Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Not quite.

And, likewise, he's not necessarily King Charles III in many of those places in the same way that Queen Elizabeth II of England was "merely" Queen Elizabeth in Scotland since the previous English Queen of that name was never Queen of Scotland. (ISTR there was a bit of a kerfuffle in Scotland when the first new Royal Mail post boxes were appearing after QEII's coronation and they had to be changed to remove the II from the crest)

Re: Head of Commonwealth

From wikipedia "n 2018, following the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Commonwealth leaders declared that Charles would be the next head of the Commonwealth,[36] while the role remained non-hereditary.[37][38] Consequently, after the Queen's death on 8 September 2022, Charles automatically became Head of the Commonwealth."

Sounds like a vote to me! More of a ceremonial "Prime Minister" position and definitely not a "Head of State" position, so being voted on an elected by the leaders of the Commonwealth nations sounds perfectly reasonable rather than a full on public vote in each member nation, ie just how most Prime Ministers are elected, by the party, not the people. Or in the US, the Speaker of the House, also very powerful but not head of state. (Remember, the Speaker of the House need not themselves be elected into government, but elected BY the house, not the people)

Re: Elon crosses another bridge

Well, he did signal his intentions when he started selling pocket sized flame throwers.

On the other hand, his Boring Company seems to actually be doing something. I'd not heard anything about their operations until this turned up on BBC News. It's a long way from the original vision, but then so was grasshopper from Falcon 9.

From the day he signed it over, the debt repayments will have sucked out any operating cash they had almost instantly.

Re: If you owe the bank...

IIRC. the Saudi Royal family investment fund is the next biggest shareholder after Musk. A bastion of free speech, just like Free Speech Absolutist Mr Musk :-)

Re: Metric for precision. Imperial for sharing

"Try that when dividing a cake between a small number of people...5 really is the only outlier"

The "2.4 children" implies that nuclear families of 5 is relatively common :-)

Re: Gammon's

*IF* the EU ever turns into a single federal state, that would make it as much an "empire" as the USA, Canada or Australia or is. No one is being forced or pressured into joining the EU. Countries ask to be allowed to join and are then given a range of conditions to satisfy before being allowed to join (and yes I accept there are controversies over the conditions). Maybe you meant Moscow, not Strasbourg?

And, of course, a country can leave the EU too if it choose to :-p

Re: Gammon's

"These are the same fuckwits who think Britain has an empire and is a country that matters."

There are very, very few people alive who experienced "empire"[*] these days. I doubt it's enough to swing an election.

* depending on who you ask. Personally I'd say 1947[**], not the hand over of Hong Kong. If we use Hong Kong as a measure, then Britain still has an "empire" with the likes of Gibraltar and other dependencies.

** Yes, 1947 is "only" 76 years ago, but anyone under 5 or 6 isn't going to have much if any memory of it so we're really only looking at people over about 82 who might have some active memories of Empire. The rest are just jingoistic wannabees.

Re: I just use SI most of the time

Motorway coutdown signs are in a weird length which is 0.9m roughly.

100 yds per sign, 300 yds total, so about 91 meters between signs. or 0.17(ish) miles in total. Not sure where you confusion is with 0.9m since it doesn't seem to match either miles or metres in this case :-) At motorway speeds, just treat the signs as 100 metres each, it's close enough.

Re: The French also tried metric time

6 deka-seconds :-)

Re: Metric for precision. Imperial for sharing

"The great value of 12 is that it readily splits by 2,3,4,6."

Why? 30cm splits nicely into 300mm, so you can spit things many more times without bothering with messy fractions and 30cm has 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 as factors. 12 doesn't have 5 as a factor and I come from a family of 5 so food portioning works better in metric :-p

Re: "forced to glide the aircraft, containing 69 souls"

Yeah, that actually sound s a bit weird. "Souls" instead of people is usually reserved for those "lost", usually at sea, but has carried on to the air passenger industry. It might even be offensive to some who may not believe in "souls" :-)

And anyway, the Christian God at least is supposed to omniscient and omnipresent, so no "soul" can ever be "lost" since They[*] will know exactly where and when they died and arrange "collection" :-)

[*] Surely, by definition "God" is gender neutral and so must use the they/them pronouns, none of this He or She stuff :-))))

Re: Age

I'm only 60 and can work with both. We changed over while I was about 7 or 8 but I still use feet/inches for mu height and St/lbs for weight because I can easily visualise both. I know my weight in kg and can work with that in a relative fashion, but still find it difficult to visualise what, eg 180cm tall is or 82Kg in weight is. Likewise distances, miles because that's what I do everyday on the roads, but can easily do metres for shorter distance from my competitive swimming days so visualising 25meters or 50meters is easy from pool lengths. Likewise, the pool I first learned in was 100' so can visualise that sort of distance in feet/yds easily too. My head is a weird mish mash of metric and imperial measurements and conversions making some things more difficult simply because I learned first imperial and later metric.

On the other hand, my SatNav British voice says things like turn left in 200 yds normally, but in December when my wife likes to switch to the America Elfred santas elf American voice, it says things like turn left in one quarter mile, which I find harder to visualise :-) (Yeah, I know it;s about 440yds, but still...)

Re: Brine

So freezing brine at 0F also requires you define "brine", ie the salt content and possibly any other impurities in the water?

"You could go down to 1/256 of an inch without needing any more decimal places."

Yeah, 'cos working mental arithmetic with fractions is so much easier :-)

True, with practice, you "learn" certain fractions and calculations that are common and can just "know" the answer, but the moment you come across a less used fraction and have to add or subtract another less used fractional size, it gets more difficult. My mother was a comptometer operator when she first left school and for the rest of her life remember all the LSD-decimal conversion she had to memorise because even back in the 50's, big electric office calculators where working in decimal, not a bastardised mix of bases 12 and 20. Converting mixed 12ths and 20ths to decimal was second nature to her. But she only had to learn and do that because the mechanical calculators couldn't (or were more more complex and expensive)

Re: Consistency is what matters....

Fun fact, building and plumbing supplies are still sold in Imperial sizes

...because there are still an enormous number of "legacy" properties out there with 100+ year old plumbing.

as is jam & milk........

Not sure about jam, but milk still sometimes comes in 1 or 2 pint quantities, but not always. Mostly I buy it in 1 or 2 litre bottles. I just checked in the fridge where I keep a "1 pint" bottle to re-fill for my "coffee on the road". It's actually 500ml. So I can't say I've actually seen milk in imperial measures for some years now.

Re: I'm pro SI

"At least Americans just give the weight in pounds."

And have a love of *BIG* number based on docudrama/reality shows I've seen. Things are many, many 1000's of pounds. And yet they have at least two sizes of Ton to play with :-)

Re: I'm pro SI

"One of the tangible, retrograde, outcomes of Brexit, does seem to be that people feel free to use Imperial measurements - I hear it increasingly, everywhere."

That;s a little surprising to me. Just some strongly Brexit people being contrary maybe? Anyone 60ish or younger was taught metric from early school days, like me, I was there when it all changed so learned both. By secondary school, pretty much all teaching was done in metric units.

Re: No to cups or spoons

Ever watched Americas Test Kitchen? They bang on about "perfection" and then use these imprecise measurements like cups! They even did a section on *how* to fill a cup depending on the recipe/ingredient and then never really talk about it again, leaving you to guess. A little variation may not matter with large quantities, but could make a huge difference in smaller quantities such as 1 cup or 1/2 cup. Dip and scrape level? Pour in? Shake or not? Cup of chopped nuts? How small are the nuts chopped? Weird!

Re: No to cups or spoons

The teaspoon and tablespoon are also official mandated size in the UK for cooking measures too. And as you say, actual tableware are not calibrated measures and come in variable sizes :-)

There are conversions between US and UK cups and spoon measure though because, as you would expect, they are different on each side of the pond. A bloody nightmare when buying some cooking equipment that comes with recipes from the US and they didn't bother to (or even understand!) that the measurements are different. I only really use cups for rice cooking and tea/table spoon for bread making.

"More factors."

I've heard that as an argument for retaining feet and inches from Americans before. "What if you need a 1/4 ft or 1/3rd of an inch? My ruler has those marking". Well duh! You can divide a ruler into any weird fractions you want to. Or you can just use decimal in the first place :-)

From the telly, I was under the impression that in US bars, beer comes in a "glass" or a "pitcher" :-)

Still the same in UK DIY stores :-)

I couldn't agree more. The longer a change is left, invariably the harder it is to implement. I wonder how "easy" it would be to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right nowadays compared with when Sweden did so in 1967 when cars were a lot more scarce on the roads?

Wile more or less true, depending on the circumstances, they were given years of notice to prepare.

"And also ignoring the fact even when we were in the EU it was legal to sell in pounds and ounces that as long as they also gave the weight in Kilos / grams."

And even now, you still come across some products in weird numbers of grammes or millilitres because they are approximations of imperial measurements.

Re: Leeching off a leech

Does Twitter charge for access to the APIs? If so, then charging for their app and not wanting to give refunds after being cut off with no notice makes a bit of sense. But if the Twitter API access is free or very low cost, then how much money were these companies making? That might affect how some people feel about them.

"It also, of course means that your employer won't go the extra mile for you."

That's the point that so many are trying to make to you. Few employers will go the extra mile for you, no matter how often you do so for them. You've either been very lucky with your employers or aren't old enough to have grown cynical yet :-)

They usually also get paid a "flat rate" salary (+ perqu's of course, like shares) so the more hours they can show they claim to do, the better it looks for them. The problem is, even if they worked their way up through the ranks, they forget (or never knew) what it's like to be paid hourly under contract and expect everyone to be just like them. Of course, their flat rate salary is way way higher than us peons get so while it may not matter to the bosses, it matters a lot to us.

Re: what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower

I seem to recall a fad for chocolate covered sprouts at some point in the past.

I like chocolate. I like sprouts. But not on the same plate, never mind as a "fusion" :-(