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Our next unelected PM?

Vixen said:
If you are used to driving along at 20 mph in an urban area such as London, then when you are cruising along in a speedboat at 20 knots you have a fair idea you are doing the roughly equivalent speed in your car in London.
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Whereas it would be so much more confusing trying to understand that 30km/h in your boat is exactly the same speed as 30km/h in your car. Right.

Dave
 
Vixen said:
Well the UK still gets by perfectly well using miles, stones, feet and inches. I can't see why Rees-Mogg's secretarial guidelines are the slightest bit controversial to anyone. Yes, it's nice to encounter the Euro almost everywhere you go in Europe (the Swedish Kroner is a right PITA). However, I recall working with French Francs, Italian Lire, Deutsch Marks, Spanish Pesatas, etcetera, and honestly, guys a little simple calculation never hurt anybody and might actually protect your brain from terminal stupefacation.

As for standardised plugs and jar lids, how come my travel adaptor plug has about five or six different plugs to choose from if 'everything is now uniform'?
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Rubbish - at least for those under 50
 
Vixen said:
(the Swedish Kroner is a right PITA)
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It's krona/kronor. But the ubiquity of plastic and contactless means I have never needed to handle any actual SEK in seven years of visiting.

I agree with you on two spaces after a full stop BTW. Not on imperial measures.
 
Vixen said:
In the UK we still have miles per hour as the speed limit. If you are used to driving along at 20 mph in an urban area such as London, then when you are cruising along in a speedboat at 20 knots you have a fair idea you are doing the roughly equivalent speed in your car in London.

Anyway, don't worry about it, just think of fluffy kittens and bunnywabbits.
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20 knots is roughly 20 mph in the same way as pi is roughly 3.6.
 
Dave Rogers said:
Whereas it would be so much more confusing trying to understand that 30km/h in your boat is exactly the same speed as 30km/h in your car. Right.

Dave
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Except knots are not based on kilometres. They are based on nautical miles.

As with many imperial measures they have come about from observing natural phenomena: in this case latitudes, longitudes and the meridian lines.

As another example, knowing that an apartment size can be roughly estimated in square feet without any tape measures by taking careful footsteps across and around it, knowing that a 'foot' is roughly based on the size of a man's foot.

Can't do that with square metres: then you just have to familiarise yourself as to what the different sizes mean. Unless of course you can do the calculations in your head, converting sq feet to sq metres, but why would you want to do that once you know what size the apartment is anyway.

You can use your hands to estimate the height of a horse (=4 inches x N, where N= number of hands). Much quicker than doing a calculation in your mind to convert it.
 
Francesca R said:
It's krona/kronor. But the ubiquity of plastic and contactless means I have never needed to handle any actual SEK in seven years of visiting.

I agree with you on two spaces after a full stop BTW. Not on imperial measures.
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I always make sure I have some currency in cash when I visit.

You still have to do a calculation in your mind before buying anything. It's not the paper money/coins that are the PITA but they are an additional pain as the coins are mostly worthless.
 
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Vixen said:
As another example, knowing that an apartment size can be roughly estimated in square feet without any tape measures by taking careful footsteps across and around it, knowing that a 'foot' is roughly based on the size of a man's foot.

Can't do that with square metres: then you just have to familiarise yourself as to what the different sizes mean. Unless of course you can do the calculations in your head, converting sq feet to sq metres, but why would you want to do that once you know what size the apartment is anyway.
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As another example, knowing that an apartment size can be roughly estimated in sq m without any tape measures by taking stretched strides across and around it, knowing that a stretched stride is roughly a meter.

Can't do that with square feet: then you just have to familiarise yourself as to what the different sizes mean. Unless of course you can do the calculations in your head, converting sq meters to sq feet, but why would you want to do that once you know what size the apartment is anyway?
 
Vixen said:
Except knots are not based on kilometres. They are based on nautical miles.
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Which are based on the dimensions of the Earth. As, of course, are kilometres.

Vixen said:
As with many imperial measures they have come about from observing natural phenomena: in this case latitudes, longitudes and the meridian lines.
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None of which are, in fact, natural phenomena; all are artificial metrics overlaid on the map to aid navigation.

Vixen said:
As another example, knowing that an apartment size can be roughly estimated in square feet without any tape measures by taking careful footsteps across and around it, knowing that a 'foot' is roughly based on the size of a man's foot.
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I've always wondered why my sitting room suddenly gets bigger when my wife walks in. Her feet are about two-thirds the length of mine, so rooms are 50% bigger when she's in them.

Vixen said:
Can't do that with square metres:
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Can't do it with square feet either. To get a decent estimate, you need to know what the actual length of your foot is, and multiply your estimate accordingly. Of course you can do the calculations in your head, but why would you want to do that when you could just buy a fricking tape measure?

Vixen said:
You can use your hands to estimate the height of a horse (=4 inches x N, where N= number of hands). Much quicker than doing a calculation in your mind to convert it.
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Doing a calculation in your mind is much quicker than doing a calculation in your mind?

Dave
 
Lothian said:
As another example, knowing that an apartment size can be roughly estimated in sq m without any tape measures by taking stretched strides across and around it, knowing that a stretched stride is roughly a meter.

Can't do that with square feet: then you just have to familiarise yourself as to what the different sizes mean. Unless of course you can do the calculations in your head, converting sq meters to sq feet, but why would you want to do that once you know what size the apartment is anyway?
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Nonsense. A tall person has a much longer stride than someone even only a few inches shorter.
 
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Lothian said:
How weird. You can see the flaws in my parody but fail to spot them in your original.
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That's how people used to measure things. Whilst it is true the yard is also based on being measurable by use of the human body (a forearm or thigh or something iirc) it is mere coincidence a yard is not much different from a metre.

ETA: from
The French originated the meter in the 1790s as one/ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole along a meridian through Paris. It is realistically represented by the distance between two marks on an iron bar kept in Paris.

In 1960 the meter was redefined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of orange-red light, in a vacuum, produced by burning the element krypton (Kr-86). More recently (1984), the Geneva Conference on Weights and Measures has defined the meter as the distance light travels, in a vacuum, in 1/299,792,458 seconds with time measured by a cesium-133 atomic clock which emits pulses of radiation at very rapid, regular intervals.
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Try measuring a simple space by that criteria.
 
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Dave Rogers said:
Which are based on the dimensions of the Earth. As, of course, are kilometres.

Dave
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Well now they're based on electronic transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms and c. But originally yes.
 
sphenisc said:
Well now they're based on electronic transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms and c. But originally yes.
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Yeah, but they're imperial caesium-133 atoms, right? Mined in the hills of Derbyshire and refined in the laboratories of Wessex.

Right ????
 
It's quite something isn't it that the ancients didn't need to measure distances from the equator to Paris and then divide it by one ten-millionth to come up with a metre. They knew that the foot was a sound and robust measurement. And quelle surprise a metre is not far off a yard, another well-founded measurement.

The procedure for verification of the foot as described in the 16th century posthumously published work by Jacob Koebel in his book Geometrei. Von künstlichem Feldmessen und absehen is:[14][15]

Stand at the door of a church on a Sunday and bid 16 men to stop, tall ones and small ones, as they happen to pass out when the service is finished; then make them put their left feet one behind the other, and the length thus obtained shall be a right and lawful rood to measure and survey the land with, and the 16th part of it shall be the right and lawful foot.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit)
 
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