OT: Shop assistant didn't know what "half a dozen"meant!

A metric dozen (dekon) is 10, so metric-half dozen is 5 pieces. It's easy if you remember that one usually gets less with metric measures than with imperial measures.

See section "A Metric Dozen".

It must be like 40 or 50 years ago that all commercial trading here was enforced to use metric standard units. Before that, shops were pricing and handling merchandise in "ounces", "pounds" etc. (metric ounces and pounds, of course!)

However that is no longer allowed. Everything is in kilograms, meters, liters etc. Numbers are to be specified explicitly. You can sell eggs packed by 12, but not "per dozen".

The US is quite a lot behind on such standardization, but when the young people do not know such things anymore the elderly claim it is "stupid" instead of "we are making sound progress".

Strange...

Now I understand why Britons voted for Brexit. They want to return to imperial units :-)

Hopefully this will occur in 11 days.

There's nothing particularly imperial about dozens.

Merchants were pricing goods by the dozen and by the gross long before the UK had any kind of empire,and there's also the baker's dozen.

one of the digits (or more?) of the ~1600 "pascaline" was modulo 12 you can exactly divide 12 by 2 3 and 4, consider the eggs you may understand me...

delo

ha scritto nel messaggio news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

... and of course for "half a dozen" ...6

delo

"delo" ha scritto nel messaggio news:q6o7q0$199c$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org...

Rubbish. This is the modern computah age, where everything should be counted in powers of two, bits, octal, or whatever makes it easier to compute. Eggs should be delivered in cartons of 16 otherwise known as sexadecimal: However, it may take a while for everyone to change over to a sexadecimal system. After all, apothecaries weights and measures officially died in the mid 19th century, but is still in use by some pharmacies. To their credit, American politicians have abandoned all their scruples and switched to the more ancient system of quid pro quo.

More drivel: [Q] How does one identify a computah programmist in a crowd? [A] Ask everyone to count to ten. Normal people will start counting at one, while the programmists will start at zero.

Save for matlab

Metric is used by 15/16 of the world's population, but people should know things from at least a *little* while before they were born.

Reminds me of my grandmother, who was insecure and defensive about how poorly she spoke English. Once my mother said to her, "I don't understand what you said", and Grandma said with a huff, "I shop at Sex-a Fifth Avenue and they understand-a me!"

Nice idea. Meanwhile...

In the late 50s a shop assistant in Mew York learned my mother had been in the US for a couple of weeks, and exclaimed "my, don't you speak the language well".

On learning she was English, "which ocean did you cross to get here?"

Instead of 15/16, I suggest using 94% instead. US population is about 0.327 billion World population is about 7.53 billion. I won't include the populations of Liberia and Myanmar (Burma). (7.53 - 0.327) / 7.53 = 96% Close enough.

I recently had a rather expensive medical adventure which included some liquid prescription drugs. The dosage I was expected to take was measured in teaspoons and tablespoons, which are rather inaccurate. Fortunately, most everything else in medicine is now all in metric with no imperial equivalents in sight: The current trend in the US is that everything in medicine, science, and engineering is already mostly metric, but most everything else is stuck in imperial units.

Before: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. After: A milligram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure. Somehow, after doesn't sound quite right.

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address included "Four score and seven years ago..." which begs the question, how many years in a score? Most students don't know. However, that was 150 years ago, so I would not expect anyone today to measure years in scores.

While we're still using units of measure based on royal body parts, horsepower should be expressed in mechanical, metric, imperial, electrical, boiler, hydraulic, air, and tax horsepower, all of which are different:

Drivel:

Cooking for Engineers:

Perhaps the shop assistant felt that if you meant six, you should say six, rather than delegating a problem in arithmetic.

Sylvia.

Base 12 is as usable system as Base 10, as long as you teach children with Base 12 addition and multiplication tables. You could even make a nice consistent measuring system with units as ...1/144, 1/12, 1,

But unfortunately the imperial units use also 3, 4, 16 etc. other multipliers between units.

not being taught the units in widespread use is stupid.

NT

I'd favour a base 12 system with digits running from -5 to +6 rather than from 0 to 11. That makes arithmetic delightfully easy in several ways:

- Negative numbers would be as natural as positive ones.

- Rounding and truncation would be identical.

- We'd have smaller elementary addition and multiplication tables. This, combined with the previous point, would make especially long division *much* easier.

- Addition and subtraction would basically be the same operation. You could mix positive and negative values in a single column to sum them up: no need to sum positives and negatives separately. Adding up long columns would consist mostly of crossing out complementary digits. Easy! Accountants would have loved that when accounting was still handwork.

- Carry-overs in long sums would tend to cancel rather than to accumulate.

There's much to say for such a system, but alas, like the Romans before us, we are committed to our clumsy ways.

Jeroen Belleman

It's a bit like my Australian friend Mark, when coming to the US at JFK, was asked 'Do you speak English'?