As I write this, I am sitting in my cold basement office, shivering. I have a stuffy nose and a sore throat. I'm cold, and I have a cold. This means I can either feel sorry for myself, or I can think about people who are more cold and miserable than I am.

I choose the latter.

There's nothing like the knowledge that I'm thousands of miles from the coldest place on earth to warm me right up. The Germans would call this schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in the misfortune of other people. I call it better than complaining.

Besides, there aren't a lot of people in the coldest place on earth, so I'm not taking pleasure in true human misfortune. In fact, this place is so cold that no indigenous human populations exist there--although it does host some very well-dressed penguins.

If you haven't guessed, I'm talking about Antarctica. Not only is it the coldest place on Earth, it's also the highest and windiest. And, it's plagued by frequent, snowless blizzards, where flakes that have already fallen are scraped up by wind and flung about, so that visibility is less than a meter.

Another condition particular to Antarctica is called "whiteout." When this happens, the sky and ground appear uniformly white or gray, so that humans and other animals unfortunate enough to be out in the weather can easily lose depth perception and become hopelessly lost.

Perhaps the most challenging part of life in Antarctica's interior, though, is the nearly constant daylight in summer and darkness in winter. (That's right. We can gripe all we want about the short days of winter, but at least we have days.) This means that for six months, going to sleep has got to be a little bit tough. The other six months, however, are worse: It's dark all the time, and it's beyond freezing cold. Maybe this is what Dante imagined when he made the innermost circle of hell really cold.

How cold is it? Vostok Station, Antarctica, holds the record for the lowest recorded temperature at -129 degrees Fahrenheit.

So how cold is that?