At 11:59 4/18/01 -0600, you wrote: >I have never used the Reaumur scale and know nothing about it. The Reaumur scale is a temperature scale that has zero at the freezing point of water and 80 degrees at water's boiling point. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky used the scale when describing the weather in their novels. A character might remark something like, "We have eight degrees of frost this morning," and this would mean that the temperature is -10 degrees C. It's handy to know the Reaumur scale if you are reading Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky -- and also handy to know versts and some other arcane measures -- but that's about it. I can't imagine using the scale today unless one wanted to be misunderstood.
