale (-17.77 Celsius)is arrived at by mixing equal parts of water, ice and salt. Remember how quickly that hand cranked, ice cream churn froze Mamgu's favorite recipe even on the hottest day in August? The mixture of ice, water and salt keeps the temperature in the churn at 0 degrees F (-17.77 Celsius).

100 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale was arrived at by measuringthe "body temperature" of a healthy man (now known to be 98.6 degrees F but close enough back in the day).

The method above is how Welshman, PresidentThomas Jefferson, instructed Welshman, Meriwether Lewis, to calibrate his thermometer for journal entries of the temperature during the journeys of the Corps of Discovery. When a graduated scale of 100 equal parts is marked between those to benchmarks, water will freeze at 32 degrees, and when extended beyond, water will boil at 212 degrees at sea level on the Fahrenheit scale.

Stephen Fry jokes that the British have the best of both worlds. In the winter,he says, they always cite the temperature in Celsius because it sounds so much colder and in the summer they cite the temperature in Fahrenheit because it sounds so much hotter. Unless, of course, you're DCI Jack Frost, who is/was by no means a reactionary, but not aboveasking his associates to explain what kilometers and temperatures in Celsius mean in "real numbers."

I don't why the two scales meet at -40 degrees--but they do. It's the one temperature where no "F" or "C" is needed. As a fan ofDouglas Adams I would have preferred they converge at 42 or at least -42. But at my age, I have learned that we don't get everything we wish for. So I decided to google -40 and was abruptly told that no documents matched my request. On the positive side, when I googled plain old 40 the giant search engine trumpeted " About 12,720,000,000 results

Why is 40 so popular and -40 so out of fashion? Wikepedia explains it all, I guess, when it says "4 0(forty) is the natural number following 39 and preceding 41. Despite being related to the word 'four' (4),40 is spelled 'forty', and not 'fourty' " I should have known (smacking myself in the forehead)!

So why waste so much time on this drivel? Because someday, somewhere, someone else (besides me) is going to google -40. And, when that day eventually happens everyone, everywhere will know that at least ONE document exists giving due credit to this amazing spot on the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales! The place where the United States of America and all of Europe finally see eye-to-eye! And those future google-ees will take note that least one place--AmeriCymru--took time to ponder these things. Chock it up to Welsh curiosity! Or, if you don't want to share the blame--to this Welshman's curiosity.

Postscript: I suppose when celebrating this amazing "point of agreement" between the continents it's only natural to expect that some muckety-muck somewhere would attempt to cloud the waters even further! And what better place than the House of Lords! That someone is/was Belfast born and self-proclaimed Baron Kelvin of Largs but known to his mates on the school playground as "Billy Thomson." Billy, with one of his muckety-muck colleagues at Glasgow University, decided to start their own scales henceforth known as Kelvin and Rankine. In a universe of relativity they demanded absolutes zeros. As you might expect there's more to this adventure but this is absolutely not the place nor time to bore you further.

Christmas has come and gone--and none to soon for livestock in Wyoming--but this song in the fascinating A Capella format seems fitting: