v for frequency?

Siemens are the ones who bribed the EU to pass the renewable obligation, and sponsored the Tory party here. No, they are not a great company, they are just another German arm of the Mafia

>

We use Ohm-Siemens "OS" to name dimensionless things.

and, I understood, were responsible for the late opening of the Elizabeth Line.

What is miles, feet, pounds and pints????

Imperial

I suppose you get used to it and it doesn't make all that much difference in everyday life but the compression throws me.

AIUI It was 'the hottest and coldest temperatures recorded in Paris' or somesuch

It has the virtue that temps down near 0 are BLOODY COLD and weather up around the 100 mark is BLOODY HOT.

Indeed you DO get used to it.

And its difficult to tell the difference between one celsius and the next one up.

By "compression" do you mean the fact that the range from freezing to boiling is only 100 degrees Celsius but is 180 degrees Fahrenheit?

Given that there are fewer degrees C than degrees F in a given range of temperatures (so each degree is "bigger"), I'd have thought that a change from n deg C to n+1 deg C would be *more* noticeable than a change from n deg F to n+1 deg F.

I imagine that apart from in America, the number of people who still use and prefer F to C is dwindling as older people (who know F) die off and new people (who are brought up with C) are born.

I like a lot of things about "the way we sued to do it in the past" but I draw the line at absurd systems of measurement like deg F, inches, feet, yard, miles, ounces, pounds, stones, hundredweight which use every base under the sun except the only one that matters - base 10 which we are taught to calculate in. There are also units which have the same name but different sizes: for example the apothecaries, troy and avoirdupois definitions of the dram/drachm and ounce, and the UK and US definition of pint and gallon having different numbers of fluid ounces. And the "little" problem that the volumetric and linear measurements are not related by a simple integer: in the UK, 1 gallon is 277.4 in^3

When I wanted to estimate the weight of a full hot water cylinder (which was not marked with its volume), having only an inches tape measure and no calculator (and no access to a phone to phone-a-friend) I had to convert everything to metric because I knew that 1000 cc was a litre whcih weighed a kilogramme, whereas I hadn't the remotest idea of the imperial equivalent cubic inches to gallons (where a gallon weighs 10 lb - I knew that bit).

Which in itself is quite a shame. Base 12 would be easier and I spend too much time with hexadecimal!

There are also some issues over the mile, where there is more than one standard: The US survey mile is 0.999998 statute mile.

The statute mile being exactly 1,609.344m

Yes, 12 has factors that are more similar (3, and 2 or 4) which allows almost-square boxes when object are packaged in 12s, rather than long thin

2x5 boxes when they are packed in 10s.

12 is a great number. We should have adopted it as the base in which we count and calculate, having invented two new symbols to denote what in base

10 we call 10 and 11 (the equivalents of A-F in hex).

But since we *aren't* taught to count/calculate in base 12, it is a right PITA to work with quantities where there may be one or two digits in the old-pence column and one or two digits in the shillings column, in £sd calculations.

I suppose it's a matter of priorities: do you design a system where the conversion from one unit to the next (pence to shillings to pounds, or ounces to pounds-weight to stones) uses the *same* base (that we are taught to count in), for ease of calculation, or do you design a system with a variety of bases such that all the units are "human-sized".

For me, ease of calculation trumps all other conditions. Other people may feel differently.

If we were to go back to the imperial system (as Jacob Rees-Mogg has advocated) then two pre-conditions are:

- we teach children to count/calculate in base 12 (and maybe not teach base

10)

- we invent single-symbols to denote 10 and 11 (in base 10)

And we standardise on that one base: no more...

12 inches = 1 foot 3 feet = 1 yard 1760 yards (or 5280 feet or 63360 inches) = 1 mile

8 ounces = 1 lb

14 lb =1 stone 112 lb (or 8 stones) = 1 cwt 20 cwt = 1 ton

As it happens, I have committed the linear conversions to memory: 5280 feet or 1760 yards or 63360 inches = 1 mile for quick conversion. 63360 sticks in my mind because it is the scale factor for a 1-inch OS map and 63360/50000 is the scale factor to rescale a scan of a 1-inch map so it matches a

1:50000 map.

That 8 stones = 1 cwt is bloody scary - it means I'm getting on for 2 cwt in weight so 10 of me would weigh a ton :-(

0 Fahrenheit is the freezing point of saturated brine; 100 F was Mr Fahrenheit's "blood heat" (body core temperature); he had a fever at the time.

"Degrees of frost" is an odd one: it's the number of Fahrenheit degrees below 32 (freezing points). Do people use that in the US?

He has never advocated it. He merely remarked it shouldnt be illegal to use it

Almost 64k inches You left out rods poles or perches, chains and furlongs. Not to menytion hands

I am managing to stay the south side of 13 stone.

I've never heard of it. Seems like it's for people who are uncomfortable with negative numbers.

Yes, every "industry" devised its own units - eg rods, poles, perches, chains for surveying and cricket pitches, and hands/furlongs for heights of horses and lengths of horse racecourses. They didn't use the standard, universally-understood inches, feet, yards.

I used to be a bit heavier, then I had a heart attack and when I came out of hospital several weeks later I had lost about 15 kg. Over the 12 years since then, even though I've tried to eat more healthily (*) and to take more exercise (walking, cycling and even using a treadmill) the weight has gradually crept up again. The other day I came across a pair of trousers with 40" waist that I'd bought when I was at my heaviest/biggest. It was gratifying to find that even though I'm bigger than I was after hospital, those trouser are still too big - so I'm not as big as I once was. But now the extra girth is in the dreaded region from the bottom of my ribs to my waist: so my waist is fine (36") but my belly hangs over it :-(

Why is it that all the nice food is fattening and all the good food (eg vegetables) tastes vile? Dr Sod (of the Law) really *is* a sod.

(*) Hell, I even gave up eating doughnuts!

NY snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net wrote

Roast potatoes aren't vile and neither are tomatoes.

Yes. The 9/5 or 5/9 however you want to look at it means 1 degree C is roughly 2 degrees F. However unless you're looking at a thermometer of some sort as you say can someone tell the difference between 1 degree in either scale?

Ah, yes, that one. I do quite a bit of GIS work, often with the State Plane Coordinate System.

My mother worked for a shirt manufacturer and brought home a mechanical adding machine that had become obsolete. Being designed for a shirt company it worked in dozens.