Posts by John Brown (no body)

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" :-(

Re: Oh for the love of kittens

Or the "pasty babies", ie young, not very well off mothers feeding Greggs[*] pasties[**] to their toddlers.

* other brands may be available and the Greggs ones are probably "slices" or "bakes" since Cornwall decided to be assertive over the name of its "national dish" :-)

** Ginster abominations don't count, even if they are assembled in Cornwall.

Re: Some people...

Thank you. It's always nice when someone shoehorns in a quote from Mr Adams :-)

Re: Some people...

Would be great for morale (sorry, "mental health").

It was, for a short time, Well Being, but I believe the current fad term is "mindfullness" :-)

Re: What a load of cobblers

"there is no such thing as passive eating!"

You've not met my wife!!!

Re: confused

"The watch tried to understand what was said and apparently the only part it could understand was "1-1-2" and so it assumed it was a number to be called. So it did."

That's actually quite an assumption, but not something I'm surprised by given the current state of so-called "helper features" in general software today. If it was me, I'd not assume a "heard" number was a phone number since few people ever actually use phone numbers these days. I'd expect a call to the emergence services to be something like "Call 112" or "Call Police" etc. Specifically the the word "Call" to specify what the number/name/word following means in context.

Re: Hey, Siri

"They don't realise that we all have different ideas about what's interesting. With this sort of attitude so prevalent, it's only going to get worse."

If he also has an Apple watch, tell him the motion sensors can report all sorts of stuff back to Apple HQ, such as how often he wanks, how long for and how "enthusiastic" his performance was and, thanks to various web tracking, not only which porn site he was on at the time but even what video clip he was watching.

Re: The bill

"Why? It was most likely human officers who heard the audio from the gym and made the decision to send what they saw as an appropriate response, given the information before them."

From the article, it is implied that Siri "heard" the words one one two, multiple utterances of "shot" and some "bangs" from gloves hitting the trainers pads and took it upon itself to call the emergency services. The article doesn't mention if it just dialled 1-1-2 and connected the audio to whoever picked up or if it just reported in it's own voice what it "thought" was happening.

I'm not sure how that could work in the UK, with either method. Calls to 999 are picked up by the emergency service operation centre and the first thing they do is as "Which service do you require" at which point you are expected to state Police, Fire Ambulance or Coast Guard. They do have procedures for "silent" calls and/or special code words. I'm not sure what they might do if Apples Siri calls them.

Re: Hey, Siri

"Not sure how it works, whether it's the car or the phone that is doing the work."

It's the car doing the work. If you check the manual, you should find you can also change the audio source, radio band and stations too. Also a Kia owner. I only use the voice recognition for the phone too. The radio stations and audio source is easier to do by pressing the buttons since I know where they are by feel and that's quicker for me.

(Did you know the radio also has 2GB of storage for MP3 files? Handy for keeping your favourite stuff and just use the USB for the ever changing stuff. In my case, music in the storage, audio books on USB stick)

Re: Hey, Siri

So why is it even listening without the "wake" command? Or does Siri commonly mistake "sorry" for its wake command? Something I'd not be very surprised at and commented on when Siri was first announced to the world.

Re: Hey, Siri

"My Echo has a mic off button with a red LED confirming it."

Doesn't defeat the primary reason for having a voice controlled assistant

Re: If Only.......

The fact that so many separate companies are involved tells us that there are clouds at sea too. Part of the problem is "cloud". If they sold the s/w to the shipping companies who then ran it on their own servers, then a single hack on the s/w would not result in 100's of companies and 1000's of ships being affected. But no, these days it's all about rent-seeking and being the next billionaire while becoming an ever increasingly large and lucrative target.

Re: Massachusetts in the early days of COVID

"a current issue of a local newspaper"

So going out to buy a newspaper was an "essential need" in this case? Who buys newspapers these days anyway? I've not bought one in many years and never had enough loyalty to have one delivered. That'd be me out of a job if I worked for that manager, who was clearly one of those with a desperate need to see "bums on seats".