I remember an A level physics practical demo that was screwed up by some kind of centi minute stopwatch the lab tech gave out... Basically it meant when it said what we thought was ten seconds had passed, it had actually only been six.
The odd thing is that there were 20 people watching the demo, and no one at the time spotted the fact that the readings being taken ever ten secs seems to be happening a bit quick! Its only when doing the sums later that nothing made sense.
As a kid, I was always fascinated when I saw my mother add up a column of prices. It wasn't just pounds, shillings and pence
- we still had farthings!
She would just run her finger down the column at a constant speed muttering a stream of sub totals as she went until she reached the bottom and wrote down the final total!
In my research days, when we were typically running experiments for a week or two, one of my colleagues suggested that we should use the microfortnight as a unit of time. (Check out what it corresponds to).
fairly close to a second, but I've never done the arithmetic
Was that a guess? If so, I'm impressed. It actually works out as 1.2 seconds.
Well, we all know there are 86400 secs in a day. A fortnight is 14 days. So you're multiplying something a bit less than 100,000 by something a bit greater than 10. Thass gonna be roughly a million, innit.
That was the sort of thing I meant about being able to quickly approximate a calculation.
One of our old physics books (published by Mills & Boon oddly enough) mentioned a process that used a measurement of a foot-pound per pennyweight fortnight!
SteveW
If you're so innumerate that you need to use your fingers to count then the finer points of imperial v metric are immaterial. What percentage of people can't count without using their fingers anyway?
NT
No - a memory of a conversation in the late 1960s.
On of our university lecturers suggested we measure viscosity in "Acres per year" (L^2/T)
Page 133 onwards of this gives tables of so many obscure measurements my head hurts, and it's intended to be *helpful*
Quite a lot.
22% of fifteen year olds in this country are functionally innumerate.Owain
WhiskyDave gets around a bit. ;-)
Remember when I used to do the shopping for my mum on a Saturday morning. In the days when you bought most things fresh - and didn't go by car to shop. And she used to give me the exact money. For a large shopping bag of mixed groceries.
In which case there would only be pound shops in the poorer towns, or parts of a town?
What an indictment of the school system & our national culture.
NT
More a view of why so many think being poor is down to the individual being feckless.
Plenty use pound shops because the pack sizes are often smaller for some things. And the odd bargain.
That's because you would have spent the change in sweets.
That's almost any provincial high street, these days.
Owain
That was the basis of the article I read- can't remember who wrote it.
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required