[flerdle, Rosie] After my big whinge the other day we finished up with a reasonable temperature by late afternoon, but the humidity (naturally) went up accordingly, so it was an uncomfortable night. Sunday was reasonable temperature wise and the humidity - it actually rained late afternoon and most of the night - therefore quite acceptable. I did however see reports on the news about the continuing heat in the Brisbane area so, flerdle, you have my sympathy. It really must have been quite severe as the report was mainly about the elderly and the young having problems and the incidence of ambulance/hospital attendances.

Yes, I heard (unverified) that at least four people died - I think they would have all been elderly or sick. Reports are that the heat is over, and we'll be down under 30 soon.
But, by then I will hopefully be in another country. Unfortunately, it is even worse there. Sources say that it doesn't get much worse than this, there, except the few weeks in the middle of summer when it gets into the high 40s. With high humidity, of course.

Great.

[Rosie] For Australian weather, you might be interested in the Bureau's site: www.bom.gov.au. I've been following this handy page there; for data from the last three days click on the appropriate weather station. It samples approx 10 minutely, but maxima or minima are sometimes between those times, such as yesterday's 41.7°C at a bit before 2pm.

Latrobe, Pennsylvania (at Arnold Palmer Airport) currently reports -5 with broken clouds.

jeeeez - that's colder than Antarctica.

[DrQ] Ah, but that's American. Are they using some weird temperature scale that only Americans understand?

[Bm] Are you suggesting that Gdansk was under American occupation during the 18th Century?

[Bm] It could be Fahrenheit, which seems to be ubiquitous in the USA apart from within scientific communities. IIRC, -5F is pretty damn cold, that is (does a quick calculation) -20.5 recurring. Brrrrrrr.

[st d] It's late summer in Antarctica.

Funny thing, this differing scales of temperature malarkey. Last night, in the quiz - one of the questions was "At what temperature do both Centigrade and Fahrenheit read the same?" Could I get my head around that? Could I b*ggery.

Gusset - I'm SO pleased you like my name for you. I'm equally gratified that you haven't transposed the two words :-)

I meant -5 C, but it did hit -4 F last month....now that was Too Damn Cold™.

[Chalky] -40.

It's Monday night and the e-pilg transcriber's awake! :)

I know I have mentioned this before on one of these sites, but I was in Finland just over a year ago, and the first ten minutes of the Finnish evening news was all about how cold it was. They were interviewing people from Siberia who were complaining about the cold. I remember calculating at the time that we were down in the range where it didn't make much difference whether we were talking F or C. (It was down to at least -31C.)

[rab] Indeed I am, sir! I wouldn't put anything past them!

Nice one in the 50 Ways, Guest Login! Should've been fiftieth, that one. Any ideas for the next lot?

Ladies and gentlemen... just to conduct a straw poll, if the top-left-hand corner of this page doesn't look (roughly) like this:

Could you inform. Obliged.

Well, mine looks like that little mc5 symbol in a white square on a grey background.

rab]Running IE6 I see the logo is on white background.

Not on my IE or Firbird browsers, rab. I confirm Inkspot's comment regarding the IE6 background.

There's so many people who aren't getting the full smoothness of this site...

I must be going bonkers. The Firebird browser shows a smooth and 'highlighted' mc⁵ logo, whereas the IE shows the same image but with the white rectangular background; sorry for any confusion.

It's a (fairly) specific (range of) version(s) of IE that don't render transparencies in pngs. I don't like gifs and I don't know how to set the default background colour of a png. Yet.