Talking of tools which are a pain, how about those sets of miniature screwdrivers for jewellers and precision engineering. Firstly the blades (especially the Philips/Posidriv cross-ended ones) are made of very soft metal so they get chavelled up as you use them. Secondly, the handles are so thin and with such shallow knurls on them that you can't get a good purchase on them in your hand: Often I have to resort to a pair of pliers around the handle to undo a screw that doesn't want to budge.
Funny video on Twitter recently. Outside a shopping centre ("Mall") somewhere in US hayseed country, someone had set up an easel with a map of the world, showing country boundaries but no more detail than that. Young people passing by were asked where was. NOT ONE was able to do so, even as to where the US was on the map. One or two could identify the odd continent, but that's all.
What may be obvious to older contributors on the group may not be so for someone who has only been educated using metric conventions.
My secondary school and college education 45 years ago was using SI units which I've continued to use throughout my career. My early experience of using imperial tools was working on 10 year old cars when I was in my late teens and later with plumbing with a DIY renovation a house.
Interesting. I would have thought that adding up numbers where you are always carrying tens from one column to the next was easier than numbers where sometimes you are carrying twelves, sometimes twenties etc - even if the latter is allegedly "no trouble", the former would be *even* easier.
Mind you, mental arithmetic has always been a failing of mine: I have a complete mental block because I cannot visualise the digits in my mind's eye to be able to add them up and to remember the sum-so-far; I need a pen and paper to do any calculations beyond fairly simple two-digit addition or subtraction of simple combinations which I do by learning lookup tables.
I'm probably just a couple of years too young to have dealt with £sd money: I was 7 when decimalisation happened so the only things I'd have been buying were comic and sweets at the corner newsagent. (*)
I remember my school had some maths workbooks, and we were told to ignore the addition/subtraction of £sd and ounces/pounds/stones/hundredweights/tons because that was old-hat - in the 1970s it seemed that people expected that the changeover to metric would be quick and total, and that no-one would use imperial, even as folk units, within a few years.
A lot of the scorn about the metric system yielding silly numbers is because we persist in making things to approximately imperial sizes and convert to metric, rather than working to round numbers of centimetres instead of previously round numbers of inches.
It was like when supermarkets began selling loose food in metric units. In the early 90s, my local Tesco announced that it would only sell weighed (ie not pre-packed) food by the gramme. Most people panicked, but I simply learned that 1 ounce is about 30 grammes, so 4 ounces / quarter of a pound is about 120 grammes - or *very roughly* 100 g. I really don't care whether I receive 90, 100 or 110 grammes, as long as I pay for what I get - I just want *about* 100 grammes. Likewise for a pint of beer - I don't care whether I am served 500 ml or 568 ml (1 pint) as long as I am charged for what I get.
(*) I can remember that there was a parade of shops about 200 yards from our house: in order, hairdresser, newsagent, grocer, greengrocer, off-licence. One by one they closed down and the shop-fronts were bricked up to turn the shops into ground-floor flats. Only the hairdresser still survives; the off-licence (Milligans) was the last casualty some time in the 2000s. Now everyone goes to the local Tesco which is probably a mile away.
And they were the more expensive because they probably sold in smaller volumes and came from a more specialised supplier.
If they aren't clearly labelled and if you have never learned that imperial sizes are still sold, you would tend to think they were identical apart from one being "better quality" than the other.
Everyone should be able to do mental arithmetic, and even more importantly, be able to quickly work out an approximate answer to a calculation, which will tell you whether your final calculation is
*reasonable*. Unfortunately most people seem to be like the dopier of Adam's apprentices. Given the ratio of sand to cement, they'll turn the handle of the calculation sausage machine, and out will come that they need 10,000 tons of cement and 250 grams of sand to build the next house.
The last time I used imperial "in anger" (emphasis on "anger") was when I was helping my dad fit a new hot water cylinder at their holiday cottage. We were trying to work out whether the baulks of wood (maybe the eponymous 4x2) would be strong enough to take its weight. We only had a tape measure calibrated in inches - and no calculator. I knew that 1 litre of water weighed a kilogramme or that a gallon of water weighs 10 lb. But how do you go from measurements of height and circumference in inches to weight of water?
Not knowing the magic 277 cu in = 1 gallon (= 10 lb) factor (a number I've now committed to memory!), the easiest way was to convert to centimetres (using gross approximations like 2 cm to 1 in and pi=3), do the pi R^2 L calculation, convert to litres (divide by 1000) and hence to kilogrammes. All we needed was an order of magnitude value - neither of us knew to the nearest 10 gallons / 10 lb how big and heavy a typical cylinder is.
We obviously estimated correctly the amount of wood needed to support the cylinder, because it's still there 40 years later.
Definitely. If we'd been born with 12 digits, we'd have learned to count in base 12, and we'd have invented two extra symbols for what in base 10 we write as 11 and 12. I can do base 16 arithmetic more easily than base 12, and that's partly because there's only ever one digit (numeric or letter) in each column.
I wish I'd been taught how to do *mental* arithmetic and how to process the carry/borrow digits and to retain a mental running total. I never was: I was taught how to do it on paper, with rules for carrying/borrowing digits which I can do fine (albeit slowly and laboriously).
My wife worked in a bakery as a summer job during school, so she quickly became adept at adding up prices of five doughnuts at 13p each, two loaves of bread at 27p each, 7 seven flapjacks at 17p each, *without having to write it down and add up on paper*. I marvel at that skill.
I'm OK at estimating an approximate value - or at least knowing when a calculator answer is clearly ridiculous due to mis-keying.
I'm not one of those people who needs a calculator to perform simple calculations like adding 2 and 3 or multiplying by 10, and I am lightning fast with lookup-table things like times tables up to 12, but for anything else I do at least need a pencil and paper to act as a visible short-term memory to handle the running total and carry digits.
At my school, one of the teachers had a bizarre punishment for minor offences - like being caught cheating in weekly tests: "Tarthur's Cubes". He'd decide that an offence merited a three-digit cube or, if it was more serious, a four- or five-digit cube. He'd get members of the class to call out the required number of digits to make up the number. For the next lesson, the culprit then had to perform long multiplication, showing all the carry digits, and then multiply that answer by itself to end up with (number)^3. Then you had to perform long-division (showing all the working) and divide that answer by itself. You know that you should end up with the number you started with, but the punishment was that it was so slow and laborious and tedious that you would think twice about committing the offence that was being punished.
The prefects had similar slow-and-laborious punishments:
- Minor things merited "columns of The Times", for which you were given a page of yesterday's newspaper and you had to go through the required number of columns of newsprint, inking-in every letter with a "counter" (an enclosed space, such as in "a", "b", "d", "e" etc), with a standard rate of so many column-inches of the following day's paper for every letter that you missed.
- More serious offences rated "an impo" (imposition) which involved writing lines ("I must not lie to a prefect") on special "impo paper" which had red and green lines ruled on it at about 5 mm spacing. The body of the letters had to fit exactly within the green lines; the ascenders (of "b", "d", "l") had to rise to the upper red line and the descenders (of "p", "q", "y") had to go down to the lower red line: this involved writing more slowly and laboriously than normal handwriting. It was the job of the master-on-duty each day to make himself available during lunch break to hand out pages of "impo paper" and to check this against notes that the prefects had given him ("Smith has been given an impo of 50 lines").
Corporal punishment was allowed (this was the 1970s) but could only be administered by masters, not prefects, and was more often threatened than actually performed. One master who taught us English but also taught sport would produce "Mini Whacker" (a size 5 trainer shoe), "Tiger Whacker" (a size 7 with go-faster stripes) and "Super Whacker" (a size 10 on which he would draw an "S" in chalk and keep hitting you until all the chalk had transferred itself from shoe to backside. I never saw him *use* these, but he often *threatened* to.
I was only actually "tanned" once, and that was for what we euphemistically called "master-baiting" (!) - imitating and taunting teachers. I did a very good impression of the Nelly, the biology teacher, as we were getting changed from swimming and he walked through the changing room from the biology lab. You could see him debating with himself whether to let it go or to make a big issue of it, and he decided that he had officially heard what I'd said. "Brrrrrrinnnngg meeee a slippppperrrrrrrrrr", he yelled. "Bennnnnnn Doverrrrrrrrr". And he got hold of my hair at the front and pushed my head down (making my bum stick out) as he raised his arm to get a good swing, then he yanked my head up as he brought his arm down on my bum which retreated from his arm - his actions, always rather robot-like, were
180 degrees out of phase! Every time he brought his arm up for another swing, he bashed his knuckles on the locker doors - I could hear him muttering and cursing "Ouch, Fuck" each time he did it. I had to make all the right sounds of pain, though the only pain I was in was through trying to stop myself bursting out laughing at how ludicrous it must have looked to be tanned by "a robot". I learned later from my mates that Nelly was beside himself with fury and they feared for my safety at one point and were about to intervene because he looked as if he was going too far. I saw him years later and recounted the incident, which he still remembered, and he said the deciding factor in him deciding not to ignore it was that I'd used his surname: in a mechanical voice, I'd said "Eek! Look. There goes Nelly [surname]. I wonder if he's going to feed his crock-oh-dile (*)", but if I'd omitted his name, he'd have ignored it. Grrr.
(*) It was reputed that he kept a pet crocodile in the school pond and fed it on first-years. The word was always said with very exaggerated stress on all three syllables - crock-oh-dile.
I remember seeing articles in magazines which discussed in all seriousness whether the world should devise new units of 50 metric seconds in a metric minute, 50 of those minutes in a metric hour and 25 metric hours in a day. Or some such calculation which resulted in a metric second being
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.