× 10¶
225 words
Using the sloppy language that is common these days, you can detect a difference of a ‘factor of ten’ in the weather reports below.
And then you’ll sigh and wonder whether the difference would be a ‘factor of minus ten’ if I lived in a place like Berlin which was more chilly today. Or you’d just settle for thinking of it as a difference of 27°. Which is much more useful information anyway. It’s a distance which can be covered in less than half a day.
Obligatory Mac OS X bitching: The localised version of the weather widget you see in the screenshot above is still the one I patched myself well over two years ago. Of course Apple didn’t manage to find the 30 minutes per localisation to add the few missing strings in the meantime. I guess they were busy ‘designing’ jerkily animated stars for the Time Machine background. Naturally opening their weather widget on my machine in the Berlin time zone and with metric units still defaults to using the Fahrenheit temperature scale and displaying the temperature for some place called Berlin in the US. I won’t even need to mention their incapability in dealing with umlauts. Three obvious problems, one trivially fixable, one easy to fix and only one of them requiring a little effort. They just don’t give a shit.
