I still mark 15 February 1971 and its anniversaries as a 'bad day' in British History - I still don't see why we had to go decimal. I found it easier working in base 12 (which is what it was) than base 10 (which is what it is now). Just because the foreigners couldn't cope.....................

base 10 is so much more logical...

you brits... how many kgs is a stone? how do i know my weight? and height? how many feet is 1.65m?

and so on...

Base 10 is only 'logical' because we (well, most of we) have 10 fingers. Some people think binary is more logical. I suppose it all depends, like all logic, on where your starting point is.

Don't emigrate to the US, Carla ... they have no metrication at all!



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

I wasn't planning to...

Anyway, I was serious... can anyone tell me how many kgs to a stone and how much is 1.65m in feet?



Post Edited (07-09-03 14:45)

Nope - I can tell you feet to a yard and ounces to a pound and pints to a quart but nothing metric.

Bah
:-P

Carla: 1kg = 2.2 pounds and 1inch = 2.54cms (that's all I remember and work stuff out from there).

Hence 165cm = 65inches = 5'5" (5 feet 5inches) (12 inches to a foot)

I weigh 10st7lb = 147lb = 67 kg (14 pounds to a stone)

Hope that helps...

Thanks, it does!

Someone has told me I was 5'3" and that didn't seem right...

Base twelve wouldn't be too bad - if Imperial measurements actually stuck to it!

An example:

16 drams = 1 ounce
16 ounces = 1lb. So far, pretty easy to remember. Now we get weird.

14lb = 1 stone
112lb = a hundredweight. Sorry? A hundred weight is 112 of the buggers??? This is like that 'public' school idiocy again, isn't it?

Another:

12 inches makes one foot.
Three feet make a yard.
Twelve feet don't make anything (yup, good ol' base twelve again...)
However, 22 yards make a chain, which is itself divided up into 100 links or four poles. A mile, of course, is eight furlongs.

Hope that cleared that up for everyone.

For scientific calculations it's pretty much useless as you invariably end up with really big numbers or tiny fractions (try reading an old scientific paper if you don't believe me). If you want further proof, ask NASA how to make sure your space probe goes into orbit around Mars, rather than into a rather large crater ON Mars.

Of course, decimilisation of currency started in 1849, when the Florin was introduced.

They don't rush things here, do they?



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

here, IIRC, anything scientific is always measured in base10. Maybe that's why I failed Physics. I just couldn't keep doing the translation in my head!

That was the problem with NASA - some bod thought that the measurements were in imperial, and nobody realised until about two weeks after it went 'splat'.

Almost as good as the one that fell into the Atlantic after thirty seconds as someone had forgotten a 'minus' sign...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Don't forget there's 21 shillings in a guinea, which is still the official currency for buying and selling racehorses in the UK.

And twenty shillings in the pound. Perfectly logical...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

We had a card in the kitchen with the following aide-memoire on it;

A litre of water's a pint and three quarters

A metre measures three foot three, it's longer than a yard you see

Two and a quarter pounds of jam weigh about a kilogram

It may be awful, but it's memorable. It might have been cut off the back of a box of cereal, or handed out at the Co-op. It stayed in the kitchen for a couple of years until we had all learnt it. My favourite line was the litre one.

In fact I was quoting it to the milkman the other day as he had supplied half litres of milk and not pints, as paid for. I do not want to be diddled out of 68ml of milk, and the half litres came in cartons, not nice returnable bottles. I'm a bit of a recycling zealot. And listening to the jingle of milkbottles is part of the pleasant early morning soundscape. It's just a pity they don't have the electric trucks anymore, or the horses. It's all part of the Wiseman empire, there are hardly any independent dairies left.

However, a guinea is not legal tender at a bank. Some mates tried writing a cheque for a guinea but the bank would not credit £1.05 to their account and sent the cheque back.

PSD: You forgot that 1 furlong = 10 chains. A nice bit of base 10 for everyone.

And what about quarts, eh? And gills? And is an American gallon the same as one of ours, or not?

I have a billion questions like that.



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

Jon: No. An american pint is 16 floz whereas ours is 20 floz.

I preferred the old systems for currency & measurements... and suggest that the shift to having everything in base 10 instead was a major contributory factor behind the decline in numeracy during the last few decades.

I think that the "stone" was originally (a more logical) 12lb, but that as one of its most common uses in olden days was for measuring flour and millers could be punished severly if convicted of giving short measure _ as they were often accused of doing _ they increased its effective size to be on the safe size... c.f. a "baker's dozen" being thirteen items, because back when the law specified minimum permitted weights for various catgeories of bakery products many bakers started adding an extra bun or roll or loaf to each set of a dozen sold for this same reason. If that's so then 8 stone (the same number of stone that comprises a hundredweight today) would originally have been 96lb, which is close enough to 100lb for the colloquial use of the term "hundredweight" to look quite reasonable to me.
Americans don't use the stone, so their hundredweight IS exactly 100lb... and as both we and they have "20 hundredweight = 1 ton" there are two forms of non-metric ton, at 2240lb (British, the 'Imperial' or "long" ton) and 2000lb (American, the "short" ton) respectively too.

The difference in pints & gallons is because Britain used to have different scales of measurements for different liquids, and when the two countries decided to have one scale each instead they chose different examples from that range: Ours was originally based on the 'Ale Gallon' (although it's changed since then) and theirs on the smaller 'Wine Gallon'. I think that the difference in sizes of gallons for those two commodities was because they were the units used for calculating customs & excise duties, and wine was taxed at a higher rate than ale/beer so that a smaller volume was worth the same to the authorities.

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."

To get back on thread... I asked Jasper* about the origins of those people in the Well, and he said that it's basically a mystery. Some or all of them MIGHT be from unused or scrapped books. (Or, as I suggested and he agreed might be plausible, some of them MIGHT be the un-plotted children of book characters if those weren't subsequently included in their parents' storylines.) Some of them MIGHT have been created specifically for their jobs, or might even have appeared spontaneously... Some MIGHT just be due to Thursday's mind anthropomorphising what she perceives about how the Bookworld works, which isn't really so similar to our (or her) Reality...

Mr Grnksghty the backstoryist wrote his own backstory which, by the rules under which the Bookworld works, became real: Thus he is, to some extent, a self-created character! (He was also a practical joke that Jasper tried to play on the people who'd be producing the 'audio-book' version of WOLP, but this backfired because they phoned Jasper to ask how he had actually intended this name** to be pronounced and so HE had to work out a viable spoken version of it....) It's possible that some of the other Bookworlders might also be self-created...

*at Waterstones, in Brighton, yesterday evening.
** as well as several other words.

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."



Post Edited (07-10-03 15:36)

So, to continue back off topic - the reason metric makes more sense is because 1 litre = 1 litre = 1 litre. Simple.

And while we have a counting system that works in base ten, it seems a pretty good idea to keep everything else like that, n'est-ce pas?


Oh, and I've figrued that generics are free to steal their money to start with, as they won't have developed any morals.



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.