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Comment on xkcd #3202: Groundhog Day Meaning

You gotta have some standards. If you use a different rodent every year, you can’t realistically compare the results with one another. Who knows how wildly the measurement error varies from species to species?

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masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I mean, the one thing the comic gets wrong is that we never really settled on a standard, there are like 36 different regional rodents that are used, my favourite being Wiarton Willy:

The story of Wiarton Willie dates back to 1956. A Wiarton resident named Mac McKenzie wanted to showcase his childhood home to his many friends, so he sent out invitations for a “Groundhog Day” gathering. One of these invitations fell into the hands of a Toronto Star reporter. The reporter travelled to Wiarton looking for the Groundhog Day event. None of the townspeople knew about a festival, but one suggested he check at the Arlington Hotel, the local watering hole. There the reporter found McKenzie and his friends partying and was invited to join them. The next day, the reporter lamented to McKenzie that he needed some kind of story to take back to justify his expenses. So McKenzie grabbed his wife’s fur hat, which had a large button on the front, went out to the parking lot, dug a burrow in the snow and pronounced a prognostication (which no one remembers). The picture of Mac and the hat ran in the February 3, 1956 edition of the Toronto Star. A year later, about 50 people arrived for the festival.

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- Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Oh wow! That’s amazing.
  
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mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Americans will use any unit besides the metric system /s

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- Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Groundhog (Gr), a unit of uncertainty in weather predictions. The value of 1 Gr means the prediction is as good as pulling it out of a hat.
  
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