((Celsius *2) - 10%) + 32

Moscow is having a bit of a cold spell. I had advance notice thanks to the folks at the office. The other day they smugly told me what the prognosis was for the temperature in the middle of the week. I furrowed my brow, and stared over their heads in concentration. Then, they repeated themselves in English. “Oh,” I said. “I understand. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

They laughed heartily, somehow gleeful in their pride about how impossibly cold it could get in their motherland. The nationalist one-upsmanship got a little out of hand when they began drawing lines in the air and discussing latitude. “The southernmost parts of Russia, after all, are further north than the northernmost parts of the US”. Really? Even if that is true, there are a lot of other factors that go into making a climate. I grew up in the northeast, and I know for a fact that it’s not the same type of weather as Sochi – Russia’s Florida.

But if they were trying to get me to confess that their country is more of a frozen wasteland than mine, all they had to do was wait a couple of days.

Muscovites woke up to readings of minus 23 Celsius (minus 9 Fahrenheit) this morning as a cold front blew in from western Siberia, according to the Russian Meteorological Bureau. Temperatures may reach as low as minus 34 Celsius (minus 29 Fahrenheit) in the coming days, which would be the lowest since 1947. [Bloomberg News]

Tuesday morning, all smiles, they asked how I liked Russian winter. But by lunch time, when the temperature had gone down a few more degrees, there wasn’t such patriotic euphoria about the cold. “This isn’t normal,” they began to say to each other.

Before moving over Moscow, the cold front reduced readings in the western Siberian city of Tomsk to minus 50 Celsius, the coldest for a century. [Bloomberg News]

At that point, the numbers on the thermometer become sort of meaningless. Actually, The Celsius and Fahrenheit scales do converge at -40 degrees. Up until now, I just thought that was a theoretical construct of science that wasn’t going to figure into my life; kind of like Physics class when one measures temperatures from the absolute zero on the Kelvin scale where motion at the molecular level ceases to be possible.

I will certainly cease all motion outside my warm apartment if it gets any colder. Zero degrees Kelvin is about minus 273 degrees Celsius. I used to think that was impossible, too – but this week I’ll keep an eye out for it.