27 November 17

I'm wearing this cool blue-and-silver-striped tie to honor the birthday of Anders Celsius (1701-1744), the Swedish scientist who devised the temperature scale named for him. In the spirit of the metric system, the Celsius (or "centigrade") scale divides the range between the melting point and boiling point of water into 100 degrees. (One degree on the Fahrenheit scale is exactly five-ninths of a Celsius degree. The Kelvin scale -- where zero is the lowest possible temperature, called absolute zero -- uses degrees equal to the Celsius standard.) My tie is also quite appropriate for my Honors Freshman Seminar class today, where we welcome our university's President as our special guest!