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

First let me say, there are still many hold outs in engineering using non-m etric measurements for distance/length. It is very common to see blueprint s in feet and inches and many dimensional drawings use inches.

But when it comes to medicine, it is like pinching pennies to worry about t he inaccuracies in using teaspoons for liquid measure. Virtually every pre scription has a range of 2:1 in actual dosage prescribed to patients. They give the same total dose to someone weighing 50 kg as they do to someone w eighing 100 kg resulting in a 2:1 difference in blood level dosage which is what actually matters.

So who cares if the teaspoon you use is 10% different from the one I use? That's in the noise!

Actually, these days the liquid measures typically are in the caps of the b ottle. They are pretty accurate to use.

Rick C.

The old teaspoon/tablespoon measures were long ago standardized by the USP, as metric (milliliter) values; they had to, because medical formulations from antiquity were variously described, and there were never NIST/NBS traceable teaspoons.

Probably we all mix metric and other traditional measurements; I have meter sticks, yardsticks, tape measures with both inch and millimeter markings. And, I usually measure for woodwork in metric (one millimeter being a good aim-the-saw-here accuracy), but sometimes check tightness with milli-inch feeler gages and adjust distance with twenty-turns-per-inch adjusting screws. I'm mixing units all the time, but only occasionally get confused (last time, by a tape measure that read feet-and-inches, transcribing 2 ft 2 inches as 22 inches...).

Pressure in dynes per square cm, pascals, atmospheres, torr, psi, inches of water... One unit would be wonderful, but I only remember tire pressures in pounds/sq. in., so that's what I use. Unless it's high pressures, which I remember as kilobars (roughly

My cookbooks have marginal notes (and some not-so-marginal looseleaf pages) with spices and other ingredients in grams and tenths of grams when I like to weigh, and cups and/or ounces for things to be scooped. It isn't anything close to consistent, but it IS convenient. Except for the rice-cooker measure which claims to be 180ml.

Yeah, consistency is... inconvenient.

eone weighing 100 kg resulting in a 2:1 difference in blood level dosage wh ich is what actually matters. "

Not around here. Where are you at ?

AND, dosing is a whole course in med school, or used to be. Did they give i t up ?

Or are doctors just that lazy ?

In fact I gt a bone to pick with one of mine, a scrip ran out and it took a lmost three weeks to renew it. WTF ? And that's after he after me for a col onoscopy, which I won't do. So he gets me to send shit to this company and I do, and they say I tested positive. I asked positive for what ? They had no idea. HOW THE FUCK CAN I BE POSITIVE BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW FOR WHAT ? What 's more, I am not sure I made it clear but if I have cancer I am not taking radiation or chemo nor am I undergoing a very invasive surgery, so why the f*ck bother ? I really thought I had made that clear but apparently not. A nd all this shit about the salt, beer, grease whatever, I am not going to s top living just to keep from dying. Doctors don't seem to understand that.

Whatever, one of my tangents. Just skip over it if you want.

Some people are smarter than others. Some are more quantitative than others. The shop girl is, well, a shop girl. The proper response to her question would be "six, please" and not smug contempt.

I wonder if private schools teach "dozen."

All young people are ignorant. It takes a long time to learn a lot of stuff.

Not advisable. Solid body of research growing to show charred meat is carncinogenic.

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Probably blood in your feces. Lots of people get pre-cancerous polyps that bleed a little, sort of like moles in your gut. If you get the colonoscopy, they will snip them out on the spot.

Do it. It's no big deal. Colon cancer is a big deal.

I get a combo colonoscopy and throat endoscopy together every few years. It takes less than an hour and I just sleep through both. As I said, it's no big deal.

Name one. I'll settle for just one book on politics and philopsophy, becaus e it seems unlikely that Cursitor Doom has read any.

The fabulously well-read person who posts here who has read more books in t hat area than I have seems to be one of Cursitor Doom's imaginary creations (like my imagined devotion to Marxist clap-trap, which went out of fashion some years ago, and against which I'd been immunised early by reading Geor ge Orwell at a very early age).

Cursitor Doom claims to be post high-school, but he falls for the clap-trap he reads in the Daily Mail and Russia Today.

Cursitor Doom is deluding himself if he thinks he has mastered critical thi nking. It's not his only area of self-delusion.

Cursiotr Doom thinks that his advanced senile dementia entitles him to a vo te.

snipped-for-privacy@decadence.org wrote in news:q71nb0$1rma$1 @gioia.aioe.org:

Not just any chili...

Skyline Chili

GoldStar Chili

I'd keep a distance from those tyres :)

NT

Ah, now that reminds me. A burger in a bikers' bar sounds good to me! :->

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Zeitgeist, burgers on old picnic tables in a dirt yard under a freeway ramp. 44 beers on draft. The bikers are mostly the sort who pedal.

Since we moved, Trick Dog is closer, but not open for lunch.

There's a Smashburger nearby. Are they any good?

The shop assistants here mostly have advanced degrees in sociology or geography or something.

Quite a distance. The Cambridge Instrument GaAs single crystal pulling machine was pressurised to a mere 100 atmospheres with argon, and it was claimed that if the welding had failed it could have gone straight up for 4 km.

The guy that designed the stainless steel shell that contained it apparently also wrote the standard for that kind of container, so we got the occasional illustrative example he'd put together to impresses the rest of the standards committee.