Interesting comment by someone on the Telegraph website.
"John Roberts 1 HR AGO Unfortunately the rise of Putin was complete geo-political failure of the West. When the USSR fell apart we did nothing to prevent the country falling into a dystopia of chaos and left the country to be run by criminal gangs. We could have helped more and decided to let it all play out for a former ruthless KGB officer to rise to the top. Russia is a pretend democracy and Putin is clearly a gangster don. It have been so much more. So much more that I'm sure in parallel Universe somewhere we did help and they both a member of the EU and of NATO as an actual democracy."
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
This is right. Kg are no good for the weight of a person. You can't visualize it. Eg Boris Johnson weighs seventeen and a half stone (mainly muscle) even though he's not a tall man - we all know this and most importantly we instinctively know what it looks like. It looks like him.
François Bayrou claims to have up to 200 signatures available to candidates in need. If he is right then he can deliver nominations to Le Pen and probably Zemmour also - given that his interest in doing this will surely be to support Macron by splitting the right.
He could be the Margaret Beckett of France if he does for them what she did for Corbyn.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
This is right. Kg are no good for the weight of a person. You can't visualize it. Eg Boris Johnson weighs seventeen and a half stone (mainly muscle) even though he's not a tall man - we all know this and most importantly we instinctively know what it looks like. It looks like him.
I think it's just what you're used to. Like we're used to MPG for fuel economy. I am happy with both although usually stick to stones.
Hats off to Johnson that he has no Russian skeletons in his or the Conservatives' closets.
As you know I am no fan of Johnson, but any Western politician appearing on RT at the moment is the latest incarnation of Lord Haw Haw
I agree entirely about Eck. I also agree with sanctions being placed by Labour on their 10 Soviet halfwits. I am disappointed in the MP for Batley and Spen. Most of the others are only to be expected.
Nonetheless I am more than alarmed by Johnson's hopeless sanctions. Still if he can get Starmer harassed over the Barry Gardiner business, he will probably view today's PMQs as a significant victory.
I retract the first paragraph. It is in error, I mistakenly mistook the picture of Beth Winter to be the MP for Batley and Spen. Apologies to that MP.
This is useful but it needs setting in context of what's going on with healthcare. First day in a long time fewer than a 1000 people nationally admitted to hopsital testing positive with covid.*
*How many are due to covid is not clear.
I should have been explicit despite high case rates as identified by the ONS, identified cases via testing, hospitalisations, serious illnesses and deaths are falling.
With one in 14 in NI having it I suspect the vast majority are either asymptomatic or think they have a cold if they’ve noticed at all.
SCOOP: The Biden admin is expected to announce today that it will allow sanctions to move forward on the company in charge of building Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2 AG, and its CEO after blocking such sanctions last year using a national security waiver.
I am not a big fan of either Sturgeon or Salmond but I don't think Sturgeon could actually distance herself any further away from Salmond without moving to Tahiti. Their mutual loathing is well known by all and I would suggest she has nothing to prove or feel embarrassed about on this particular score.
Well, except that he is the embodiment of the nationalist movement, he was her mentor, and she has subsequently described him as a sex pest (also stated by his own QC), which begs the question, what did she know and when?
For her to genuinely distance herself from Salmond is about as incredible IMO as John Major being able to truly distance himself from Mrs T.
Well she allegedly connived to have him prosecuted which I don't remember Major doing to his predecessor though he might have felt tempted with some of her more strident acolytes.
She will definitely have known about his activities years before they became public. It was apparently an open secret at Holyrood and, in fact, beyond. I remember being surprised when I was told and wondering why it wasn't in the papers. Just someone I bumped into who had heard about it through family or something. This was the person who could have become the first leader of an independent Scotland - doesn't bear thinking about.
JUST IN: Confirming Newsweek that the U.S. has issued a new warning to the Ukrainian government that the latest intelligence points to a full scale attack imminently, per Ukrainian and US officials.
At particular risk, the warning said, is the northeastern city of Kharkiv.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
A lot of recipes are badly converted into metric from original imperial measurements.
So you get absurdities where, for a standard cake batter - which should be equal quantities of butter, sugar, eggs and flour - the 3 egg version has 175g of the other ingredients and the 4 egg version 225g, which is not a proportionate increase. The recipe makes a lot more sense with 6oz and 8oz as the other measurements (I worked this out when I realised the standard egg is about 2oz).
I'm consequently a fan of diversity in measurement units, to use the units that are most appropriate to the task you are performing. For day-to-day tasks often this will be Imperial units, because they arose to be of convenient scale for particular applications. Like the oz for measuring baking ingredients.
But for many scientific applications metric is much more convenient because it was defined in such a way to make many conversions simpler.
I am not a big fan of either Sturgeon or Salmond but I don't think Sturgeon could actually distance herself any further away from Salmond without moving to Tahiti. Their mutual loathing is well known by all and I would suggest she has nothing to prove or feel embarrassed about on this particular score.
Well, except that he is the embodiment of the nationalist movement, he was her mentor, and she has subsequently described him as a sex pest (also stated by his own QC), which begs the question, what did she know and when?
For her to genuinely distance herself from Salmond is about as incredible IMO as John Major being able to truly distance himself from Mrs T.
Well she allegedly connived to have him prosecuted which I don't remember Major doing to his predecessor though he might have felt tempted with some of her more strident acolytes.
She will definitely have known about his activities years before they became public. It was apparently an open secret at Holyrood and, in fact, beyond. I remember being surprised when I was told and wondering why it wasn't in the papers. Just someone I bumped into who had heard about it through family or something. This was the person who could have become the first leader of an independent Scotland - doesn't bear thinking about.
It ought to put to bed the absolute nonsense about Andrew showing what a bad thing the monarchy is.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
This is right. Kg are no good for the weight of a person. You can't visualize it. Eg Boris Johnson weighs seventeen and a half stone (mainly muscle) even though he's not a tall man - we all know this and most importantly we instinctively know what it looks like. It looks like him.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
I'm in my 40s and would say it's 50:50, often both used interchangeably by the same person. The rise of kg I would attribute to people who go to gyms and monitor their weight carefully. Whereas those people who rarely if ever weigh themselves and don't worry unduly about being overweight are still using the units their parents taught them about when they were children.
I think the fact that we're practically the only country in the world to use both metric and imperial is a strength rather than a weakness.
Have we heard anything recently about or from the former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder? He was close to Putin and a proponent of NordStream.
Even Salmond seems to have nothing on Schroder...
From Wiki:
"On 13 March 2014, an attempt by the German Green Party to ban Schröder from speaking in public about Ukraine was narrowly defeated in the European parliament. His decision to celebrate his 70th birthday party with Putin in Saint Petersburg's Yusupov Palace in late April elicited further criticism from several members of Merkel's grand coalition, including human rights spokesperson Christoph Strässer."
Talking about imperial units, a friend has just by coincidence sent me this link on the use of rods etc in town planning in the good old days, when the serfs knew their place, and the Rees-Moggs of the time too.
Just saw a Newyorker headline that mysogyny was what saw Dick brought down at the Met. A shame repeated incompetence and unwillingness to address systemic problems didn't manage it.
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
I'm in my 40s and would say it's 50:50, often both used interchangeably by the same person. The rise of kg I would attribute to people who go to gyms and monitor their weight carefully. Whereas those people who rarely if ever weigh themselves and don't worry unduly about being overweight are still using the units their parents taught them about when they were children.
I think the fact that we're practically the only country in the world to use both metric and imperial is a strength rather than a weakness.
How?
I can understand an argument its neutral, though I find the snowflakes insisting on the government taking action to encourage imperial use tiresome, but I cannot really see what benefits we get from it.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
No idea I am afraid. There have been thousands of these standardised weights found across the Indus Valley and beyond but we have been unable to translate Harrapan Cuneiform or their Hieroglyphic language and so know almost nothing about them beyond the ruins they left behind. We didn't even know they existed until the start of the 20th century. Their cities were thought to be medieval in date and were reused by British engineers to build the railways across north western India.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
This is right. Kg are no good for the weight of a person. You can't visualize it. Eg Boris Johnson weighs seventeen and a half stone (mainly muscle) even though he's not a tall man - we all know this and most importantly we instinctively know what it looks like. It looks like him.
I think it's just what you're used to. Like we're used to MPG for fuel economy. I am happy with both although usually stick to stones.
It's exactly that - what you're used to. It takes an effort to train yourself away from what you are to what you aren't. I've made that effort for temp - I think in C now not F - but I haven't (yet) for weight of Prime Ministers. I probably should really. We're talking 111 kg btw.
Vivian Salama @vmsalama I asked Ukraine’s foreign minister yesterday if his government plans to evacuate Mariupol or Kharkiv given threats facing those cities. He said it’s not the plan, and that still appears to be the case. Their strategy: confront any threat head on. They believe they are prepared.
PM to City of London on Russian sanctions: “It’s not easy. I’m a former mayor of London. I know how important it is that our City is open to investment so these are tricky issues to navigate."
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”.
There's no mystery. He was given asylum by Britain and Russia's extradition requests were denied.
SCOOP: The Biden admin is expected to announce today that it will allow sanctions to move forward on the company in charge of building Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2 AG, and its CEO after blocking such sanctions last year using a national security waiver.
PM to City of London on Russian sanctions: “It’s not easy. I’m a former mayor of London. I know how important it is that our City is open to investment so these are tricky issues to navigate."
PM to City of London on Russian sanctions: “It’s not easy. I’m a former mayor of London. I know how important it is that our City is open to investment so these are tricky issues to navigate."
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
This is right. Kg are no good for the weight of a person. You can't visualize it. Eg Boris Johnson weighs seventeen and a half stone (mainly muscle) even though he's not a tall man - we all know this and most importantly we instinctively know what it looks like. It looks like him.
Have to admit that even though I deal with weight for medical reasons I do struggle to calculate BMI in my head in imperial units (=weight in kg / height in metres ^ 2), and I have to convert it first; nor have I come up with a rule fo thumb for the calc. Tough 25+ = concerningly fat for the number.
The one that threw me has been the change from HBA1c (glycosylated Haemoglobin) measured in mmol/mol (*) rather than %. Good being 49-59 (**) rather than 6.5%-7.5% is a reet pain.
Illiterates who weren't taught Latin can't even spell haemoglobin properly with the dipthong - bah. Teaching everyone Latin is one thing that *should* be compulsory.
* Has anyone ever tried explaining 6.02x10^20 per 6.02x10^23 to a random patient in hospital as a measure of their diabetic control? ** This range means a four times lower risk of heart attacks over if I remember my clinical data correctly over poor control.
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
And if Wallace and others carry on like that, even more. An unmistakeable error for the Tories after literally weeks of better coverage, with the Mail full of thousands, upon thousands, of comments saying this reflects the quality of the government.
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”.
There's no mystery. He was given asylum by Britain and Russia's extradition requests were denied.
Yes, that has got to definitively prove he is not a Putin agent or McMafia at all.
NEW: Biden is expected to expand sanctions against Russia as soon as today, with new U.S. penalties hitting additional Russian elites close to Putin as well as the builder of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Penalties will be on top of the initial sanctions package announced yday. https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1496533840009089025
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
Influence over government policy towards Russia and protection from having their assets seized by the looks of it.
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
It was obviously purely philanthropic. Their strong connections to the Kremlin show how they wish to support principles of democracy
Actually I am genuinely outraged. I used to be a Conservative Party Activist. This really is disgraceful. It is bad enough that the party advanced Putin's foreign policy agenda on Brexit, but this is much worse. Did no one ask why for fucks sake!!!
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
Influence. Freshly laundered money. Brexit, guaranteeing ongoing freshly laundered money and uninterrupted tax havens. A weakened EU. A weakened UK.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
It was obviously purely philanthropic. Their strong connections to the Kremlin show how they wish to support principles of democracy
Actually I am genuinely outraged. I used to be a Conservative Party Activist. This really is disgraceful. It is bad enough that the party advanced Putin's foreign policy agenda on Brexit, but this is much worse. Did no one ask why for fucks sake!!!
PS. Little wonder that the so-called Russia Report was a whitewash.
PM Orbán is traveling to Brussels tomorrow to take part in the extraordinary EU summit on the Ukrainian situation. The EU is set to make a long list of decisions on how to respond to Russia's actions and how to support Ukraine. HU stands committed to the joint EU policy. https://twitter.com/zoltanspox/status/1496524833936613386
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
Presumably you'd want weights in powers of two so that you could measure any weight at the given unit accuracy.
So 1, 2, 4, 8 etc
For bigger weights you might round to the nearest 10 or 100.
So 100, 200, 400 etc
You'd stop at 128 / 1280 / 12800 because you can then use the next scale up.
PM to City of London on Russian sanctions: “It’s not easy. I’m a former mayor of London. I know how important it is that our City is open to investment so these are tricky issues to navigate."
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
No idea I am afraid. There have been thousands of these standardised weights found across the Indus Valley and beyond but we have been unable to translate Harrapan Cuneiform or their Hieroglyphic language and so know almost nothing about them beyond the ruins they left behind. We didn't even know they existed until the start of the 20th century. Their cities were thought to be medieval in date and were reused by British engineers to build the railways across north western India.
Ok, so let me suggest something 5^2 *2 is the number of combinations you can make with your hands on a sort of up/down basis. I don't really believe that it's the truth, but who knows. 16 though..
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
Influence. Freshly laundered money. Brexit, guaranteeing ongoing freshly laundered money and uninterrupted tax havens. A weakened EU. A weakened UK.
Yup ; that's about the size of it, I would say, too.
PM to City of London on Russian sanctions: “It’s not easy. I’m a former mayor of London. I know how important it is that our City is open to investment so these are tricky issues to navigate."
JD Vance is a shameful person unsuitable for public office. His comments are those of a stooge for Russian aggression.
J.D. Vance @JDVance1 Your entire time in military leadership we won zero wars. You drank fine wine at bullshit security conferences while thousands of working class kids died on the battlefield. Oh, by the way, how much do you stand to gain financially from a war with Russia, Barry?
JD Vance is a shameful person unsuitable for public office. His comments are those of a stooge for Russian aggression.
J.D. Vance @JDVance1 Your entire time in military leadership we won zero wars. You drank fine wine at bullshit security conferences while thousands of working class kids died on the battlefield. Oh, by the way, how much do you stand to gain financially from a war with Russia, Barry?
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
It was obviously purely philanthropic. Their strong connections to the Kremlin show how they wish to support principles of democracy
Actually I am genuinely outraged. I used to be a Conservative Party Activist. This really is disgraceful. It is bad enough that the party advanced Putin's foreign policy agenda on Brexit, but this is much worse. Did no one ask why for fucks sake!!!
You are right it should have been sorted out long time ago. And look how close Cameron and May were to Gardners “friend”.
What is it with these politicians? Just money mad greed and no thought for their country?
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
Strangely, for money, it was the other way around - 10 and sixpence would be 10 shilling and 6 pence (52.5p)
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
Presumably you'd want weights in powers of two so that you could measure any weight at the given unit accuracy.
So 1, 2, 4, 8 etc
For bigger weights you might round to the nearest 100.
So 100, 200, 400 etc
You'd stop at 128 / 1280 / 12800 because you can then use the next scale up.
Bit weird, but it works.
Don't buy it. Why start with a base 2-ish system and then go to base 10.
If the Government sanctions all of those Conservative Party donors, then surely it would be illegal for the Conservatives to repay all of the tainted donations? So they might as well keep them?
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
No idea I am afraid. There have been thousands of these standardised weights found across the Indus Valley and beyond but we have been unable to translate Harrapan Cuneiform or their Hieroglyphic language and so know almost nothing about them beyond the ruins they left behind. We didn't even know they existed until the start of the 20th century. Their cities were thought to be medieval in date and were reused by British engineers to build the railways across north western India.
Ok, so let me suggest something 5^2 *2 is the number of combinations you can make with your hands on a sort of up/down basis. I don't really believe that it's the truth, but who knows. 16 though..
This is not difficult. It is 2⁴, and it is the number of oz in a lb for that reason. Powers of 2 rock.
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
It was obviously purely philanthropic. Their strong connections to the Kremlin show how they wish to support principles of democracy
Actually I am genuinely outraged. I used to be a Conservative Party Activist. This really is disgraceful. It is bad enough that the party advanced Putin's foreign policy agenda on Brexit, but this is much worse. Did no one ask why for fucks sake!!!
PS. Little wonder that the so-called Russia Report was a whitewash.
But how can that even happen? How can a report into what’s going on for sake of national security be white washed? How corrupt is that on a corruption scale?
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
It was obviously purely philanthropic. Their strong connections to the Kremlin show how they wish to support principles of democracy
Actually I am genuinely outraged. I used to be a Conservative Party Activist. This really is disgraceful. It is bad enough that the party advanced Putin's foreign policy agenda on Brexit, but this is much worse. Did no one ask why for fucks sake!!!
You are right it should have been sorted out long time ago. And look how close Cameron and May were to Gardners “friend”.
What is it with these politicians? Just money mad greed and no thought for their country?
What is astonishing is that they don't seem to ask that simple question "why?" Why would a load of Russians want to fund a British political party? It is similar to the lobbying question, ie. what did they think was expected in return for the cash?
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
Presumably you'd want weights in powers of two so that you could measure any weight at the given unit accuracy.
So 1, 2, 4, 8 etc
For bigger weights you might round to the nearest 100.
So 100, 200, 400 etc
You'd stop at 128 / 1280 / 12800 because you can then use the next scale up.
Bit weird, but it works.
Don't buy it. Why start with a base 2-ish system and then go to base 10.
You need the base 2 system to measure out something with the minimum number of counterweights.
You need the base 10 system to count how many you want in the first place.
And if Wallace and others carry on like that, even more. An unmistakeable error for the Tories after literally weeks of better coverage, with the Mail full of thousands, upon thousands, of comments saying this reflects the quality of the government.
This is how it seemed to me. rather than the incredulous spin “Britain is at the forefront of the global response” Boris called UK response at PMQs, for what is actually worst response so far in Western World and we are playing catch up, the Tory’s problem is the reason being believed for weak response is THE MONEY Tory Party have taken from who they now need to be tough on - like police taking back handlers from crooks - leading to an even more laughable response in a bad PMQ from Boris “I don't think any government could conceivably be doing any more to root out corrupt Russian money”
This is the problem Boris has: he does not have any credible response to this, because there can be no praise for sorting out now what should have been sorted out long ago.
Such as? The Foreign Secretary asked on news are you giving 2 million pound back, the answer is No. Primeminister is asked at PMQs about being on record as saying Russia unsuccessfully tried to influence UK democracy, and he refused to answer the question hence the whiff of “what has he been covering up”?
Rather than filibustering when not having an answer, as a proper politician would do, as all hardworking and prepared prime ministers before have done, all Boris knows is to go on the attack, instead of doing the right thing his instinct is to blow dog whistles, getting himself into more trouble down the line.
Dreadful political instincts. Hence lazy Boris and his party in free fall.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
Why parse it like that and not 2^9 x5^2?
16 makes a huge difference when you are representing rather than counting on your appendages.
Base 16 lets you represent your four fingers as one symbol with 16 options, which is doable and memorable, whilst base 32 is over the convenient number of options for one symbol. Consider how tricky it is to name "the 17th letter in the alphabet" on spec.
"eighteen-point-four-dee-em" from above is a Point of Order, because the precision is vexatious. "6 foot" is a convenient approximation that we are used to. In metric you use either 1.8, which is fine, or 2m. You are just attached to the "6 foot" as a shorthand.
The Imperial equivalent of the "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" is "five-feet-nine-and-a-twentieth".
"Almost exactly" is a contradiction in terms - like democratic socialism.
What is astonishing is that they don't seem to ask that simple question "why?" Why would a load of Russians want to fund a British political party? It is similar to the lobbying question, ie. what did they think was expected in return for the cash?
IDS was interviewed about this on the news earlier.
He said they might like the policies...
He also said ministers should not take money to change policy as "the optics would be terrible"
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
No idea I am afraid. There have been thousands of these standardised weights found across the Indus Valley and beyond but we have been unable to translate Harrapan Cuneiform or their Hieroglyphic language and so know almost nothing about them beyond the ruins they left behind. We didn't even know they existed until the start of the 20th century. Their cities were thought to be medieval in date and were reused by British engineers to build the railways across north western India.
Ok, so let me suggest something 5^2 *2 is the number of combinations you can make with your hands on a sort of up/down basis. I don't really believe that it's the truth, but who knows. 16 though..
This is not difficult. It is 2⁴, and it is the number of oz in a lb for that reason. Powers of 2 rock.
And I still don't see why 16 is privileged as a factor of 12800 when it is non prime.
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
It was obviously purely philanthropic. Their strong connections to the Kremlin show how they wish to support principles of democracy
Actually I am genuinely outraged. I used to be a Conservative Party Activist. This really is disgraceful. It is bad enough that the party advanced Putin's foreign policy agenda on Brexit, but this is much worse. Did no one ask why for fucks sake!!!
You are right it should have been sorted out long time ago. And look how close Cameron and May were to Gardners “friend”.
What is it with these politicians? Just money mad greed and no thought for their country?
What is astonishing is that they don't seem to ask that simple question "why?" Why would a load of Russians want to fund a British political party? It is similar to the lobbying question, ie. what did they think was expected in return for the cash?
A much more worrying possibility, and indeed quite plausible with the Johnson government in particular, is that they're perfectly well aware of why, but have such a high level of corrupted opportunism that they simply don't care. The day-to-day and short-term interests of party coffers would come well before issues of national security, in that case.
And if Wallace and others carry on like that, even more. An unmistakeable error for the Tories after literally weeks of better coverage, with the Mail full of thousands, upon thousands, of comments saying this reflects the quality of the government.
This is how it seemed to me. rather than the incredulous spin “Britain is at the forefront of the global response” Boris called UK response at PMQs, for what is actually worst response so far in Western World and we are playing catch up, the Tory’s problem is the reason being believed for weak response is THE MONEY Tory Party have taken from who they now need to be tough on - like police taking back handlers from crooks - leading to an even more laughable response in a bad PMQ from Boris “I don't think any government could conceivably be doing any more to root out corrupt Russian money”
This is the problem Boris has: he does not have any credible response to this, because there can be no praise for sorting out now what should have been sorted out long ago.
Such as? The Foreign Secretary asked on news are you giving 2 million pound back, the answer is No. Primeminister is asked at PMQs about being on record as saying Russia unsuccessfully tried to influence UK democracy, and he refused to answer the question hence the whiff of “what has he been covering up”?
Rather than filibustering when not having an answer, as a proper politician would do, as all hardworking and prepared prime ministers before have done, all Boris knows is to go on the attack, instead of doing the right thing his instinct is to blow dog whistles, getting himself into more trouble down the line.
Dreadful political instincts. Hence lazy Boris and his party in free fall.
I think you've got it the wrong way round. The response is being dismissed as "weak" and "dreadful political instincts" only because the party is in free fall.
JD Vance is a shameful person unsuitable for public office. His comments are those of a stooge for Russian aggression.
J.D. Vance @JDVance1 Your entire time in military leadership we won zero wars. You drank fine wine at bullshit security conferences while thousands of working class kids died on the battlefield. Oh, by the way, how much do you stand to gain financially from a war with Russia, Barry?
New: Spoke to a senior European intelligence official just now. The official says so far Russia’s attempts to draw Ukrainian retaliation have failed, “local warlords in Donbas are increasingly frustrated that Ukrainian troops are disciplined and not falling for provocations.”
This doesn’t alter the likelihood of Russian invasion, the source says, but the casus belli Putin needs isn’t being so easily furnished by the Ukrainians.
It’s not going to stop Putin, who signed an agreement at 10am Seven hours before the “live” meeting which recommended it but had in fact been recorded five hours earlier
What is astonishing is that they don't seem to ask that simple question "why?" Why would a load of Russians want to fund a British political party? It is similar to the lobbying question, ie. what did they think was expected in return for the cash?
IDS was interviewed about this on the news earlier.
He said they might like the policies...
He also said ministers should not take money to change policy as "the optics would be terrible"
"they might like the policies"? FFS. I bet they did, particularly the one about "Get Putin's Brexit Done". They loved that.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
No idea I am afraid. There have been thousands of these standardised weights found across the Indus Valley and beyond but we have been unable to translate Harrapan Cuneiform or their Hieroglyphic language and so know almost nothing about them beyond the ruins they left behind. We didn't even know they existed until the start of the 20th century. Their cities were thought to be medieval in date and were reused by British engineers to build the railways across north western India.
Ok, so let me suggest something 5^2 *2 is the number of combinations you can make with your hands on a sort of up/down basis. I don't really believe that it's the truth, but who knows. 16 though..
This is not difficult. It is 2⁴, and it is the number of oz in a lb for that reason. Powers of 2 rock.
I will send you a gift token for a tenner if you can demonstrate that the 16 there is there for that reason.
Pounds in a stone?
Inches in a foot?
Leagues in a fathom?
Fathoms in a mile?
UK metrical thought simply has to be the worst in the world. We did though build incredible engineering things despite this handicap.
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
Theres one list (from someone who knows what money is, at least when nones left)
Meanwhile the Tories hit back with nearly a dozen Labour back benchers who have been anti NATO and stop the war their entire careers voicing as much, and Alex Salmond still works for RT? 🤔 not a fair fight Dog Whistle Johnson is dragging his party into here is it? In terms of knowing when to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away, when to run, this leaders pretty rubbish isn’t he?
Seriously, where do we all stand on the argument, what are RT viewing figures anyway, is it wise and sensible to ban it?
Putin will respond by banning the BBC in Russia, that actually cuts through Putin’s propaganda to millions. So isn’t perfect example of the counterproductive reactionary action we need to be avoiding right now?
I’m glad my political instincts aren’t reactionary like many people I know.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
I'm in my 40s and would say it's 50:50, often both used interchangeably by the same person. The rise of kg I would attribute to people who go to gyms and monitor their weight carefully. Whereas those people who rarely if ever weigh themselves and don't worry unduly about being overweight are still using the units their parents taught them about when they were children.
Its unsightly American but I now measure my weight in lbs and have dropped the stones altogether. It just seems easier to think "I weight ### lbs and last week I weighed ### so that's a difference of #.#".
Why bother with the stones? They don't serve any useful purpose to me. I just use lbs as a decimal number, similar to how you'd use metric.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
Why parse it like that and not 2^9 x5^2?
16 makes a huge difference when you are representing rather than counting on your appendages.
Base 16 lets you represent your four fingers as one symbol with 16 options, which is doable and memorable, whilst base 32 is over the convenient number of options for one symbol. Consider how tricky it is to name "the 17th letter in the alphabet" on spec.
"eighteen-point-four-dee-em" from above is a Point of Order, because the precision is vexatious. "6 foot" is a convenient approximation that we are used to. In metric you use either 1.8, which is fine, or 2m. You are just attached to the "6 foot" as a shorthand.
The Imperial equivalent of the "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" is "five-feet-nine-and-a-twentieth".
"Almost exactly" is a contradiction in terms - like democratic socialism.
Different magnitudes require different counting strategies. Ounce , pound, stone, cwt, ton. 16, 14, 8, 20.
Yes, really. If the defences had been built by now, Scotty would be moaning that they were rushed/overpriced/money obviously going to donors' back pockets/VIP lane/blah, blah, blah.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
One of the things I love about the UK is that we (mostly) don't get religious about how things should be. We don't try and force people to use one system. People do what they like, and it's a wonderful hodge-podge, and that's ok.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
This is right. Kg are no good for the weight of a person. You can't visualize it. Eg Boris Johnson weighs seventeen and a half stone (mainly muscle) even though he's not a tall man - we all know this and most importantly we instinctively know what it looks like. It looks like him.
Even a seventeen and a half stone person will be carrying mostly lean body weight.
Yes a seventeen and a half stone individual probably is carrying about 10 stone of lean body weight at least.
And yes fat people do carry more muscle than similarly active thin people, because of all the extra fat they're carrying. Just think about it - if every time you went to walk/run/cycle/anything you strapped on a seven stone backpack and carried that weight around with you everywhere you went, do you think it'd be more strenuous exercise that would end up building more muscles?
If you can show me a mobile person that's mostly fat, as measurable in body scans, then I would be utterly amazed.
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”.
There's no mystery. He was given asylum by Britain and Russia's extradition requests were denied.
Yes, that has got to definitively prove he is not a Putin agent or McMafia at all.
Sure but it’s extremely lazy to think that anyone with links to Russia, particularly people who’ve fallen foul of the regime, must be working for Putin.
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
That’s a lot of money. What did they all get in return for it? 😕
It was obviously purely philanthropic. Their strong connections to the Kremlin show how they wish to support principles of democracy
Actually I am genuinely outraged. I used to be a Conservative Party Activist. This really is disgraceful. It is bad enough that the party advanced Putin's foreign policy agenda on Brexit, but this is much worse. Did no one ask why for fucks sake!!!
You are right it should have been sorted out long time ago. And look how close Cameron and May were to Gardners “friend”.
What is it with these politicians? Just money mad greed and no thought for their country?
What is astonishing is that they don't seem to ask that simple question "why?" Why would a load of Russians want to fund a British political party? It is similar to the lobbying question, ie. what did they think was expected in return for the cash?
It's one reason why they'd struggle to argue against a very low upper limit. 'Not enough people would donate' is not a sound argument against, you just spend less, and there is no harm done to someone in making them keep their case.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
No idea I am afraid. There have been thousands of these standardised weights found across the Indus Valley and beyond but we have been unable to translate Harrapan Cuneiform or their Hieroglyphic language and so know almost nothing about them beyond the ruins they left behind. We didn't even know they existed until the start of the 20th century. Their cities were thought to be medieval in date and were reused by British engineers to build the railways across north western India.
Ok, so let me suggest something 5^2 *2 is the number of combinations you can make with your hands on a sort of up/down basis. I don't really believe that it's the truth, but who knows. 16 though..
This is not difficult. It is 2⁴, and it is the number of oz in a lb for that reason. Powers of 2 rock.
I will send you a gift token for a tenner if you can demonstrate that the 16 there is there for that reason.
Pounds in a stone?
Inches in a foot?
Leagues in a fathom?
Fathoms in a mile?
UK metrical thought simply has to be the worst in the world. We did though build incredible engineering things despite this handicap.
Like I said it depends on focus. Anything you sell for fractions of a pound is saffron or cocaine. Sixteenths mean you can measure small fractions with just 1, 2 and 4 Oz weights for the scales
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
No idea I am afraid. There have been thousands of these standardised weights found across the Indus Valley and beyond but we have been unable to translate Harrapan Cuneiform or their Hieroglyphic language and so know almost nothing about them beyond the ruins they left behind. We didn't even know they existed until the start of the 20th century. Their cities were thought to be medieval in date and were reused by British engineers to build the railways across north western India.
Ok, so let me suggest something 5^2 *2 is the number of combinations you can make with your hands on a sort of up/down basis. I don't really believe that it's the truth, but who knows. 16 though..
This is not difficult. It is 2⁴, and it is the number of oz in a lb for that reason. Powers of 2 rock.
I will send you a gift token for a tenner if you can demonstrate that the 16 there is there for that reason.
Pounds in a stone?
Inches in a foot?
Leagues in a fathom?
Fathoms in a mile?
UK metrical thought simply has to be the worst in the world. We did though build incredible engineering things despite this handicap.
And we had a nation of children who could juggle all this in their heads.
And then came decimalization and calculators. Now they can't do bugger all unaided.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
As an interesting aside one of the strange wonders of archaeology is to be found in the Indus Valley civilisation where there was a uniform system of weights and measures across the 'empire' (I use the word loosely as there is no direct evidence of a ruling class).
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
16/16
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
No idea I am afraid. There have been thousands of these standardised weights found across the Indus Valley and beyond but we have been unable to translate Harrapan Cuneiform or their Hieroglyphic language and so know almost nothing about them beyond the ruins they left behind. We didn't even know they existed until the start of the 20th century. Their cities were thought to be medieval in date and were reused by British engineers to build the railways across north western India.
Ok, so let me suggest something 5^2 *2 is the number of combinations you can make with your hands on a sort of up/down basis. I don't really believe that it's the truth, but who knows. 16 though..
This is not difficult. It is 2⁴, and it is the number of oz in a lb for that reason. Powers of 2 rock.
I will send you a gift token for a tenner if you can demonstrate that the 16 there is there for that reason.
Pounds in a stone?
Inches in a foot?
Leagues in a fathom?
Fathoms in a mile?
UK metrical thought simply has to be the worst in the world. We did though build incredible engineering things despite this handicap.
And we had a nation of children who could juggle all this in their heads.
And then came decimalization and calculators. Now they can't do bugger all unaided.
I know, people used to be able to skin animals to make their own clothes too, now they just buy them.
It was the calculators, not the decimilization that did it.
Comments
"John Roberts
1 HR AGO
Unfortunately the rise of Putin was complete geo-political failure of the West. When the USSR fell apart we did nothing to prevent the country falling into a dystopia of chaos and left the country to be run by criminal gangs. We could have helped more and decided to let it all play out for a former ruthless KGB officer to rise to the top. Russia is a pretend democracy and Putin is clearly a gangster don. It have been so much more. So much more that I'm sure in parallel Universe somewhere we did help and they both a member of the EU and of NATO as an actual democracy."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/02/23/sanctions-will-prove-toothless-against-putin-situation-will/
This system used stones which were precise fractions and multiples of a standardised unit ranging from 1/16th of a unit to 12,800x the unit. The unit itself was almost exactly 1/2 an ounce. This is pure coincidence of course but the fact there was such a widespread standardised unit of measurement almost 5,000 years ago is rather nice.
With one in 14 in NI having it I suspect the vast majority are either asymptomatic or think they have a cold if they’ve noticed at all.
Did it say cc: Chris Nineham?
https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1496498878304206849
At particular risk, the warning said, is the northeastern city of Kharkiv.
https://twitter.com/KatieBoLillis/status/1496527145325240324
So you get absurdities where, for a standard cake batter - which should be equal quantities of butter, sugar, eggs and flour - the 3 egg version has 175g of the other ingredients and the 4 egg version 225g, which is not a proportionate increase. The recipe makes a lot more sense with 6oz and 8oz as the other measurements (I worked this out when I realised the standard egg is about 2oz).
I'm consequently a fan of diversity in measurement units, to use the units that are most appropriate to the task you are performing. For day-to-day tasks often this will be Imperial units, because they arose to be of convenient scale for particular applications. Like the oz for measuring baking ingredients.
But for many scientific applications metric is much more convenient because it was defined in such a way to make many conversions simpler.
The evil Smithson limits us just to binary!
12800 is interesting - 16^2 * 5^2 * 2. Have you any idea where the 16 came from? 5 presumably from hands.Why the last *2?
Even Salmond seems to have nothing on Schroder...
From Wiki:
"On 13 March 2014, an attempt by the German Green Party to ban Schröder from speaking in public about Ukraine was narrowly defeated in the European parliament. His decision to celebrate his 70th birthday party with Putin in Saint Petersburg's Yusupov Palace in late April elicited further criticism from several members of Merkel's grand coalition, including human rights spokesperson Christoph Strässer."
https://www.burgageplots.info/a-planned-approach
One of the most powerful speeches in the debate came from Liam Byrne, the Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury, who mocked Liz Truss’s claim in interviews this morning that the Russians who have given money to the Conservative party are not linked to the Putin regime in Moscow. (See 9.32am.) Saying that he intended to offer the Tories a vetting service, Byrne listed seven donors who he implied were suspect.
Lubov Chernukhin
Byrne said Chernukin had donated £2.1m to the Tories. He said her husband Vladimir (the fomer Russian deputy finance minister) received £8m from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. Byrne said the transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016 “mysteriously just before a donation of £1.9m to the Conservative party”.
Alexander Temerko
Byrne said Temerko was someone who had “forged a career at the top of the arms industry” and who had connections at the highest levels in the Kremlin. Byrne said Temerko was a deputy chairman of the Yukos oil comany but “somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of is colleagues”. He has donated £747,000 to the party, Byrne said.
Viktor Fedotov
Byrne said Temerko had been working very closely with Fedotov, who was a director of Aquind and a former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil. In the Pandora Papers Fedotov was revealed as man who made fortunes in the company in the mid 2000s “around the time it was alleged to be syphoning funds from the Russian state monopoly company Transneft”, Byrne said.
Dmitry Leus
Byrne said Leus had donated £54,000. According to Daily Mail, Leus was found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004, Byrne said. Byrne said that Leus said the prosecution was politcally motivated, and the conviction was overturned. Byrne went on:
Here is the mystery. He also donated to the Prince’s Foundation. The Prince’s Foundation has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The Conservative party, you will be amazed to hear, has not.
Mohamed Amersi
Byrne said Amersi and his wife had given £793,000 to the Conservative party. He said Amersi had reportedly been involved in “one of the biggest corruption scandals in Europe”, which involved $220m being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. Byrne said Amersi says his donations came from UK profits. But the FT said he received £4m from a company he knew was secretly owned by a powerful Russian, President Putin’s telecoms minister, Byrne said.
Murtaza Lakhani
Byrne said Lakhani’s firm, Mercentile and Maritime, has donated £500,000 to the party. Byrne said Bloomberg has reported that Lakhani made made large parts of his fortune by channelling $6bn from Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan.
David Burnside
Byrne said Burnside’s firm has donated £200,000 to the party. Byrne, a former Ulster Unionist MP, boasts of his links to senior figures in the Kremlin and has introduced several to senior Tory figures, Byrne said.
I can understand an argument its neutral, though I find the snowflakes insisting on the government taking action to encourage imperial use tiresome, but I cannot really see what benefits we get from it.
@vmsalama
I asked Ukraine’s foreign minister yesterday if his government plans to evacuate Mariupol or Kharkiv given threats facing those cities. He said it’s not the plan, and that still appears to be the case. Their strategy: confront any threat head on. They believe they are prepared.
https://twitter.com/vmsalama/status/1496530311617863705
https://twitter.com/tony_bee/status/1496503920600006659?s=21
This is where the West needs to hit back with cyber attacks "from unknown sources" on Russia. Surely the US is ahead of Russia in this field?
[/sarcasm]
The one that threw me has been the change from HBA1c (glycosylated Haemoglobin) measured in mmol/mol (*) rather than %. Good being 49-59 (**) rather than 6.5%-7.5% is a reet pain.
Illiterates who weren't taught Latin can't even spell haemoglobin properly with the dipthong - bah. Teaching everyone Latin is one thing that *should* be compulsory.
* Has anyone ever tried explaining 6.02x10^20 per 6.02x10^23 to a random patient in hospital as a measure of their diabetic control?
** This range means a four times lower risk of heart attacks over if I remember my clinical data correctly over poor control.
https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1496533840009089025
Meanwhile BoZo does nothing...
Or, if you prefer, Useful Idiots as a career long vocation.
Including imo Comrade Corbynski (sorry, Nick).
Actually I am genuinely outraged. I used to be a Conservative Party Activist. This really is disgraceful. It is bad enough that the party advanced Putin's foreign policy agenda on Brexit, but this is much worse. Did no one ask why for fucks sake!!!
https://twitter.com/zoltanspox/status/1496524833936613386
Did BoZo and Truss miss a photo-op?
So 1, 2, 4, 8 etc
For bigger weights you might round to the nearest 10 or 100.
So 100, 200, 400 etc
You'd stop at 128 / 1280 / 12800 because you can then use the next scale up.
Bit weird, but it works.
Barry R McCaffrey @mccaffreyr3
Replying to @MalcolmNance and @JDVance1
JD Vance is a shameful person unsuitable for public office. His comments are those of a stooge for Russian aggression.
J.D. Vance @JDVance1
Your entire time in military leadership we won zero wars. You drank fine wine at bullshit security conferences while thousands of working class kids died on the battlefield. Oh, by the way, how much do you stand to gain financially from a war with Russia, Barry?
https://twitter.com/jdvance1/status/1495124288864665600
===
NY Times has report on splits within GOP over Ukraine response. The Trumpsters of course don't care what Vlad does.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/us/politics/republican-candidates-split-over-ukraine-russia-crisis.html
What is it with these politicians? Just money mad greed and no thought for their country?
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/flood-hit-village-boris-johnson-26311106?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar https://twitter.com/MirrorPolitics/status/1496534332546162695/photo/1
You need the base 10 system to count how many you want in the first place.
/Speculation
This is the problem Boris has: he does not have any credible response to this, because there can be no praise for sorting out now what should have been sorted out long ago.
Such as? The Foreign Secretary asked on news are you giving 2 million pound back, the answer is No. Primeminister is asked at PMQs about being on record as saying Russia unsuccessfully tried to influence UK democracy, and he refused to answer the question hence the whiff of “what has he been covering up”?
Rather than filibustering when not having an answer, as a proper politician would do, as all hardworking and prepared prime ministers before have done, all Boris knows is to go on the attack, instead of doing the right thing his instinct is to blow dog whistles, getting himself into more trouble down the line.
Dreadful political instincts. Hence lazy Boris and his party in free fall.
Base 16 lets you represent your four fingers as one symbol with 16 options, which is doable and memorable, whilst base 32 is over the convenient number of options for one symbol. Consider how tricky it is to name "the 17th letter in the alphabet" on spec.
"eighteen-point-four-dee-em" from above is a Point of Order, because the precision is vexatious. "6 foot" is a convenient approximation that we are used to. In metric you use either 1.8, which is fine, or 2m. You are just attached to the "6 foot" as a shorthand.
The Imperial equivalent of the "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" is "five-feet-nine-and-a-twentieth".
"Almost exactly" is a contradiction in terms - like democratic socialism.
He said they might like the policies...
He also said ministers should not take money to change policy as "the optics would be terrible"
It's all about the narrative.
WW1, WW2, Vietnam, the list goes on.
She ruled out any review of CCHQ policy because “we believe all due diligence is in place."
https://twitter.com/PippaCrerar/status/1496484196340191233
This doesn’t alter the likelihood of Russian invasion, the source says, but the casus belli Putin needs isn’t being so easily furnished by the Ukrainians.
https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1496535702330302464
It’s not going to stop Putin, who signed an agreement at 10am Seven hours before the “live” meeting which recommended it but had in fact been recorded five hours earlier
This weeks been a wash out for Boris.
Pounds in a stone?
Inches in a foot?
Leagues in a fathom?
Fathoms in a mile?
UK metrical thought simply has to be the worst in the world. We did though build incredible engineering things despite this handicap.
Meanwhile the Tories hit back with nearly a dozen Labour back benchers who have been anti NATO and stop the war their entire careers voicing as much, and Alex Salmond still works for RT? 🤔 not a fair fight Dog Whistle Johnson is dragging his party into here is it? In terms of knowing when to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away, when to run, this leaders pretty rubbish isn’t he?
Seriously, where do we all stand on the argument, what are RT viewing figures anyway, is it wise and sensible to ban it?
Putin will respond by banning the BBC in Russia, that actually cuts through Putin’s propaganda to millions. So isn’t perfect example of the counterproductive reactionary action we need to be avoiding right now?
I’m glad my political instincts aren’t reactionary like many people I know.
Why bother with the stones? They don't serve any useful purpose to me. I just use lbs as a decimal number, similar to how you'd use metric.
It's so transparent.
This would be a serious move...
Ukraine Foreign Minister Kuleba: Negotiations are underway to cover our airspace with NATO forces
https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1496539416055230470
Yes a seventeen and a half stone individual probably is carrying about 10 stone of lean body weight at least.
And yes fat people do carry more muscle than similarly active thin people, because of all the extra fat they're carrying. Just think about it - if every time you went to walk/run/cycle/anything you strapped on a seven stone backpack and carried that weight around with you everywhere you went, do you think it'd be more strenuous exercise that would end up building more muscles?
If you can show me a mobile person that's mostly fat, as measurable in body scans, then I would be utterly amazed.
https://twitter.com/ru_rbc/status/1496449845380493312
And then came decimalization and calculators. Now they can't do bugger all unaided.
It was the calculators, not the decimilization that did it.
I would assume that's what they mean, although it would still be .... dangerous.