I've grown to really love the cold too--and not the least of which is predicated on the need for warmth that it brings, the reason to turn on the fire (yes, sadly, it's a gas fire). But think about the costs of fuel as you do. Fascinated by those small windows, the intense heat of those houses. I visited Kaktovik once many years ago on north of the arctic circle and what I will always remember is that it was -20 but every building I entered was super super hot. Women in tank tops and shorts. I wondered about that practice, and cultural expectations for what 'indoor temperature' is. Also am a wee bit starstruck that Marina Tsvetaeva was your stepmother's great-aunt! Such an incredible poet.
Ooh, another Tsvetaeva fan! There are a couple in here :) Her sister Anastasia Tsvetaeva is starting to get a bit more recognition, too, which is interesting. My stepmother has many stories of her from her childhood.
I wonder if it's just easier to keep a building really hot and then you get used to that being the norm? It always seems so strange to me, especially when you contrast it with overly air-conditioned places in summer than de-condition you for the heat outside. But maybe there's an efficiency aspect to heating, like it takes less to moderate it than it does to just keep it hot.
It's been colder than usual for longer and much earlier here in the Puget Sound area. I realize that compared to Montana and other places, it would still feel pretty balmy. Because I am who I am, I just did a comparison of the low temps on my weather station in November for the past two years, and it's not my imagination. In 2021, a total of 7 nights with lows in the 30s, and one in the twenties. This year - 17 nights in the 30s, and 10 in the 20s! No wonder I'm cold all the time, the daytime temps are shifted lower as well. The room I work in all day is on the north side of the house and these days it always feels cold. I add layers, and keep reminding myself this is nothing compared to people in other areas of the world.
Thanks for a glimpse into a very cold place. I love those houses and their clever windows. Everything in this country is so cookie-cutter and not necessarily appropriate for the local climate.
It's so much more damp there, too, and that makes a huge difference. I always feel far colder visiting my in-laws in England even though the temperatures aren't anywhere near ours, because the air is always damp. It feels like you can never layer enough to feel warm when it's like that!
The damp days are the worst. Our 10-day forecast is now calling for snow on the weekend and beyond! They did say our winter was going to be colder and wetter this year, and it has proven to be true so far (and it's not even really winter yet). My husband is from Yorkshire and he has tales about the damp winters.
John Haines book is a classic, in touch with the place that claimed him as few are. I think of how the homestead was heated; the wood we gathered for fires, and the coal - enough in the ground, even the homesteaders knew, to sustain twenty generations. But nothing can sustain industrial obeisance to greed. The zero sum game was introduced by those whose need is to push everything and everyone else aside; generosity is not recognized.
Your writing leads me to unexpected places. I like to think the diversity of an audience can lead to some interesting dialog. I am a prisoner of my scientific background. I like the way your writing steers my thoughts in ways I thought I'd forgotten. For me, what you write about returns me to the inevitable challenge of what the last 500 years of modernity has brought. In the end, it is all about entropy. Each bit of material in the ground, now becoming a sexy term ala sequestration, is a candidate for the increase in entropy. Taking a perfectly stable bit of oil or coal or wood and burning it drives the formerly predicable solid, liquid or gas and places it in the upper atmosphere in a state of liberated disorder (and high entropy / disorder).
It is not a statistically different comparison based upon efficiency. The truth is burning a lump of coal is not reversible. The unfortunate laws of thermodynamics mean that to take the component CO2 gas and put it back will require EVEN MORE ENERGY than we got to warm our skin. The only answer to this seemingly intractable problem is to find ways to do stuff outside the closed system of our lowly planet. That answer is certainly solar power of all sorts. It is the only free resource we can likely use to fuel our lifestyle, even if we wear more sweaters.
As you know, you and I share the commonality of America's coldest spot here in Minnesota. This defines your past and my current. We are often apologetic and assume it is done better elsewhere. Minnesota, represented well by companies like 3M represent some of the very best in energy efficiency. My memories of Lithuanians spreading goose fat on their faces while I was kept well insulated by my 3M engineered clothing tells me that I would not wish to change places nore let my mind meander to a place where I imagine the rules of thermodynamics studied by the scientists at 3M do not apply. We all remain prisoners to the laws of thermodynamics.
As for "the sheer depth of cold", I am confident that modern society has not flourished much brighter at a higher latitude that what we experience here in the Twin Cities and further north. I am sure such things are true in Russia as well as Scandinavia. What I am also confident in is my suburban, modern-home R-52 in the attic is likely more efficient in its build and energy miserlyness than most any home similarly situated in the world.
I am always glad when I get to read your Newsletter.
Thanks, Mark! And that is a really interesting point, about how the energy released by coal can't be reversed, and the need to look outside a closed system for warmth. It has so much to do with entropy, doesn't it? As you say, we're all bound by the laws of physics.
There was a recent controversy at NYU. A group of rather entitled kids ran out a highly acclaimed professor because he made organic chemistry too hard. They didn't want to mess up their chances to go to medical school. I can still remember the challenge of the coursework and it is indeed very difficult. What I also know, however, is that every living thing is organic and fundamentallly a bunch of carbon bonds. In the end that is what it is all about. Those carbon bonds are very stable and store a lot of energy. Each time we break them a lot of energy is released (and the entropy goes up a bit also). All of us, and everything we burn, a very big load of previously stable carbon bonds :)
I often think that a tragic opportunity is lost in our education system. It would be marvelous if a toned down course in organic chemistry were developed. It would be a great benefit to society. It seems a shame to traverse this life and not have the basic understanding of what life is and how stability and energy play such an important part. I would never propose that we make such material "dumbed-down" for biochemists, physicians (or chemists and chemical engineers). However it is a big opportunity lost in having a broader understanding societally of the big issues.
Your phrase "the sheer depth of cold" really conjures it up for me - not just your day in Suzdal, but the very few times I've experienced a cold that I genuinely didn't feel I was capable of handling. A kind of vertigo, like that feeling when you're drifting off to sleep of being at the top of the stairs, falling forward into space. A cold you can fall into until it's too far to come out again.
And you've answered a question I've long had: because of how spectacularly cold it gets in Russia, have Russians mastered the art of making houses that truly, properly keep in the warmth? If I ever have the privilege of designing my own home, I'll look at the way Russians do it. And also central Europeans. I visited a friend in Luxembourg during a -10C cold snap, and it was absolutely amazing how warm her house was, and how painfully cold I became within seconds of leaving it. First time I'd been in a house that was properly engineered in that way - the UK certainly hasn't mastered it, and it seems Scotland especially so, weirdly enough, lots of cold, big houses here with the wind whistling in, which seems ludicrous considering the climate. Maybe a hangover from the miserably bone-cold time of castles, as you note! (That's exactly what strikes me every time I wander through the remains of a Scottish castle - "THE TEMPERATURE MUST HAVE BEEN INTOLERABLE.")
I'm fascinated by the cold - love it, when it's manageable and in the "type 2 fun" range, while trying to acknowledge that kind of opt-in low-level cold-for-fun is a very very different thing to, say, what so many folk in Ukraine are dealing with right now. But I'm fascinated about the way some people have grown accustomed to levels of it others of us would find unbearable, where we'd shut down and panic. Hmmm. I wrote a thing a while back on my old blog about the science of human bodies getting too cold - for a while it was the most popular thing on my site (https://feveredmutterings.com/the-human-scale-of-cold-how-we-freeze-and-how-we-thaw) But - hmmm. Hmmmmmm. Hey, I have a newsletter about sciencey things now. Hmm.
On topic: we're having what is, to us, a pretty cold snap - about 5 or 10 degrees C below freezing - and since I'm recovering from a nasty cold and since my cold cabin isn't the place to do it, I've booked myself into a nearby hotel for two days, starting tomorrow.
>>"try and fail to read Kim Stanley Robinson"
😂 Ruh roh. I'm guessing we're not going to have excited conversations about everything in the Mars trilogy anytime soon! (Having felt both ways about his work - both "this is so endless and these people are so annoying and I wish something would HAPPEN" and also the fan-boy I am today, I totally get both responses!)
We will have that conversation! At some point! And yes, that's been my response so far. His book just aren't at their most interesting for me when they focus on the technical aspects of what's happening, and there's a lot of that here! And I'm having trouble connecting with the characters. But I like it enough not to put it down :)
That is a great write-up of freezing, and yes I think it would make a great post on your newsletter :) Maybe a season on temperatures and the human body?
Also, ugh to having a cold when it's cold -- I hope you're feeling better!
Isn't the house building thing weird? I don't think I've ever been in a home in Britain, of any kind or age, that felt comfortably warm. Like they're *all* cold and damp. Yet in a Russian home I've never been anything but too hot and dry. Always, every time. Always scrambling for that fresh air. We really could all learn a lot from studying different building designs over the centuries, couldn't we? (Next up: why kitchens probably shouldn't be inside the rest of the house.)
Living in Alaska, I'm always struck when I visit home in Oregon and reminded of how houses there have NO insulation. It's bananas, frankly. I don't understand it, but it's real and in winter the heat has to be blasted much much more through a cold snap. I wonder if that's similar in Scotland for some reason--of in denial that it gets really cold or something? I am also so aghast when I have visited a castle and how bone-chillingly cold those stone rooms must have been. Oof.
That definitely sounds similar, if it's that mixture of denial and apathy and "och, how bad can it really get now?" A kind of acceptance of it as a temporary if protracted state of suffering, rather than a problem to be solved. I think British stoicism - and maybe Oregonian stoicism too - needs to pull its socks up and realise it's holding everyone back.
I had that reaction living in Australia, Freya! It would weird me out every now and then, remembering that there was no insulation in our apartment or anybody's apartment. it just wasn't needed. Wild.
Fun comment Mike. While we recently sold our home of 25 plus years, it was not before a rite of winter in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. When temperature conditions are "just right" about twice a winter or so, throwing a hot cup of water into the air and having the subbtle tinkle of crystals as flash freezes in the air and returns to earth. In parts of Northerm Minnesota the most avid of outdoorsmen purchase specialized ice augurs for a winter ice fishing season. What is specialized? Well in the Twin Cities we set our deck for a 54" frost line (1.37m). The most Northern of Minnesota lakes freeze to depths up to 6 feet (~ 2 meters) in a "cold" winter. Be assured we have managed (with world-class companies like 3M) to manage in the cold weather. My lasting memory of Lithuania is the tendency to spread goose fat on their faces to protect from the cold. I am confident my Thinsulate Baclava is a better solution :)
Your reference to Celsius brings to mind a rather basic question from physics. It is the temperature -40 at which Celsius and Fahrenheit meet. I am happy to say that I have only "observed" these sort of temperatures once or twice in the last quarter century. Once or twice is certainly enough.
Oh wow. I would love to see the cup-of-water-into-an-ice-cloud thing in person, Mark. And yet I know for a fact that I would suffer in the temperature it requires. Here in Scotland the cold snap went down to 19 degrees F / minus 7 C, and while it was delicious to be out in it and all wrapped up properly, *breathing* it has been a different matter - hence the stay in the hotel...
As for that great minus-40 Celsius/Fahrenheit crossover event, I will happily avoid that particular thermodynamic shindig for the rest of my life. No thank'ee with bells on.
I describe Minnesota as a place with hundreds of good reasons to live here but one very bad one. The sounds that machines (and people) make when the temperatures dip very low are fun and interesting. Here's the math -- this is the sort of things nerds like :) :
9/5 * C + 32 = F and F=C
9/5 * F + 32 = F ==>> 4/5 * F + 32 = 0
4/5 * F = -32 ==>> 4*F = -32 * 5
4 * F = -160 ==>> F = -160/4
F = -40 (cold on any scale)
QED -- my favorite Latin expression :)
I enjoy your writing and try to keep up when I can.
It is hard to describe to others. The science nerd in me thinks about how narrow the range of temperatures actually are that we can EVEN EXIST. I think -40F is REAL BAD. 115F is REAL BAD. Nature can easily make it real tough on us if we don't play nice.
"And today the temperature will be BAD until just after noon, when it will become REAL BAD until about 5pm." This is the future of responsible weather forecasting.
Those coal trains ... my mother, living just outside Missoula, mentions them often. They're a constant reminder of what is being sacrificed.
People lived in cold weather for millennia without burning the planet up, so we know there are ways! Like chopping wood for a couple of wood stoves to keep the hearth warm :)
I've grown to really love the cold too--and not the least of which is predicated on the need for warmth that it brings, the reason to turn on the fire (yes, sadly, it's a gas fire). But think about the costs of fuel as you do. Fascinated by those small windows, the intense heat of those houses. I visited Kaktovik once many years ago on north of the arctic circle and what I will always remember is that it was -20 but every building I entered was super super hot. Women in tank tops and shorts. I wondered about that practice, and cultural expectations for what 'indoor temperature' is. Also am a wee bit starstruck that Marina Tsvetaeva was your stepmother's great-aunt! Such an incredible poet.
Ooh, another Tsvetaeva fan! There are a couple in here :) Her sister Anastasia Tsvetaeva is starting to get a bit more recognition, too, which is interesting. My stepmother has many stories of her from her childhood.
I wonder if it's just easier to keep a building really hot and then you get used to that being the norm? It always seems so strange to me, especially when you contrast it with overly air-conditioned places in summer than de-condition you for the heat outside. But maybe there's an efficiency aspect to heating, like it takes less to moderate it than it does to just keep it hot.
It's been colder than usual for longer and much earlier here in the Puget Sound area. I realize that compared to Montana and other places, it would still feel pretty balmy. Because I am who I am, I just did a comparison of the low temps on my weather station in November for the past two years, and it's not my imagination. In 2021, a total of 7 nights with lows in the 30s, and one in the twenties. This year - 17 nights in the 30s, and 10 in the 20s! No wonder I'm cold all the time, the daytime temps are shifted lower as well. The room I work in all day is on the north side of the house and these days it always feels cold. I add layers, and keep reminding myself this is nothing compared to people in other areas of the world.
Thanks for a glimpse into a very cold place. I love those houses and their clever windows. Everything in this country is so cookie-cutter and not necessarily appropriate for the local climate.
It's so much more damp there, too, and that makes a huge difference. I always feel far colder visiting my in-laws in England even though the temperatures aren't anywhere near ours, because the air is always damp. It feels like you can never layer enough to feel warm when it's like that!
The damp days are the worst. Our 10-day forecast is now calling for snow on the weekend and beyond! They did say our winter was going to be colder and wetter this year, and it has proven to be true so far (and it's not even really winter yet). My husband is from Yorkshire and he has tales about the damp winters.
John Haines book is a classic, in touch with the place that claimed him as few are. I think of how the homestead was heated; the wood we gathered for fires, and the coal - enough in the ground, even the homesteaders knew, to sustain twenty generations. But nothing can sustain industrial obeisance to greed. The zero sum game was introduced by those whose need is to push everything and everyone else aside; generosity is not recognized.
I still haven't read Haines, if you have a copy around and need ideas ;)
Your writing leads me to unexpected places. I like to think the diversity of an audience can lead to some interesting dialog. I am a prisoner of my scientific background. I like the way your writing steers my thoughts in ways I thought I'd forgotten. For me, what you write about returns me to the inevitable challenge of what the last 500 years of modernity has brought. In the end, it is all about entropy. Each bit of material in the ground, now becoming a sexy term ala sequestration, is a candidate for the increase in entropy. Taking a perfectly stable bit of oil or coal or wood and burning it drives the formerly predicable solid, liquid or gas and places it in the upper atmosphere in a state of liberated disorder (and high entropy / disorder).
It is not a statistically different comparison based upon efficiency. The truth is burning a lump of coal is not reversible. The unfortunate laws of thermodynamics mean that to take the component CO2 gas and put it back will require EVEN MORE ENERGY than we got to warm our skin. The only answer to this seemingly intractable problem is to find ways to do stuff outside the closed system of our lowly planet. That answer is certainly solar power of all sorts. It is the only free resource we can likely use to fuel our lifestyle, even if we wear more sweaters.
As you know, you and I share the commonality of America's coldest spot here in Minnesota. This defines your past and my current. We are often apologetic and assume it is done better elsewhere. Minnesota, represented well by companies like 3M represent some of the very best in energy efficiency. My memories of Lithuanians spreading goose fat on their faces while I was kept well insulated by my 3M engineered clothing tells me that I would not wish to change places nore let my mind meander to a place where I imagine the rules of thermodynamics studied by the scientists at 3M do not apply. We all remain prisoners to the laws of thermodynamics.
As for "the sheer depth of cold", I am confident that modern society has not flourished much brighter at a higher latitude that what we experience here in the Twin Cities and further north. I am sure such things are true in Russia as well as Scandinavia. What I am also confident in is my suburban, modern-home R-52 in the attic is likely more efficient in its build and energy miserlyness than most any home similarly situated in the world.
I am always glad when I get to read your Newsletter.
Thanks, Mark! And that is a really interesting point, about how the energy released by coal can't be reversed, and the need to look outside a closed system for warmth. It has so much to do with entropy, doesn't it? As you say, we're all bound by the laws of physics.
There was a recent controversy at NYU. A group of rather entitled kids ran out a highly acclaimed professor because he made organic chemistry too hard. They didn't want to mess up their chances to go to medical school. I can still remember the challenge of the coursework and it is indeed very difficult. What I also know, however, is that every living thing is organic and fundamentallly a bunch of carbon bonds. In the end that is what it is all about. Those carbon bonds are very stable and store a lot of energy. Each time we break them a lot of energy is released (and the entropy goes up a bit also). All of us, and everything we burn, a very big load of previously stable carbon bonds :)
I often think that a tragic opportunity is lost in our education system. It would be marvelous if a toned down course in organic chemistry were developed. It would be a great benefit to society. It seems a shame to traverse this life and not have the basic understanding of what life is and how stability and energy play such an important part. I would never propose that we make such material "dumbed-down" for biochemists, physicians (or chemists and chemical engineers). However it is a big opportunity lost in having a broader understanding societally of the big issues.
Your phrase "the sheer depth of cold" really conjures it up for me - not just your day in Suzdal, but the very few times I've experienced a cold that I genuinely didn't feel I was capable of handling. A kind of vertigo, like that feeling when you're drifting off to sleep of being at the top of the stairs, falling forward into space. A cold you can fall into until it's too far to come out again.
And you've answered a question I've long had: because of how spectacularly cold it gets in Russia, have Russians mastered the art of making houses that truly, properly keep in the warmth? If I ever have the privilege of designing my own home, I'll look at the way Russians do it. And also central Europeans. I visited a friend in Luxembourg during a -10C cold snap, and it was absolutely amazing how warm her house was, and how painfully cold I became within seconds of leaving it. First time I'd been in a house that was properly engineered in that way - the UK certainly hasn't mastered it, and it seems Scotland especially so, weirdly enough, lots of cold, big houses here with the wind whistling in, which seems ludicrous considering the climate. Maybe a hangover from the miserably bone-cold time of castles, as you note! (That's exactly what strikes me every time I wander through the remains of a Scottish castle - "THE TEMPERATURE MUST HAVE BEEN INTOLERABLE.")
I'm fascinated by the cold - love it, when it's manageable and in the "type 2 fun" range, while trying to acknowledge that kind of opt-in low-level cold-for-fun is a very very different thing to, say, what so many folk in Ukraine are dealing with right now. But I'm fascinated about the way some people have grown accustomed to levels of it others of us would find unbearable, where we'd shut down and panic. Hmmm. I wrote a thing a while back on my old blog about the science of human bodies getting too cold - for a while it was the most popular thing on my site (https://feveredmutterings.com/the-human-scale-of-cold-how-we-freeze-and-how-we-thaw) But - hmmm. Hmmmmmm. Hey, I have a newsletter about sciencey things now. Hmm.
On topic: we're having what is, to us, a pretty cold snap - about 5 or 10 degrees C below freezing - and since I'm recovering from a nasty cold and since my cold cabin isn't the place to do it, I've booked myself into a nearby hotel for two days, starting tomorrow.
>>"try and fail to read Kim Stanley Robinson"
😂 Ruh roh. I'm guessing we're not going to have excited conversations about everything in the Mars trilogy anytime soon! (Having felt both ways about his work - both "this is so endless and these people are so annoying and I wish something would HAPPEN" and also the fan-boy I am today, I totally get both responses!)
We will have that conversation! At some point! And yes, that's been my response so far. His book just aren't at their most interesting for me when they focus on the technical aspects of what's happening, and there's a lot of that here! And I'm having trouble connecting with the characters. But I like it enough not to put it down :)
That is a great write-up of freezing, and yes I think it would make a great post on your newsletter :) Maybe a season on temperatures and the human body?
Also, ugh to having a cold when it's cold -- I hope you're feeling better!
Isn't the house building thing weird? I don't think I've ever been in a home in Britain, of any kind or age, that felt comfortably warm. Like they're *all* cold and damp. Yet in a Russian home I've never been anything but too hot and dry. Always, every time. Always scrambling for that fresh air. We really could all learn a lot from studying different building designs over the centuries, couldn't we? (Next up: why kitchens probably shouldn't be inside the rest of the house.)
Living in Alaska, I'm always struck when I visit home in Oregon and reminded of how houses there have NO insulation. It's bananas, frankly. I don't understand it, but it's real and in winter the heat has to be blasted much much more through a cold snap. I wonder if that's similar in Scotland for some reason--of in denial that it gets really cold or something? I am also so aghast when I have visited a castle and how bone-chillingly cold those stone rooms must have been. Oof.
That definitely sounds similar, if it's that mixture of denial and apathy and "och, how bad can it really get now?" A kind of acceptance of it as a temporary if protracted state of suffering, rather than a problem to be solved. I think British stoicism - and maybe Oregonian stoicism too - needs to pull its socks up and realise it's holding everyone back.
omygoodness YES. many similarities. 😂
I had that reaction living in Australia, Freya! It would weird me out every now and then, remembering that there was no insulation in our apartment or anybody's apartment. it just wasn't needed. Wild.
Fun comment Mike. While we recently sold our home of 25 plus years, it was not before a rite of winter in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. When temperature conditions are "just right" about twice a winter or so, throwing a hot cup of water into the air and having the subbtle tinkle of crystals as flash freezes in the air and returns to earth. In parts of Northerm Minnesota the most avid of outdoorsmen purchase specialized ice augurs for a winter ice fishing season. What is specialized? Well in the Twin Cities we set our deck for a 54" frost line (1.37m). The most Northern of Minnesota lakes freeze to depths up to 6 feet (~ 2 meters) in a "cold" winter. Be assured we have managed (with world-class companies like 3M) to manage in the cold weather. My lasting memory of Lithuania is the tendency to spread goose fat on their faces to protect from the cold. I am confident my Thinsulate Baclava is a better solution :)
Your reference to Celsius brings to mind a rather basic question from physics. It is the temperature -40 at which Celsius and Fahrenheit meet. I am happy to say that I have only "observed" these sort of temperatures once or twice in the last quarter century. Once or twice is certainly enough.
Oh wow. I would love to see the cup-of-water-into-an-ice-cloud thing in person, Mark. And yet I know for a fact that I would suffer in the temperature it requires. Here in Scotland the cold snap went down to 19 degrees F / minus 7 C, and while it was delicious to be out in it and all wrapped up properly, *breathing* it has been a different matter - hence the stay in the hotel...
As for that great minus-40 Celsius/Fahrenheit crossover event, I will happily avoid that particular thermodynamic shindig for the rest of my life. No thank'ee with bells on.
I describe Minnesota as a place with hundreds of good reasons to live here but one very bad one. The sounds that machines (and people) make when the temperatures dip very low are fun and interesting. Here's the math -- this is the sort of things nerds like :) :
9/5 * C + 32 = F and F=C
9/5 * F + 32 = F ==>> 4/5 * F + 32 = 0
4/5 * F = -32 ==>> 4*F = -32 * 5
4 * F = -160 ==>> F = -160/4
F = -40 (cold on any scale)
QED -- my favorite Latin expression :)
I enjoy your writing and try to keep up when I can.
-40 is just miserable. It's gotten that way here quite a few times and it's ... a lot.
It is hard to describe to others. The science nerd in me thinks about how narrow the range of temperatures actually are that we can EVEN EXIST. I think -40F is REAL BAD. 115F is REAL BAD. Nature can easily make it real tough on us if we don't play nice.
"And today the temperature will be BAD until just after noon, when it will become REAL BAD until about 5pm." This is the future of responsible weather forecasting.
Well said.
Those coal trains ... my mother, living just outside Missoula, mentions them often. They're a constant reminder of what is being sacrificed.
People lived in cold weather for millennia without burning the planet up, so we know there are ways! Like chopping wood for a couple of wood stoves to keep the hearth warm :)