I was, but long enough before to understand money at that point.
Sounds a bit daft until you work out that 45p in '72 would be over £6 in today's money!
I remember 1/2p ceasing to be legal tender, and the introduction of the pound coin...
You mean a bit like posting a totally off topic to a group about DIY, Bill?
Most of us don?t actually use our fingers to count anymore.
When looking at the weather forecast I think in an unholy mix of Celsius/Fahrenheit, so anything around zero degrees C is cold and icy, whereas around 70 degrees F is a nice warm day.
After I've bought X litres of diesel, I then work out my fuel consumption in MPG.
I know that 200g of pasta is enough for two people, but when measuring rice I revert to ounces.
And so on.
Imperial and £sd has/had a certain charm but if I'd never had to deal with either I wouldn't weep over it.
I think we were overall better at doing maths because of it
Let's face it the natural world is not a decimal system
Time was never decimal.
Time still is not decimal.
I remember my father teaching me rapid imperial to decimal conversion that he used daily in his bank job.
It was based on the simple fact that 960 farthings to the pound was nearly one thousand, and a shilling was one twentieth of a pound
so 5'/3½d would be 5x.05 = .25 plus 3x4 plus 2 = 14 farthings, so you could simply add 14 and get £0.264 and be extremely close. Since there were 48 farthings in a shilling a farthing was a tad bigger so you added in .001 if it was over thruppence and .002 if it were over ninepence to roughly get close. Thruppence halfpenny being more than 3d, £0.265 is correct to three decimal places.
0.264583333... is the correct value...
of course but its massively more complicated to for example work out what 3.5% per annum of £1237 17'3½d is compounded as a monthly interest, in £sd terms.
The answer was to represent all values in either binary coded decimal or really in floating point, as far as banks went. Display in pounds and whole pence was simply presentation.
But where it really made a difference was shop sized cash registers and small computers like pocket calculators
Well that is just more bigoted bollocks. America still uses imperial measures!
Imperial measures and English language have outlasted Britain and its empire massively!
pounds, shillings, and pence, inches, feet, yards, poles, chains, furlongs and miles, fluid ounces, pints, quarts and gallons , Ounces, pounds, stones, hundredweights and tons. Fahrenheit temperatures. And fractions not decimals
As opposed to this revolutionary French metric shit
I don't remember the people ever being asked actually.
Before you display more bigotry why not ask why duodecimal number systems ever came into being if it wasn't the 'will of the people'
It was the will of the people that an inch was the length of a thumb knuckle joint, a foot was the length of a - foot, and a yard was how long an arrow had to be at dull draw - so a full arm and chest, just as a cubit had been the length of a forearm . And a mile was about a thousand steps, that turned into about 1700 yards, and then a pole was about man height and so that became two yards, and thongs like furlongs and acres were related to use of horses in ploughing
Only much later did they try and define exact integral relationships between them
So imperial measurements evolved naturally from what people did.
The metric system was designed by intellectuals and imposed on post revolutionary France. Nothing to do with the people
Once they started doing weather forecasts in °C it simply fell out of modern comprehension. I do remember 212°C is boiling point tho.
The funny thing is manufactured wood still comes in 8' x 4' sheets, but they quote the size in mm.
and structural timber may be '75mm × 50mm' but its still called three-by-two down at the yard.
The claim was that *some* were disadvantaged, as they couldn't cope with the concepts. Nobody I knew believed that and I think we were better off for learning to cope with multiple base systems at an early age.
Something that is only available to those of use who grew up with the old systems. I had to teach imperial measure and fractions to my apprentices as much of the stuff we made had been designed in Britain in the 1950s or before.
I never had a feel for Fahrenheit. It didn't really matter to me as a kid what the outside temperature was beyond whether I needed to wrap up warm or not. It was only when I started science at school that exact temperatures mattered and we used the cgs system for that.
It depends where you are. When I moved to Geneva I got a feel for temps in C. Then I moved to the US and (re)gained a feel for temps in F. Now I'm back here and it's a feel in C again.
Someone says a number, for a temp, using the units you're used to, and you know how warm/cold that is, without having to think about it.
The americans ''got to the moon'' using imperial linear measurements, but they had trouble with volume tho'..7 UK pints to an american gallon.
Fahrenheit has to be the most hare-brained temperature scale ever devised - apart from the one which used an inverse scale so a higher temperature was a lower number. It seems very obvious that you devise a temperature scale that is based on (and is easily compared with) the properties of the most abundant liquid on Earth: water. Make 0 the freezing point of water and some larger number the boiling point. given that we count in base 10, it's probably sensible to make that larger number 10, 100 or 1000. But at a pinch I could cope with a power of 12 or 16 as the interval, as long as boiling water is a round number of that base (eg 144, if you're using base 12, or
256 if you're using base 16).Units should be devised for ease (rather than complexity) of calculations. If we had twelve fingers/thumbs, we'd count in base 12 and our units would related by base 12 ratios. But we have 10 digits and are taught to count in base 10, so that is the *only* ratio that should be used for a units system.
Computers are an exception, but there are good scientific principles why binary is used - because logic gates can have two states. Because binary is exceptionally tedious for calculation and for expressing large quantities, we have evolved octal and hexadecimal. Given that computers have generally standardised on "molecules" (bytes) of 8 "atoms" (bits), hexadecimal is more logical than octal, in that you are dividing a byte into an *even* number of
*same-size* chunks (4 and 4), rather than unequal chunks of 3, 3 and 2 bits.
which aircraft crashed because they needed X kg of fuel and put in X lbs instead?
Like with all things its not what the standard is, its that there is a standard and everyone uses it.
Diversity simply doesn't cut it
Degrees K are the most sensible, keeps people alert.
It's their cheese-paring short-measure pint: 16 Fl Oz instead of 20. Still 8 US pints to a US gallon, though.
Fahrenheit used two fixed points that were available to him at the time.
Zero is the freezing point of saturated brine, which makes more sense than that of water in an era when you can't be sure how pure the water you have is. By deliberately contaminating it with a known substance, he got a repeatable temperature.
He set 100 at something else readily available to him at the time - the temperature of the human body. Today, we know it can vary between 97F and 99F, but it has been suggested that the prevalence of mild infections would have made 100F more likely in his time.
It was based on two sensible ideas. Lowest known temperature 0 degrees & body heat + 100 degrees. Sadly neither these two parameters was correct
But it means a pint weighs a pound - which is vaguely logical
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