Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Everybody saw this coming.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

“woke” is the new caravan.

T R E 4 5 O N

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread

Reader Interactions

220Comments

  4. 4.

    Jack the Second

    Don’t get me started on stones.

    When the British added stones to their system (about the same time they started talking funny) they decided they wanted there to be an even number of stones in a hundredweight.

    SO THEY REDEFINED THE HUNDREDWEIGHT AS 112 POUNDS.

    Meanwhile for the curious, the cup-pound discrepancy is because historically the PINT was the fundamental unit of liquid measure. 16 oz in a pound, 16 oz in a pint, and a fluid oz of water weighs an ounce. Hence the old saying, “a pint’s a pound the whole world ’round”.

    Or at least until the British, as part of their ongoing madness after losing the American colonies, redefined their pint as 20 oz.

  6. 6.

    Kraux Pas

    @Platonailedit:

    Multiplying & dividing by ten so fucking librul and girly.

    I’m surprised the Trump administration hasn’t yet announced its plan to bring us off the decimal Sharia Law system and get back to good Christian Roman numerals.

  10. 10.

    clay

    I was with him until he started ranting about American hotels calling the ground floor, “First Floor”.

    YEAH BRITAIN BECAUSE IT’S SO NATURAL TO START COUNTING WITH “ZERO”.

  12. 12.

    Kraux Pas

    @Gin & Tonic:

    And you guys laughed at Lincoln Chafee.

    Who’s laughing? It’s gotta take guts to run basically a single issue campaign where that single issue is the decimal system.

    And if I’m unfairly giving short shrift to Chafee’s platform, I would like to point out that my unwillingness to Google tonight shares at least a little blame with the way the MSM covers elections and, more importantly, ignores candidates.

  13. 13.

    Kraux Pas

    @clay:

    YEAH BRITAIN BECAUSE IT’S SO NATURAL TO START COUNTING WITH “ZERO”.

    My admittedly incomplete education in computer science suggests that this is the convention for most programmers.

  14. 14.

    dmsilev

    @clay: That sound you felt rather than heard was the great disturbance in The Force as millions of computer programmers cried out in terror over zero vs. one indexed arrays, and were suddenly silenced.

  18. 18.

    SiubhanDuinne

    That is, and I mean this seriously, literally the best, SERIOUSLY THE LITERAL BEST Twitter thread ever in history.

  19. 19.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    I may be the only one, but I like the English system. The problem with the metric system is that while it’s easy to calculate, the measurements themselves are random, and not awfully practical in daily use. A foot is a good length for everyday shit. Centimeters are not. How tall is that guy? Oh, about six feet. That guy? A little less than six feet. The one over there? Maybe five feet and a half. Try doing that with centimeters. And the thing is, how often, really, do we need to calculate how many feet there are in two miles or something? And for cooking, English measurements are easy to work with. Twos and fours and threes, while they’re more of a hassle to calculate when you’re dealing with big numbers, are easier to halve or double when you have a cup of flour or something.

    Anyway, as I said, I might be the only one, but I like the English system.

  20. 20.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @NotMax:

    Dude, there are 20 shillings in a pound.

    “But whatever his weight in pounds, shillings, and ounces,
    He always looks bigger because of his bounces.”
    /Tigger

  24. 24.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Jack the Second:

    When the British added stones to their system (about the same time they started talking funny) they decided they wanted there to be an even number of stones in a hundredweight.

    SO THEY REDEFINED THE HUNDREDWEIGHT AS 112 POUNDS.

    I smell Rear Admiral Dr. Ronny Jackson.

  26. 26.

    Kraux Pas

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    The problem with the metric system is that while it’s easy to calculate, the measurements themselves are random, and not awfully practical in daily use.
    …
    How tall is that guy? Oh, about six feet. That guy? A little less than six feet. The one over there? Maybe five feet and a half. Try doing that with centimeters.

    Now tell me, what system were you raised with?

    A foot is a good length for everyday shit. Centimeters are not.

    I don’t have a natural intuition for metric either, but I bet that meters would be the unit to serve that function.

  31. 31.

    Jay

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    I was happy when Canada converted to the metric system.

    Only had to memorize the times tables to 10,

    Not 64.

    And of course, an ounce was not an ounce or another ounce any more. They were different measurements by volume or weight.

    Once you convert it’s easy. Distance is in km, speed is kmh, height is in metres, weight in kilo’s.

    All divisable by 10, not 64.

    When the Imperial System had to get precise, they started dividing the non-metric inch, in metric’s.

  33. 33.

    different-church-lady

    @clay: Now to be fair, the Brits generally do not put floors down on the ground level, feeling the earth itself to be sufficient.

    [nods]

  36. 36.

    Walker

    Had a roommate in grad school who would swear that the imperial system was superior. Especially for lengths. 12 is evenly divisible by 3 unlike metric, which can only approximate fractions of a third, and this was absolutely necessary for carpenters (or so he said).

    To be fair, this is why the Babylonians (and hence our time/angle measurements) are in terms of 60. Evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

  43. 43.

    Jay

    @Walker:

    Done carpentry for years, from framing, to trim, to cabinet making.

    Never needed a 3.

    It’s a lot easier to note the lenght of the piece you need is 112.14 cm

    Than 3 feet, 9 inches and 17/64ths.

  44. 44.

    Barb 2

    Welcome to “Home Economics”.

    Or can girls from this era get out of that class in high school or jr. High?

    Just seemingly mindless stuff we girls had to memorize. Guys didn’t have to learn the cooking stuff or nutrition. But then what we learned about nutrition was mostly made up in order to sell agriculture products. So now diabetes is out of control – just because there are 16 ounces in a pound. But then it is more reliable to weigh the dry stuff rather than use the 8 ounces in one cup. Then there are the teaspoons – 3 tsp per Tablespoons.

    The spousal unit would now rant and rave about how RayGun (the prez) killed the metric system in the USA. Now we are all behind the rest of the world and stupid because 16 ounces are in one pound – unless the measurement is liquid. Or something. Home Economics was decades ago – it’s too easy to Google the answer.

    Poor guys you didn’t take Home Economics.

  49. 49.

    Jay

    @Barb 2:

    The guy twitter ranting is a Brit.

    30 years old.

    The Brit’s went metric when they joined the EU.

    Now Brexiteer’s are twitting about how once they leave, they get to go back to the Imperial measurements, from foot, inch, pound, different ounces, hundredweights, Imperial gallons, tuppences, ha’pennies, guinea’s,……

  50. 50.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): A 2×4 is 1 1/2′ by 3 1/2″. A 2×6 is 1 1/2″ x 5 1/2″. A 2×8 is 1 1/2″ by 7 3/4″. Or sometimes more like 7 1/2″. A 2×10 is …. Studs are on 16″ centers. Trusses are on 24″ centers. Except for when they are on 19 3/16″ centers. A stud is 96 inches. Precut studs are 92 5/8″. Except for 9′ precut studs, they are 104 5/8″.

    Ad nauseum.

  51. 51.

    FlipYrWhig

    I feel like the national freakout over adopting the metric system was a harbinger of derp to come.

  57. 57.

    different-church-lady

    I JUST DISCOVERED THERE’S ONLY 90 DEGREES IN A RIGHT ANGLE AND ONLY SIXTY MINUTES IN A DEGREE! HOLD ON WHILE I WRITE THE BEST TWITTER THREAD EVER!!!1!

  61. 61.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Jay: It’s the milling. When it comes out of the saw it’s 2″, after they mill it down it’s 1 1/2″. Not sure why they settled on that. I think it was the late 40’s to early 50’s when carpenters became splinter phobic.

  62. 62.

    Jay

    @wasabi gasp:

    The guy was responding to Brexit Insanity with wit and humour,

    Imagine MAGA’ts stating that in the Glorious Age of Trump, 2.0 all computer interactions from smart phones to pin pads will now require DOS.

  64. 64.

    jl

    Apothecary, Avoirdupois or Troy, dude, Apothecary, Avoirdupois or Troy?

    What I like is that a hundredweight is 112 pounds. Now, that is weird.

  67. 67.

    MomSense

    @FlipYrWhig:

    I was pissed because we spent the first half of 3rd grade learning it and then we came back from Christmas break and it was just abandoned without explanation.

  68. 68.

    jl

    I like the Swedish guy who tweeted back that everyone should use the Swedish ‘lagom’ system. Lagom means ‘just right’. Sounds good to me.

  69. 69.

    clay

    @different-church-lady: My World History teacher in 10th grade put that as a bonus question on a quiz. I’ve remembered that joke ever since.

    (It’s stuck with me way longer than any world history he taught.)

  70. 70.

    Amir Khalid

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
    The metric system isn’t as arbitrary or as counterintuitive as you say. A cubic metre of water has a mass of 1,000kg or one tonne, a litre has a mass of 1kg, and a millilitre has a mass of 1g. An electric guitar (to pick an everyday object at random) is 1m long. People in Europe have been measuring a person’s height in centimetres and their groceries in kg for going on two centuries and are well used to it. People in Asia abandoned catties and tahils for kg and grams a generation ago, and are doing just fine. Speed limits everywhere outside the US are posted in km/h and every driver understands how fast they may go.
    Converting between US and metric is also not hard. An inch is about 2.5cm, a foot is 30cm, a yard is 11/12 of a metre, a km is 5/8 of a mile. A 5’6″ person is 165cm tall. A litre is just over a quart. A kilogram is 2.2lb. An ounce is 28g. These conversion factors should suffice for most everyday purposes.

  72. 72.

    Jay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Renovated a bunch of pre-1900 plank built homes in town. Dimension’s didn’t change between rough sawn and milled, ( other than to get more uniform between boards and planks).

    Timber framers up here work in metric, but most of them are German.

  74. 74.

    Kraux Pas

    So I was just cooking asparagus, etc. for dinner. I had spiced the asparagus, but let the spice stick to the pan because I was trying to do too many things at once because I refuse to do prep work. Oh no! I have to fix this before it burns. So I use mirin and tamari to get it loose and blend everything together.

    Best asparagus I’ve ever eaten.

  76. 76.

    danielx

    @Kraux Pas:

    I don’t have a natural intuition for metric either, but I bet that meters would be the unit to serve that function.

    They would, or a fraction of them would, but a foot is still handier as a descriptive. The universe of objects a foot in size that people handle on a daily basis is much larger than those a meter in size. I can visual a foot a lot more easily than a third of a meter.

  77. 77.

    different-church-lady

    JESUS, WHY ARE ALL THE CONTINENTS DIFFERENT SIZES?!? HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU PEOPLE OPERATE LIKE THIS??!?!

  82. 82.

    Mike J

    We use cups because the colonial powers thought it a bad idea to let us have accurate scales, lest we be able to engage in commerce with anyone else or on terms not dictated by them. With no scales, we used volumetric measures. Cups tend to be roughly the same size and they worked ok for most things.

    So fuck any Brits who want to sneer at cups.

  85. 85.

    Matt McIrvin

    Imagine my surprise when I got to graduate school and found out that metric isn’t even metric: the edition of Jackson’s electromagnetism textbook we used back then had everything in Gaussian centimeter-gram-second units instead of SI, which actually affects the form of the electromagnetic formulae.

    And in particle physics we used “natural units” where the speed of light is 1, Planck’s constant is 2*pi and you measure length in reciprocal mega-electron-volts.

  87. 87.

    Jay

    @danielx:

    Objects less than a metre, become “estimated” in centimetres. Objects less than a centimetre, get “estimated” in milimetres.

    The head of a standard pin is thus roughly 1.25 mm vs somewhere between 1/64th and 1/32nd of an inch and holds 1000 fictional angels.

  88. 88.

    Sasha

    “NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:

    Two Farthings = One Ha’penny. Two ha’pennies = One Penny. Three Pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.

    The British resisted decimalised currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.”

  92. 92.

    jl

    @Amir Khalid: Well, OK, smarty pants. A foot is how long some medieval guy’s foot was. Or some demented English king. And a stone is heavy, like a stone, see? Can’t get more intuitive and easy to use than that.

    Edit: the problem is that damned hundredweight. Gave the whole system a bad name.

  94. 94.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Amir Khalid: My favorite US/metric conversion hack is that miles to kilometers is close to the ratio of successive Fibonacci numbers (since it’s coincidentally close to the golden ratio). 3/5 or 5/8 works, but 8/13 or 13/21 is even better.

    I realized that one day just looking at a car speedometer, then discovered it was already well-known.

    So if the number you want to convert is close to some easy multiple of a Fibonacci number (and basically anything is) you know what to do.

  96. 96.

    different-church-lady

    THERE’S NO EAST VIRGINIA!

    HOW IN GOD’S NAME CAN YOU COLONIAL DOODLES HAVE A WEST VIRGINIA WITHOUT THE PRECIOUS SYMMETRY OF AN EAST VIRGINIA??!? IT IS MADNESS ITSELF!!li!

  100. 100.

    Mnemosyne

    I just had a Cole-worthy snit when I couldn’t find a single one of the dozen (at least) wrist braces I have for my carpal tunnel issues and I need one RIGHT FUCKING NOW BECAUSE MY MOTHERFUCKING WRIST FUCKING HURTS!!!!

    Hopefully the small children who live in the apartment upstairs were out of earshot.

    Also, I currently feel like dragged-down shit for unknown reasons that may or may not be asthma, because I don’t fucking know and I have to time my inhaler just right or else it keeps me awake.

    And I am going to have to learn to dictate my writing if I don’t want to end up completely fucking crippled, and I don’t fucking want to.

    Fuck. All. This. Shit.

  104. 104.

    eemom

    @clay:

    I was with him until he started ranting about American hotels calling the ground floor, “First Floor”.

    A lot of older buildings in NYC don’t have a 13th floor.

    Just thought I’d put that out there.

  105. 105.

    Kraux Pas

    @NotMax: Thanks for contributing Helen Mirren to my insane compulsion to sing that song while cooking.

    Seriously, she makes it easier to take.

  108. 108.

    Steeplejack

    @jl:

    That’s a long, or imperial, hundredweight. A short hundredweight is still 100 pounds.

    Everything is so simple.

  111. 111.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @danielx:

    I can visual a foot a lot more easily than a third of a meter.

    That is just semantics. You are pretty much visualizing the same thing, . You are more comfortable thinking in terms of inches and feet but only because that’s what you grew up with. I am too but I don’t kid myself about how much the math sucks.

  112. 112.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Sasha: Yeah, I never understood how Brits could do any kind of commerce or balance their checkbook under the 12 p = a shilling, 20 shilling = a pound system.

  115. 115.

    eemom

    I was in 6th grade when the US officially converted to the metric system (1974). One of the main lessons they hammered into our little heads was that the transition would take a LONG time to accomplish. They got that right.

    I’ll never learn to think in metrics, myself.

  116. 116.

    smedley the uncertain

    @Sasha: To add to the details… I learned in a Scottish school the the Monetary system was denominated as L S d; Pounds, shillings and pence.
    Helps to understand why Pounds of something are abbreviated Lbs. NB: I attended US schools up to the 3rd grade before that…

  118. 118.

    different-church-lady

    I CAN’T SHARE MY PIZZA EVENLY WITH TWO FRIENDS!!1! HOW CAN YOU CALL THIS AN ADVANCED CIVILIZATION???

  119. 119.

    Amir Khalid

    @Matt McIrvin:
    My yard/metre conversion is from football: the penalty spot is 12 yards from the goal line, and in German the penalty kick is called an Elfmeter (literally, eleven metres, that being the distance in metric).

  120. 120.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @danielx: But the universe of 10 cm objects is probably even larger. Once you learn some common reference like that (10 cm is 4 inches) it becomes a lot easier to go back and forth between thinking in metric and thinking in English.

    Another useful one is that 250 mL (milliliters) is about a cup. And a liter is about a quart of course.

  125. 125.

    thalarctosMaritimus

    @wasabi gasp: The last Seattle BJ meetup I went to, at one point the jackals ended up spontaneously singing “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball”.

    I forget how we got onto that topic, though.

  127. 127.

    Kraux Pas

    Now let’s say I were to make lemonade as an awesome dessert/drink type thing. One part lemon juice, one part sugar, and three parts water would be way easier in L, mL.

  130. 130.

    clay

    @eemom: You partially already think in metric. Picture a 2-liter bottle of Coke. That’s metric. Asperin and other pills? In milligrams, metric.

  133. 133.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Major Major Major Major: I’m sure many of us learned the “mnemonic” that begins “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November.” But as catchy phrases to remember things go, it’s kind of lacking. It sort of breaks down after that with the complications of the calendar.

    Thirty days hath September
    April, June and November
    All the rest have thirty-one
    Well, except February which only has twenty-eight
    Except it has twenty-nine on leap years
    Which are every four years. Unless it’s a century, then it’s not a leap year.
    Unless it’s divisible by 400.
    Then it is.

    When I took Latin class I learned about the Roman system of 12 months of exactly 30 days each, with a five-day Saturnalia party (which we could make six days on leap years). I always thought that was an eminently sensible system and don’t know why we didn’t keep it.

  135. 135.

    Mnemosyne

    @eemom:

    Most tall buildings in the US lack a (marked) 13th floor.

    I once rode up in an elevator here in CA with two Spanish-speaking people, one of whom noticed that the elevator’s buttons went from 12 to 14. The other person explained that Americans have a weird superstition about the number 13, and they laughed at how silly Americans are.

    Mind you, I don’t really speak Spanish, so I was able to pick this all up from context and knowing a few random words.

  136. 136.

    BC in Illinois

    @Sasha:
    During WW II, my mother was a WAC, assigned to London for a while. She could do the whole schtick of “One Pound, Thruppence, Ha’penny” and the like.

    The WACs were instructed never to ask, “And what is that in real money?”

  142. 142.

    NotMax

    @,a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/2018/11/26/open-thread-2000/#comment-7100308″>Ceci n est pas mon nym

    And every time it’s evenly divisible by 4000, February gets one day added from then on (and still another one on leap years).

  145. 145.

    Amir Khalid

    @Mnemosyne:
    If you come to Asia, you’ll notice that quite a few buildings lack a 4th, 14th, 24th, etc. floor. Superstitious Chinese consider 4 an unlucky number.

  148. 148.

    boatboy_srq

    A) That’s brilliant. Just effing brilliant.

    B) I remember back in my bad old university days wailing that I would never EVER weigh more than ten stone no matter how hard I tried to gain mass. Ah, youth….

  155. 155.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @danielx: Kinda funny story. In surveying caves one measures distance between survey stations, reading a compass and clinometer for bearing and degrees of incline. At each station the person pulling lead tape gives an LRUD (left, right, up, down distance from the survey station to furthest point on the left wall, same on the right wall, highest point on the ceiling, lowest point on the floor for a rough measurement of the cross section of the passage.

    On a trip in an Arkansas cave I had a gal from the Netherlands pulling lead tape. She sets the first station and starts giving me the LRUD in centimeters.

    “NO NO NO, inches and feet please.”

    2nd station, centimeters again. I switched her to shooting foresights and put an Arkie on lead tape

  156. 156.

    Mnemosyne

    @Amir Khalid:

    When the 818 area code was split off into the 626 area code that now covers a part of Los Angeles county that is primarily Asian immigrants, it was a HUGE honking deal. People were really, really pissed that they were losing the double 8 in their phone number.

    Good thing someone was smart enough not to try to impose the 424 area code on that part of the county. That one went to Santa Monica, where the Irish immigrants don’t care.

  162. 162.

    Millard Filmore

    @dmsilev:

    millions of computer programmers cried out in terror over zero vs. one indexed arrays

    Isn’t zero where you put the index counter?

  165. 165.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??

    @Amir Khalid:
    I read your comment on the dead thread below on how many cars I’ve owned. I’m currently on my third and this is the first one I’m making the payments on; my parents made the payments on the previous ones. I’ve owned a 2012 Chevrolet Cruze and a 2015 Honda Civic. My current car is a 2018 Kia Forte.

  166. 166.

    Amir Khalid

    @Kraux Pas:
    Interestingly, that fourth century is still only one day longer than the other centuries. And an even-numbered millennium, with three leap century years rather than two, is also only a day longer than an odd-numbered millennium.

  170. 170.

    guachi

    Though the farthing/shilling/pound thing is a mess in a decimal world it’s great when you realize that there are 960 farthings in a pound. 960 is divisible by a whole lot of numbers
    1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320, 480, 960.

    Mighty useful.

  187. 187.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @clay:

    It’s not zero, it’s the ground. The first floor is the first floor that is above ground level.

    Do you walk into a house with no upper floors and say “nice first floor you have here”?

    Anyway, if the US Army can go metric I don’t see why the rest of country can’t.

    Don’t get me started on software that assumes a default date format of MM/DD/YY. What idiot thought that one up. Grrr! Abomination.

  190. 190.

    eemom

    @Viva BrisVegas:

    Don’t get me started on software that assumes a default date format of MM/DD/YY.

    Does that have anything to do with the now-forgotten cult of insanity about what would happen at midnight on January 1, 2000? Fun times.

  191. 191.

    Amir Khalid

    @NotMax:

    There was a bit of controversy about that street name some years back: It was named after John Penny who, it turned out, was a slave trader back when Liverpool (as a major port city) was an international centre of that evil business.

  193. 193.

    Amir Khalid

    @eemom:
    Not really. MM/DD/YY is an exclusively American date format. The rest of Earth uses the more logical DD/MM/YY.

  195. 195.

    Martin

    @Jay: Even better, a 2×4 isn’t 2″x4″, it’s 1.5″x3.5″ A 4×8 sheet of plywood is 48×96 inches, but a 4×8 sheet of OSB is 47⅞ by 95⅞. MDF is 49×97. Veneer is 48½ x 96½.

    The best thing about the metric system might be ISO paper sizes. Cut an A0 sheet of paper in half, and you get 2 A1. Cut the A1 in half and you get 2 A2, etc. all the way down to A10. Means that you can always find a size of paper that when folded in half can contain an insert. Envelopes work the same way. So you can put an A4 sheet of paper in a C4 envelope, but you can fold it in half and put it in a C5, or fold it in half again and put it in a C6.

    Imperial paper sizes are a fucking pain in the ass.

  196. 196.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @Amir Khalid:

    The problem being that American software, I’m looking at you Microsoft, often makes MM/DD/YY the default date format.

    Despite the fact that it drives everybody outside the the US crazy.

    Like seven billion other people on this planet, whenever I come across a date like 01/12/19 on the internet, I require context to work out whether it refers to the 1st of December or the 12th of January.

    For this I blame America, and I do not forgive.

  197. 197.

    SectionH

    Good grief, y’all are picky. Or maybe I’m just annoyed I didn’t get home sooner and missed all the early bragging rights about things like guineas and stones. Yes, I like some of my old useless knowledge. It beats all those commercia… no no no no, playing IZ now.

    Yes, I’ve been asked my weight in stones. It was legit, so I was honest, and they very nicely pretended not to believe me, and said was I sure I got the conversion right? I said, sadly, yes it’s 10 stone…

    My son texted me yesterday to ask me if we had some Barilla or Da Cecco spaghetti, linguine or similar long pasta at hand, and would we please measure it? I have to admit that was a fairly odd request, and I was amused, but we weren’t home. Mr S immediately went to teh Google, and I did my thing. Box is ~12″, pasta must be smaller. First info was 25.1 cm, which was close enough. When we got home, I measured fettuccine and linguine: both were 10.25 inches long. I was just a bit worried that we might be getting EU info so I wanted to make sure.

    I have utterly no idea why he needs a pan to fit completely not softened long pasta, but he was happy – and also appreciative of his stepdad’s google-fu, because he did eventually find the 25.1 cm info too. Not in the useful stats, but in some text or the other.

  198. 198.

    Martin

    @Viva BrisVegas: Relatively valid. though if we’re talking about date formats in the context of data, then DD/MM/YY is only marginally better. YYYY-MM-DD is infinitely preferable. Not only does it naturally sort, but there’s no ambiguity as there is no YYYY-DD-MM format to confuse it with, and you don’t have the potential confusion around the century, which still creates data errors as the different applications of YY assume different cutoffs for the century.

  200. 200.

    Jay

    @Martin:

    The OSB Gap,( don’t tell Trump) is because of the expansion gap needed for instalation.

    The MDF/Veneer gap is for trimmage.

  202. 202.

    NotMax

    Tidbits from the instruction manual of a Black Friday week purchase which arrived today:

    …and then fix the randomly supplied screw at the bottom of the product with a screwdriver.

    Demolition of [the product] with authorization is strictly prohibited.

  204. 204.

    Suzanne

    I had a British architecture professor who swore that buildings designed with imperial measurements were superior to buildings done to metric standards, because he said they felt more humane and in scale to the human body. I don’t know if I agree, but I think about the amount of building code I have memorized in imperial and feel shook at the idea of ever trying to relearn it in metric.

    Sixty-inch turning radius for wheelchairs, 18″ clear on the pull, 12″ on the push. Corridors are 44″ minimum up to 49 occupants, then they’re 5′, unless you have gurneys, then they’re 6′, unless you have hospital beds, then they’re 8′.
    .2″ of exiting width per occupant, except on stairs, which is .3″. But 48″ clear between handrails. Ramps are 1:12 max slope with handrails, 1:20 without handrails. Stairs are maximum 7″ riser, minimum 11″ tread plus 1″ nosing, with maximum 1/8″ variance per run.
    And more!
    And so much more.

  205. 205.

    NotMax

    @Suzanne

    And the unwritten rule:

    Entrances to bathrooms in public buildings must not be evident, recognizable nor visible from more than 3 feet away.

    :)

  207. 207.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @NotMax:

    Very few public buildings have bathrooms#. They have toilets.

    Which is itself a euphemism, but at least not a misleading one.

    # Number 2 in my list of Americanisms that annoy grumpy old men.

  209. 209.

    Martin

    @Jay: Oh, I know, but using dimensions to label something and then violating that label creates enormous problems. Better to use a label that does not imply dimensions and then identify the standard for that label.

  216. 216.

    Citizen Alan

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    How tall is that guy? Oh, about six feet. That guy? A little less than six feet. The one over there? Maybe five feet and a half. Try doing that with centimeters.

    /blinks/ Why would anyone measure the height of a person in centimeters as opposed to meters? You know, since the whole point of the metric systems is so that you can use accurate decimal units? A guy who is 6’4″ is about 1.93 meters (or just about 2 meters if that level of precision isn’t needed).

  217. 217.

    J R in WV

    @wasabi gasp:

    There a two boobs per lady. He should look into that. Sooner the better.

    Wrong, numbnuts… I’ll leave you to figure out why you are despicably wrong. And pied.

  219. 219.

    low-tech cyclist

    I didn’t care in the least about how stupid our American system of measurement is, until I became a parent and it was in my face every time I tried to explain any part of it to my son.

    Parenthood turned me into an evangelist for metric. I will never again have to explain to a child of mine that there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 16 ounces in a pound (or pint), 2 pints in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon, 43,560 square feet in an acre, 640 acres in a square mile, 8 quarts in a peck, 4 pecks in a bushel, 12 bushels in a shitload, and so forth.

    But nobody else should have to go through this again either.

  220. 220.

    Jack the Second

    @low-tech cyclist: Honestly, the acre is a bad unit. It doesn’t measure a useful size of land for anything nowadays, and it just encourages people to think that it make sense to put a house per acre.

    You should use the square furlong or, if you must, the hectare (about 4 hectare to the square furlong).

Comments are closed.