Goodbye Snow

No, I'm not talking about Global Warming here. This year we're saying goodbye to a different type of "snow." Also just called static, TV snow is a signal picked up by analog televisions when there is no stronger signal around. And where does this weak signal come from? Much further away than you might expect. As Scientific American writes,

The impending digital-TV transition has a forgotten victim: the big bang. You can tune an analog set between broadcast channels and see static, part of which is energy left over from the hot primordial universe. This static is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation, and its discovery in the 1960s proved the big bang theory. But on a digital TV, the best you can do is "The Big Bang Theory".

Since the the digital TV signals don't pick up this analog ambiance, the only relic of Big Bang snow on TV may be the opening sequence for HBO.