v for frequency?

[NY]

It wasn't so much the heart attack itself as the cardiac arrest that went with it: the brain being a bit starved of oxygen as my wife and the ambulance crew struggled with CPR for over an hour to get my heart to beat unaided (*). And then the effect of the drug-induced coma while I recovered in intensive care: I was originally taken to York where my heart was "jump started" but I then had to be taken to Leeds where they had a special ICU designed to lower the body temperature for a period of time to aid recovery.

All in all, it's a minor miracle than I'm still here.

(*) Apparently they were eventually advised to bring me in to Casualty even though I wasn't stabilised (normal paramedic advice is "stay and play" rather than "scoop and run"). That was after I've been pumped with the ambulance's entire supply of adrenaline, plus some more that was brought by a backup ambulance.

[Vir Campestris]

A mile is about 1.609 km. A foot is a little over 30cm. A pound is about 454 grams. A pint is 656ml in the UK.

Andy

[Fredxx]

Even a UK pint is only 568ml. Which pint did you have in mind?

[charles]

For most of us a UK pint is 568ml.

[Vir Campestris]

The one where the keys on my keyboard are the other way around! Well spotted!

Andy

[Mark Lloyd]

A pint of beer?

I don't know if it was pints, but I remember about some old units where it depended on what was being measured.

[Sam E]

Maybe its 656ml when its beer?

[Cindy Hamilton]

Pints are pretty much always 1/8 of a gallon.

The U.S. adopted the old British wine gallon (231 cubic inches) for wet measures and the British corn gallon (268.8 cubic inches) for some dry volumes.

In 1824 the British replaced the various gallons with a single gallon of

277.42 cubic inches.

The Wikipedia article has a lot more info, of course.

[NY]

What were the people smoking when they came up with the idea of different definitions for dry and wet gallon, and defined some of them not even to be an *integer* number of cubic inches, let alone a nice round number? That's the biggest problem with the imperial system (after its use of non-base-10 relationships): the fact that there is no single worldwide definition of some of its units, so we have US versus UK definitions of pint and gallon, and troy/apothecaries/avoirdupois definitions of ounce and dram/drachm (and presumably multiples thereof such as pound, stone etc - if troy and apothecaries use weights that heavy ;-) "Please send us three stones of diamonds (*)" or "The patient must take 5 pounds of aspirins per day" ;-)

Did other countries have measurement systems that were as absurd as ours?

(*) Yes, I *did* realise the confusion of stones (unit of weight) and stones (rocks or jewels).

[Cindy Hamilton]

This'll make you laugh: they were based on the weight of the amount of water they held, which worked out to a weird number of cubic inches.

Probably close to it, although the varying size of a gallon might be unique to us.

Ah, well. We're ahead of you there. We don't use stones as a unit of weight in the U.S. We just use pounds.

Hundredweight might be used in some specialized context, but never in daily life.

Incidentally, I buy topsoil in 40-pound bags, but mulch by the cubic foot. I often wish I knew the weight of the latter before I attempt to lift it.

I'd like the U.S. to go fully metric, but I'm confident I won't see it in my lifetime.

[Max Demian]

...if you include the head.

[Max Demian]

Personal weight in the UK is always stones and pounds except when kg is used - which very few people do, even youngsters.

[gareth evans]

Perhaps you are thinking of weight, where the Avoirdupois system is used for everything except precious metals where the Troy system is used, as in the old brain teasers ...

Which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?

Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?

Which weighs more, an ounce of feathers or an ounce of gold?

ISTR that the answers lie with that most elementary of weights, the Grain.

Who remembers the old, red, school exercise books that had all the weights and measures on the back cover?

Finally, were you lucky enough to have a double yolker for your breakfast, in the case of a double yolker, which is correct? ...

The yolks of an egg is white, or, the yolks of an egg are white?

[Rod Speed]

Weird. Only ancient dinosaurs use the imperial system for their own personal weight here.

[NY]

I think the whole world would like the US to go metric, then the imperial system (or the US version of it) would finally die the death it should have had many decades ago.

I realised that the US didn't use stones for measuring weights. In the UK, it's common for people to give their weight as "14 stone 5 [pounds]" rather than "201 pounds". But that's probably the only context in which stones are still used as "folk units".

The thing that made me double-take when I was on holiday in Massachusetts (*), was road signs, especially local signs and road-works signs, which used feet even for fairly long distances: "Road works in 3000 feet". Hmm, I need to do a quick calculation: that's 1000 yards or about about 0.6 miles. In the UK, distances on road signs tend to be expressed in yards (for small distances) or fractions of a mile (1/4, occasionally 1/3, 1/2, 3/4 mile). And trip milometers in cars express distances in tenths of a mile. I'm not saying that UK's convention is better or worse than US's - just different.

On the other hand, dates expressed as MM/DD/YY defy logic because the units are not in ascending or descending order of significance: DD/MM/YY (UK) or YY-MM-DD (ISO something-or-other standard). I tend to express months in letters because "11 Mar(ch) 2023" means the same throughout the English-speaking world, even if an American might express it as Mar 11 2023; on the other hand, "11/03/2023" might be Nov 3 2013. There are exceptions: even in the UK, we refer to "9/11" because it happened in the US so their rules apply.

(*) I can never remember the single and double letters: I need to remember, it's 2s, 1s, 2t!

[NY]

Yes, I think the use of stones and pounds for weight, and feet and inches for height, are gradually dying out here in the UK. I'll have to ask my nephews, who are all in their twenties, what units they use.

I'm one of those half-and-half people: I tend to estimate in imperial and know my height/weight in imperial, but I *always* measure in metric. Interestingly, temperatures in weather forecasts changed more recently than the introduction of imperial/metric rulers and tape measures, but I never think of temperatures in anything other than Celsius; apart from "special temperatures" like 32 F for water freezing, 98.4 F for typical body temperature and 212 F for water boiling, temperatures in F don't mean anything to me.

[NY]

I know that the ounce has three different definitions: Troy, Apothecaries (use by dispensing chemists) and Avoirdupois. But is the pound identical in each case: are the a slightly different number of troy, apoth and avoir ounces in a pound?

I've just turned 60 so I was learning arithmetic in the late 60s and early

70s. I remember being given a text book of "sums" to do, with instructions to ignore those on certain pages which got you to add/subtract feet/inches, cwt/stones/pounds/ounces and £sd, because those were "old fashioned" and would soon be obsolete. I can *vaguely* remember pre-decimal coins, but really I can only remember going along to the newsagent to buy my sweets and being told that I mustn't use those coins next week. I think in practice shops accepted pre-decimal "copper" coins for a while after, to allow people to use up their coins, but you were always given change in "new pence" and shops presumably had to bag up pre-dec coins separately when paying their takings into their bank. And somewhere I think I've still got the white mug that every child was given with conversion tables "6d = 2 1/2 p; 1 s = 5 p; 2s = 10 p; 2/6 = 12 1/2 p" etc.

I'd go for the second: one egg but two yolks, and "are" refers to the yolks, not the egg. Except, of course [I've not fallen into your little trap] the yolks are *yellow* ;-) (You nearly had me there!)

[NY]

I remember the Hitchcock film "Frenzy", set in London, with all the characters being English. And someone was described as weighing "100 pounds" or whatever. I'm surprised none of the cast mentioned that use of pounds alone, as opposed to stones and pounds, was exceptionally rare in the UK. In a similar vein, in the first Harry Potter film, Professor McGonagall says "dinner will be served momentarily" - an American usage of the word: in the UK, it means "*for* a while" or briefly, transiently; in the US it means "*in* a while" or soon.

[Rod Speed]

NY [e-mail] wrote

I know my weight in kg and height in feet and inches.

Me too, but still don't do house block sizes in metric when reading real estate ads.

100F still means something to me, but not oven temps anymore.

[rbowman]

Hectares don't do much for me any more than sections probably mean in the UK. (260 hectares). That gives rise to Americanisms like '40 acres and a mule'. or 'back 40' A section is a mile on each side, or 640 acres. Land grants typically were fractional parts of a section so anything that isn't a factor of 640 wasn't going to happen. Blame it all on chains and furlongs.