quasigeostrophy | Today's Episode Brought to You by the Letter 'C' (Reply)

copperwise gave me the letter. In this meme, I'm supposed to come up with 10 words starting with that letter and state something about what they mean to me. So, in no particular order, here goes:

crap - This is just one of my favorite exclamations. It just seems more forceful when I'm frustrated or annoyed than its counterpart that starts with 's' or even the supposedly stronger 'F-word'.
CAPE - This is an abbreviation for convective available potential energy. It's essentially the measure of how much energy a particular chunk of rising air has. If it's high, watch out for strong thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes. It's what the NWS Storm Prediction Center watches when they issue Watches.
compression - This is several different things from my past career. It can be the concept of limiting the volume of an audio signal so that it doesn't get too loud or too quiet (so the sound is compressed into a narrower range of volume). It also refers to taking a crapload of data, such as digitized video, and squeezing it to fit in a smaller storage space (memory, hard drives, DVDs, etc.). At $FormerEmployer, compression was a huge issue for years, until drives got so fast and memory so cheap that we were able to sell uncompressed versions of the products (not usually to consumers, though, just broadcast versions). It's also what is happening to a digital photo that is taken or saved as JPEG or GIF.
Celsius - That metric temperature scale that I need to get used to. Even though it doesn't have the resolution of Fahrenheit, its reference values make more sense.
cinnamon - One of my three favorite spices Evar (along with ginger and garlic).
clouds - Those things that hang in the air (good thing, too - the average small fair-weather cumulus cloud weighs about 4,000 tons!) that I'll be intensely studying for the next 5 years.
climatic smegma - A term coined by Harlan Ellison in his 1974 ecological short story, Ecowareness (the one where the earth wakes up to see how polluted it is, and that ends with "...wasn't that a nice little story. And fuck you too."). I've always loved that as a term for pollution.
Chicago - Both a favorite city to visit and a favorite stage musical.
clitoris - Let me just quote news anchor Tom Tucker from Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy cartoon series: "Nature's Rubik's Cube." :-)
cold - A physical concept which doesn't really exist (sort of like darkness). It's merely a description for the absence of heat. :-)