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 must admit, I wish I’d been taught my twelve times tables, chanting them until they were ingrained. My niece has learnt them and it’ll stand her in good stead. I’m not the most mathematical person, at all, and I really struggle with multiplication in my head. Not that I need it very often, but I think it makes sense for it to be drilled into kids when they’re young.
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
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.
Yikes! The Guess Boris' Weight Competition returns to PB!!
I doubt that this will happen in terms of combat forces, but I must say this is still the most worrying post I've seen here since the start of the pandemic.
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.
No, the question is not are they definitely working for Putin, or even are they likely working for Putin.
We vet people working in the security services or MoD on the basis of is there any risk they are working for a hostile state. The same level of vetting should apply to people who donate money to spend time with the PM, regardless of nationality or birth place.
(Ideally don't allow anyone to donate money in exchange for spending time with the PM or cabinet, but that is not going to happen).
Hopefully not, and Ukraine is just talking the talk. That would be utterly crazy.
If a number of drones were to circle the country providing live intelligence only, would the Russians choose to shoot them down?
I would assume that's what they mean, although it would still be .... dangerous.
It could mean that NATO will supply a live data feed from aerial recon and surveillance assets to the Ukrainians. A live, updated map of who is doing what, where.
That could be done from inside NATO borders + satellites.
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
Was that deliberate? It is the fine structure constant, probably (and I have no idea why) the most important number in the universe.
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.
No, the question is not are they definitely working for Putin, or even are they likely working for Putin.
We vet people working in the security services or MoD on the basis of is there any risk they are working for a hostile state. The same level of vetting should apply to people who donate money to spend time with the PM, regardless of nationality or birth place.
(Ideally don't allow anyone to donate money in exchange for spending time with the PM or cabinet, but that is not going to happen).
Why should the same level of vetting apply? Working in the MoD or having access to classified information is not comparable to having access to politicians. To equate the two suggests that you have no expectation that British politicians possess any guile nor have minds of their own.
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.
No, the question is not are they definitely working for Putin, or even are they likely working for Putin.
We vet people working in the security services or MoD on the basis of is there any risk they are working for a hostile state. The same level of vetting should apply to people who donate money to spend time with the PM, regardless of nationality or birth place.
(Ideally don't allow anyone to donate money in exchange for spending time with the PM or cabinet, but that is not going to happen).
Why should the same level of vetting apply? Working in the MoD or having access to classified information is not comparable to having access to politicians. To equate the two suggests that you have no expectation that British politicians possess any guile nor have minds of their own.
One of them boasts:
"at the beginning of Johnson’s tenure as Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, they would often “plot” late into the evening over a bottle of wine on the balcony of Johnson’s office at parliament in Westminster."
Given what we know about Johnson's respect for the rules applying to him, I doubt he would have had much concern about discussing classified information with that donor.
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
Was that deliberate? It is the fine structure constant, probably (and I have no idea why) the most important number in the universe.
No, not deliberate. However I'm a person that likes numbers so I may have absorbed the number as interesting anyway. I can't quite recall Hardy's taxi number thing, but much the same.
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.
Yesterday on Santo Antao a woman used a calculator to find out how much change to give me after I paid for a 120 escudo purchase with a 200 note
Escudos and before them milreis were always decimal
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
Was that deliberate? It is the fine structure constant, probably (and I have no idea why) the most important number in the universe.
No, not deliberate. However I'm a person that likes numbers so I may have absorbed the number as interesting anyway. I can't quite recall Hardy's taxi number thing, but much the same.
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
Was that deliberate? It is the fine structure constant, probably (and I have no idea why) the most important number in the universe.
No, not deliberate. However I'm a person that likes numbers so I may have absorbed the number as interesting anyway. I can't quite recall Hardy's taxi number thing, but much the same.
Smallest number that can be written as sum of 2 primes in 2 ways, but I can't remember what it is. 1178 or something.
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.
Some amusing comments over at the Mail, for the day :
"What l want to know is if my house is decimated by a nuclear bomb will my insurance company pay out? Or do you thinks this may be a silly question, but l am very worried."
"Also - how will it affect house prices ? Daily Mail readers will want to 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.
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
Was that deliberate? It is the fine structure constant, probably (and I have no idea why) the most important number in the universe.
No, not deliberate. However I'm a person that likes numbers so I may have absorbed the number as interesting anyway. I can't quite recall Hardy's taxi number thing, but much the same.
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
Was that deliberate? It is the fine structure constant, probably (and I have no idea why) the most important number in the universe.
No, not deliberate. However I'm a person that likes numbers so I may have absorbed the number as interesting anyway. I can't quite recall Hardy's taxi number thing, but much the same.
Smallest number that can be written as sum of 2 primes in 2 ways, but I can't remember what it is. 1178 or something.
Off the top of my head I'd have gone with 1240. Certainly 4 digits.
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.
Is that evidenced or assumed?
It depends how you see it. One would have to assume that Tory politicians know why these people have been giving money, but are more interested in the short-term party interest than the national security angle. I struggle to see it any other way personally, and so far.
I'm not sure that most people in Britain are prepared for how much will change if Putin does decide to push beyond the Donbas and attempt to conquer Ukraine.
The hundreds of thousands of traumatised refugees that we'll end up having to find new homes for at short notice is just the start of 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.
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
Was that deliberate? It is the fine structure constant, probably (and I have no idea why) the most important number in the universe.
No, not deliberate. However I'm a person that likes numbers so I may have absorbed the number as interesting anyway. I can't quite recall Hardy's taxi number thing, but much the same.
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.
What's 1/137? Is it interesting in any way? Calculators are really great.
Was that deliberate? It is the fine structure constant, probably (and I have no idea why) the most important number in the universe.
No, not deliberate. However I'm a person that likes numbers so I may have absorbed the number as interesting anyway. I can't quite recall Hardy's taxi number thing, but much the same.
Smallest number that can be written as sum of 2 primes in 2 ways, but I can't remember what it is. 1178 or something.
Off the top of my head I'd have gone with 1240. Certainly 4 digits.
*off topic. That’s a great lob sported by Caroline Davies on BBC news in Russia. About time they are exposing one of their best reporters to proper reporting. 😍
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 must admit, I wish I’d been taught my twelve times tables, chanting them until they were ingrained. My niece has learnt them and it’ll stand her in good stead. I’m not the most mathematical person, at all, and I really struggle with multiplication in my head. Not that I need it very often, but I think it makes sense for it to be drilled into kids when they’re young.
For a long time, base 12 was the standard for counting. It divides by 2, 3 and 4 easily, can be counted by the thumb on the 3 pulps of each finger quite easily, and is why so many old measurements are in 12's. Inches, months per year, hours in a day, eggs and buns sold by the dozen. Its an intuitive system.
It's incredible how - having initially taken a lead in this crisis - Boris has let himself be outflanked by Biden, Germany and the rest of the EU in relation to Russian sanctions. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Exactly.
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
It's incredible how - having initially taken a lead in this crisis - Boris has let himself be outflanked by Biden, Germany and the rest of the EU in relation to Russian sanctions. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
It's incredible how journalists can reduce any situation to a crude analysis of who's up and who's down.
It's a cunning plan by the Boche to lull the naive into not being reflexively suspicious of and antipathetic to Germany. The tough guys of PB won't be fooled though.
So on my usual Lab-Lib-Grn count they are at 54%. That's actually at the low end of the recent range (which has been universally 54-57%). Survation unusually - excessively? - low for the Greens.
The previous 10 polls per Britain elects have the LLG score at:
Redfield & Wilton 21 Feb '22 57% TechneUK 16 Feb '22 55% YouGov 16 Feb '22 54% Redfield & Wilton 14 Feb '22 55% YouGov 10 Feb '22 55% Opinium 10 Feb '22 54% Opinium 10 Feb '22 56% (different one on same day) Redfield & Wilton 07 Feb '22 57% Savanta ComRes 05 Feb '22 56% Deltapoll 03 Feb '22 56%
The combined score is way more stable than the Lab-Tory gap or Labour only score.
It's a cunning plan by the Boche to lull the naive into not being reflexively suspicious of and antipathetic to Germany. The tough guys of PB won't be fooled though.
That's how one spells the 'boche'? I've been thinking it was Bosch this whole time.
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!!!
The Conservatives needed the money, because pretty much all of the Great British Public have opted out of joining or contributing to political parties.
It's the same principle as the media- if you're not paying for the content, you're not the customer, you're the product being sold.
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Exactly.
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
Everybody, apart from me, who measures in kg. Currently 82Kg.
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 must admit, I wish I’d been taught my twelve times tables, chanting them until they were ingrained. My niece has learnt them and it’ll stand her in good stead. I’m not the most mathematical person, at all, and I really struggle with multiplication in my head. Not that I need it very often, but I think it makes sense for it to be drilled into kids when they’re young.
For a long time, base 12 was the standard for counting. It divides by 2, 3 and 4 easily, can be counted by the thumb on the 3 pulps of each finger quite easily, and is why so many old measurements are in 12's. Inches, months per year, hours in a day, eggs and buns sold by the dozen. Its an intuitive system.
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Exactly.
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Exactly.
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
Boris and me, and too many stones in both cases. A vaguely interesting question is why we say "stone" rather than "stones". Americans use pounds, of course, and I've always been both impressed and puzzled by Americans' ability to estimate the weight of strangers in cop shows. Maybe it's a Hollywood thing; maybe they learn it in school.
Ian Blackford manages to cut through in a way few other politicians succeed in doing. Say something that's patently true and then either make fun of the practice or sound like you're going to explode with indignation .
He's also very good at hitting the political sweet spots and his bombs land 'The Tory Party have been living off DIRTY Russian money and now they're doing NOTHING..... It's a SEWER running under the TORY party'
Starmer by contrast 'Why hasn't the government gone further?' Is always going to sound insipid and opportunistic. Following the government but a little bit behind is not a good look
For a small Party the SNP are punching well above their weight
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Exactly.
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
Boris and me, and too many stones in both cases. A vaguely interesting question is why we say "stone" rather than "stones". Americans use pounds, of course, and I've always been both impressed and puzzled by Americans' ability to estimate the weight of strangers in cop shows. Maybe it's a Hollywood thing; maybe they learn it in school.
As a Scientist I was taught never to pluralise units, hence Stone.
It's incredible how - having initially taken a lead in this crisis - Boris has let himself be outflanked by Biden, Germany and the rest of the EU in relation to Russian sanctions. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
It's incredible how journalists can reduce any situation to a crude analysis of who's up and who's down.
Journalists and former journalists like the Prime Minister who often claims, usually wrongly, that Britain is top at whatever is under discussion, including sanctions.
In fairness, while planning for the future is very much needed, it cannot be said as a general trend over the last few years that he was the problem with the team. England's leading Test wicket-taker James Anderson says he is "praying" his international career is not over after being dropped for the West Indies tour...
Since turning 35, Anderson has taken 160 wickets in 44 Tests at an average of 21.72.
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Exactly.
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
Boris and me, and too many stones in both cases. A vaguely interesting question is why we say "stone" rather than "stones". Americans use pounds, of course, and I've always been both impressed and puzzled by Americans' ability to estimate the weight of strangers in cop shows. Maybe it's a Hollywood thing; maybe they learn it in school.
As a Scientist I was taught never to pluralise units, hence Stone.
It's incredible how - having initially taken a lead in this crisis - Boris has let himself be outflanked by Biden, Germany and the rest of the EU in relation to Russian sanctions. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
Out of interest we’re you pro or anti comparisons of Vaccination between the EU/UK/US as being an indicator of the brilliance or shitness of countries?
Obviously if we are reducing things down to which places are great based on x/y or not.
And the phrase “outflanked” is super stupid as it suggests that it’s a competition/war against the US or EU to outdo each other and that what the EU/US do to “outflank” the UK means that it will damage what the UK can do - clearly not….
Perhaps there are certain things that have greatest effect at certain times and it’s not wise to do it all at the same time?
The BBC today programme had a chap on this morning who is a senior advisor to the US gov on sanctions and he had no problem with what the UK was doing so maybe he knows something that media wankers don’t?
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
Did BoZo and Truss miss a photo-op?
Perhaps worth noting that ethnic Hungarian leaders in Transcarpatian region in far southwest Ukraine have been aligned in not-so-distant past with other locals who themselves align (on cultural/religious grounds) with . . . wait for it . . . Russians.
So is Orban gonna be just another Putinist in the woodwork at the Brussels summit?
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.
I’ll concede you are right. Do you concede it’s equally lazy to presume they are not, and embrace them as friends?
Even if it’s not a Putin Puppet cash for access, it’s still a rich Russian businessman (I said businessman not gangster) with goodness knows what links, cash for access?
In fairness, while planning for the future is very much needed, it cannot be said as a general trend over the last few years that he was the problem with the team. England's leading Test wicket-taker James Anderson says he is "praying" his international career is not over after being dropped for the West Indies tour...
Since turning 35, Anderson has taken 160 wickets in 44 Tests at an average of 21.72.
It's a cunning plan by the Boche to lull the naive into not being reflexively suspicious of and antipathetic to Germany. The tough guys of PB won't be fooled though.
That's how one spells the 'boche'? I've been thinking it was Bosch this whole time.
It's a cunning plan by the Boche to lull the naive into not being reflexively suspicious of and antipathetic to Germany. The tough guys of PB won't be fooled though.
That's how one spells the 'boche'? I've been thinking it was Bosch this whole time.
Pronounced [boʃ], boche is a derisive term used by the Allies during World War I, often collectively ("the Boche" meaning "the Germans"). It is a shortened form of the French slang portmanteau alboche, itself derived from Allemand ("German") and caboche ("head" or "cabbage"). The alternative spellings "Bosch" or "Bosche" are sometimes found.[24][25]
It's a cunning plan by the Boche to lull the naive into not being reflexively suspicious of and antipathetic to Germany. The tough guys of PB won't be fooled though.
That's how one spells the 'boche'? I've been thinking it was Bosch this whole time.
It's a cunning plan by the Boche to lull the naive into not being reflexively suspicious of and antipathetic to Germany. The tough guys of PB won't be fooled though.
That's how one spells the 'boche'? I've been thinking it was Bosch this whole time.
Pronounced [boʃ], boche is a derisive term used by the Allies during World War I, often collectively ("the Boche" meaning "the Germans"). It is a shortened form of the French slang portmanteau alboche, itself derived from Allemand ("German") and caboche ("head" or "cabbage"). The alternative spellings "Bosch" or "Bosche" are sometimes found.[24][25]
It's a cunning plan by the Boche to lull the naive into not being reflexively suspicious of and antipathetic to Germany. The tough guys of PB won't be fooled though.
That's how one spells the 'boche'? I've been thinking it was Bosch this whole time.
It's a cunning plan by the Boche to lull the naive into not being reflexively suspicious of and antipathetic to Germany. The tough guys of PB won't be fooled though.
That's how one spells the 'boche'? I've been thinking it was Bosch this whole time.
Pronounced [boʃ], boche is a derisive term used by the Allies during World War I, often collectively ("the Boche" meaning "the Germans"). It is a shortened form of the French slang portmanteau alboche, itself derived from Allemand ("German") and caboche ("head" or "cabbage"). The alternative spellings "Bosch" or "Bosche" are sometimes found.[24][25]
Some amusing comments over at the Mail, for the day :
"What l want to know is if my house is decimated by a nuclear bomb will my insurance company pay out? Or do you thinks this may be a silly question, but l am very worried."
"Also - how will it affect house prices ? Daily Mail readers will want to know".
It's incredible how - having initially taken a lead in this crisis - Boris has let himself be outflanked by Biden, Germany and the rest of the EU in relation to Russian sanctions. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
Out of interest we’re you pro or anti comparisons of Vaccination between the EU/UK/US as being an indicator of the brilliance or shitness of countries?
Obviously if we are reducing things down to which places are great based on x/y or not.
And the phrase “outflanked” is super stupid as it suggests that it’s a competition/war against the US or EU to outdo each other and that what the EU/US do to “outflank” the UK means that it will damage what the UK can do - clearly not….
Perhaps there are certain things that have greatest effect at certain times and it’s not wise to do it all at the same time?
The BBC today programme had a chap on this morning who is a senior advisor to the US gov on sanctions and he had no problem with what the UK was doing so maybe he knows something that media wankers don’t?
If it was the same guy I listened to didn’t he suggest that continuing financial sanctions in the UK against Russia were very much down to whether HMG had the will to carry them out, and he couldn’t be confident that such a will existed? Maybe I misheard or it was a different guy.
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
Did BoZo and Truss miss a photo-op?
Perhaps worth noting that ethnic Hungarian leaders in Transcarpatian region in far southwest Ukraine have been aligned in not-so-distant past with other locals who themselves align (on cultural/religious grounds) with . . . wait for it . . . Russians.
So is Orban gonna be just another Putinist in the woodwork at the Brussels summit?
Times is headlining that "Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putin’s “genius” actions in Ukraine and described the Russian president as “smart” and “savvy” for recognising separatist-controlled regions in eastern Ukraine"
I was wondering how that was playing in the US. Is that being attacked or ignored by other Republicans?
We should invent some new post Brexit units of measurement. I’ll start with a unit of intelligence. 1 Mogg = an IQ of 50. Therefore the average person is worth 2 Moggs.
Some amusing comments over at the Mail, for the day :
"What l want to know is if my house is decimated by a nuclear bomb will my insurance company pay out? Or do you thinks this may be a silly question, but l am very worried."
"Also - how will it affect house prices ? Daily Mail readers will want to 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.
For most purposes knowing a person's weight to the nearest stone is sufficiently accurate. I know that if I weigh myself first thing in the morning and then during the day, my weight can fluctuate by several pounds.
So if I'm asked what my weight* is does it make much sense to say that I weigh 209 lbs, rather than 15 stone?
Using pounds gives a misleadingly accurate measurement, while stones is a more appropriate level of accuracy.
* Not my actual weight, obviously, not wanting to give away my personal data...
Conservatives on 35% in this climate is surprising
Also polled before Putins declaration
Suprisingly low or surprisingly high? It's about par for weeks when no new scandal has emerged. I doubt if Putin will affect voters much either way, either.
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Exactly.
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
It is not for nothing that weights and measures was a very early function of administration, but having a controlled degree of choice within that is not a problem to me.
But, selling it as some kind of acme of Brexit bonusses, the very first thing they happened on, should be rightly derided in he same manner as blue passports.
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
Did BoZo and Truss miss a photo-op?
Perhaps worth noting that ethnic Hungarian leaders in Transcarpatian region in far southwest Ukraine have been aligned in not-so-distant past with other locals who themselves align (on cultural/religious grounds) with . . . wait for it . . . Russians.
So is Orban gonna be just another Putinist in the woodwork at the Brussels summit?
Times is headlining that "Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putin’s “genius” actions in Ukraine and described the Russian president as “smart” and “savvy” for recognising separatist-controlled regions in eastern Ukraine"
I was wondering how that was playing in the US. Is that being attacked or ignored by other Republicans?
I fear that enough people accept his claim that it wouldn't have happened on his watch and leave it at that, and the rest might be appalled by no more than anything else he's ever said or done which is not enough for them to speak out, up to and including his words leading a violent mob storming the Congress.
In fairness, while planning for the future is very much needed, it cannot be said as a general trend over the last few years that he was the problem with the team. England's leading Test wicket-taker James Anderson says he is "praying" his international career is not over after being dropped for the West Indies tour...
Since turning 35, Anderson has taken 160 wickets in 44 Tests at an average of 21.72.
That’s a good poll for Boris and the conservatives. Other polling companies have them slipping away from the 35%.
I know some will say “what, no rally round flag bounce?” “Is that best Boris can do with more favourable news narrative?” “Ha ha, Labour getting the handling crisis best bounce”
Not great for Libdems, but their upturn is coming after being best party on the night in May’s locals.
It's incredible how - having initially taken a lead in this crisis - Boris has let himself be outflanked by Biden, Germany and the rest of the EU in relation to Russian sanctions. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
Out of interest we’re you pro or anti comparisons of Vaccination between the EU/UK/US as being an indicator of the brilliance or shitness of countries?
Obviously if we are reducing things down to which places are great based on x/y or not.
And the phrase “outflanked” is super stupid as it suggests that it’s a competition/war against the US or EU to outdo each other and that what the EU/US do to “outflank” the UK means that it will damage what the UK can do - clearly not….
Perhaps there are certain things that have greatest effect at certain times and it’s not wise to do it all at the same time?
The BBC today programme had a chap on this morning who is a senior advisor to the US gov on sanctions and he had no problem with what the UK was doing so maybe he knows something that media wankers don’t?
If it was the same guy I listened to didn’t he suggest that continuing financial sanctions in the UK against Russia were very much down to whether HMG had the will to carry them out, and he couldn’t be confident that such a will existed? Maybe I misheard or it was a different guy.
It was the same guy. I found it to be a case of him saying that the UK gov could hammer Russia if the will is there as you say but he was also absolutely fine with what had been done so far and rejected the idea that it was weak as part of a ratcheting up exercise.
I’m still very pro the ability to turn the screw tighter as required - fire a warning shot but keep the ability to add more sanctions tactically but I know many people want to blow it all up front. We will never really be able to tell I suppose.
Looks like a very good day for Democrats re redistricting.
538 hasn't written articles yet but this morning Courts appear to have approved new maps for North Carolina and Pennsylvania - Court map for NC is significant improvement for Dems re last time and they've now held their own in PA as well.
With just 6 States to go the change re last time is now:
Dem +12 Rep -5 Competitive -7
Big Dem gains in New York still subject to Court challenge but overall situation is way better than Dems could have dreamt of.
Suggests that any plebiscite which was genuine would be very disappointing for Putin, even in the eastern regions.
Russian attitudes are basically imperialist.
Well given that Greater Russian Nationalism requires the borders of The Russian Empire at it's greatest extent..... Putin's attitude is exactly Imperialistic.
I'm sure someone will be along to say that these are the wrong kind of polls in Eastern Ukraine
So on my usual Lab-Lib-Grn count they are at 54%. That's actually at the low end of the recent range (which has been universally 54-57%). Survation unusually - excessively? - low for the Greens.
The previous 10 polls per Britain elects have the LLG score at:
Redfield & Wilton 21 Feb '22 57% TechneUK 16 Feb '22 55% YouGov 16 Feb '22 54% Redfield & Wilton 14 Feb '22 55% YouGov 10 Feb '22 55% Opinium 10 Feb '22 54% Opinium 10 Feb '22 56% (different one on same day) Redfield & Wilton 07 Feb '22 57% Savanta ComRes 05 Feb '22 56% Deltapoll 03 Feb '22 56%
The combined score is way more stable than the Lab-Tory gap or Labour only score.
Labour squeeze green for their sexy in 40s polls.
Most that 3% is the Bristol greenwash for Snooks to be right!
So on my usual Lab-Lib-Grn count they are at 54%. That's actually at the low end of the recent range (which has been universally 54-57%). Survation unusually - excessively? - low for the Greens.
The previous 10 polls per Britain elects have the LLG score at:
Redfield & Wilton 21 Feb '22 57% TechneUK 16 Feb '22 55% YouGov 16 Feb '22 54% Redfield & Wilton 14 Feb '22 55% YouGov 10 Feb '22 55% Opinium 10 Feb '22 54% Opinium 10 Feb '22 56% (different one on same day) Redfield & Wilton 07 Feb '22 57% Savanta ComRes 05 Feb '22 56% Deltapoll 03 Feb '22 56%
The combined score is way more stable than the Lab-Tory gap or Labour only score.
That's the way I've been counting the score for a while now, Tim, and I think it makes a lot of sense to do it that way.
Like you I've been struck by the incredible stability of the polls. This one by Survation is slightly different in that the Tories are at 35%, whereas they have been polling hitherto in a very tight band between 32% & 34%.
The Green figure looks suspiciously low so maybe that explains it but really you are not talking about anything outside of standard deviation, margin of error, or what I would call 'noise'.
On topic, I think Marine Le Pen is very, very likely to make it to 500. It's extremely convenient for Emmanuel Macron if it's a very public struggle for her... but that she gets there in the end even if it means helping her over the line. She's just so much more helpful as a second round opponent for Macron than Pecresse.
Only around a fifth of the 42,000 people who could nominate have done so, and Le Pen is about 100 short (albeit it isn't quite as simple as that as there are rules on regions etc). So she'll make it, even if it ultimately means a few Macron supporters saying "I don't like her one bit, but she's second in the polls so I did it for democracy..."
Of course, if they do that and she wins (like Corbyn winning the Labour leadership) they'll look absolute fools. But both times a Le Pen has made it to the second round they have been buried in massive landslides, so it's not a totally unreasonable gamble by any means.
But elsewhere it seems it's mainly unwinding of previous Republican gerrymandering, more states doing it independently and some Courts stepping in to stop / reverse Republican gerrymandering - in particular what's happened this morning in NC and PA.
NC is really dramatic - Republicans had drawn a map to give them a much better map than last time - now Court has not just stopped that but Court map is better for Dems than last time.
It's incredible how - having initially taken a lead in this crisis - Boris has let himself be outflanked by Biden, Germany and the rest of the EU in relation to Russian sanctions. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
Out of interest we’re you pro or anti comparisons of Vaccination between the EU/UK/US as being an indicator of the brilliance or shitness of countries?
Obviously if we are reducing things down to which places are great based on x/y or not.
And the phrase “outflanked” is super stupid as it suggests that it’s a competition/war against the US or EU to outdo each other and that what the EU/US do to “outflank” the UK means that it will damage what the UK can do - clearly not….
Perhaps there are certain things that have greatest effect at certain times and it’s not wise to do it all at the same time?
The BBC today programme had a chap on this morning who is a senior advisor to the US gov on sanctions and he had no problem with what the UK was doing so maybe he knows something that media wankers don’t?
If it was the same guy I listened to didn’t he suggest that continuing financial sanctions in the UK against Russia were very much down to whether HMG had the will to carry them out, and he couldn’t be confident that such a will existed? Maybe I misheard or it was a different guy.
It was the same guy. I found it to be a case of him saying that the UK gov could hammer Russia if the will is there as you say but he was also absolutely fine with what had been done so far and rejected the idea that it was weak as part of a ratcheting up exercise.
I’m still very pro the ability to turn the screw tighter as required - fire a warning shot but keep the ability to add more sanctions tactically but I know many people want to blow it all up front. We will never really be able to tell I suppose.
There was obvious coordination between Germany and the US on Nord Stream 2 - the Germans waved the Americans on by halting the approval, and the US has made operating the pipeline practically impossible now.
There seems to have been a wider discussion of the sanctions with other countries (including the EU stuff). There probably was some kind of general agreement on various things, multi-laterally.
It's incredible how - having initially taken a lead in this crisis - Boris has let himself be outflanked by Biden, Germany and the rest of the EU in relation to Russian sanctions. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
It's incredible how journalists can reduce any situation to a crude analysis of who's up and who's down.
I’m not a journalist so you have to let me get away with saying, it’s incredible how Labour outflank Churchill tribute act in the third world war
Suggests that any plebiscite which was genuine would be very disappointing for Putin, even in the eastern regions.
Russian attitudes are basically imperialist.
Actually there's a lot of nuance there. For example, 45% of East Ukrainians think that Russia and Ukraine are "one people" (vs.28% in Ukraine as a whole and 64% in Russia), but only 18% of East Ukrainians think the two countries should merge (9% in Ukraine as a whole, 34% in Russia). That suggests a lot of East Ukranians feeling cultural identity without wanting to merge. Also interesting that Russians overwhelmingly feel the Soviet Union was a positive thing (by 71%-9%) but so do 34% of Ukrainians (vs 35% who disagree).
It's quite possible that Putin is driving apart two countries with more in common attitudes than is generalised realised.
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Exactly.
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
It is not for nothing that weights and measures was a very early function of administration, but having a controlled degree of choice within that is not a problem to me.
But, selling it as some kind of acme of Brexit bonusses, the very first thing they happened on, should be rightly derided in he same manner as blue passports.
Pounds only? - didn't you ameriicanise quickly?
Different point: the admin law is involved in certifying that weights are honest examples of what they claim to be. The thing they claim to be evolved naturally, it isn't stipulated by the authorities
Somewhat disappointed there are not as many 'these boundaries are awful as X always win' and 'this is gerrymandering' comments published on the BCE's second consultation on its initial proposals. I felt for sure there'd be a ton/tonne around Uxbridge of openly political bent, but sadly not. His own response was sadly boring.
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
Did BoZo and Truss miss a photo-op?
Perhaps worth noting that ethnic Hungarian leaders in Transcarpatian region in far southwest Ukraine have been aligned in not-so-distant past with other locals who themselves align (on cultural/religious grounds) with . . . wait for it . . . Russians.
So is Orban gonna be just another Putinist in the woodwork at the Brussels summit?
Times is headlining that "Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putin’s “genius” actions in Ukraine and described the Russian president as “smart” and “savvy” for recognising separatist-controlled regions in eastern Ukraine"
I was wondering how that was playing in the US. Is that being attacked or ignored by other Republicans?
Republicans are split, much more so than Democrats. With 45's true believers AND toadies are supporting their Fearless Leader.
Rest of GOP is like rest of American public: opposed in principle to Putin and sick of his no-goodnick ways, yet weary of war AND wearier still of active US involvement in war, regardless of how good the cause or foul the foe.
Perhaps don't have my ear close enough to the ground, but so far on this side of Atlantic (and Pacific) but am NOT hearing anti-war-with-Russia let alone pro-Putin sentiment, anywhere to the left of You-Know-Who that is.
Suggests that any plebiscite which was genuine would be very disappointing for Putin, even in the eastern regions.
Russian attitudes are basically imperialist.
Actually there's a lot of nuance there. For example, 45% of East Ukrainians think that Russia and Ukraine are "one people" (vs.28% in Ukraine as a whole and 64% in Russia), but only 18% of East Ukrainians think the two countries should merge (9% in Ukraine as a whole, 34% in Russia). That suggests a lot of East Ukranians feeling cultural identity without wanting to merge. Also interesting that Russians overwhelmingly feel the Soviet Union was a positive thing (by 71%-9%) but so do 34% of Ukrainians (vs 35% who disagree).
It's quite possible that Putin is driving apart two countries with more in common attitudes than is generalised realised.
That's because a lot of people in East Ukraine speak Russian and think of themselves "ethnically" as Russian. But in terms of which country they want to be in - Ukraine. They are Russian-Ukrainians.
This is about a surprising as the existence of people in the UK who think of themselves "ethnically" as Pakistani and speak a language from that country. But consider themselves British in terms of nationality.
Conservatives on 35% in this climate is surprising
Also polled before Putins declaration
I think the next poll, or polls from this week, will have the Tories down one or two.
Who knows? 🤷♀️ Big dogs smelly bollocks arn’t being felt up by plod on the tv screen every night like they were, we are effectively at war with a superpower, Government and Boris ratings must get a rally round flag bounce. I think it could get very close to crossover for the reasoning I have given, probably Sundays Opinum will show Tory lead because of rally round the flag bounce won’t work well with Opinums method to hand labour responses to conservatives to predict next election result.
Comments
https://the-race.com/formula-1/mark-hughes-what-the-f1-2022-cars-are-really-like-trackside/
Going to be very different from recent seasons - and the lack of grip at low speeds is going to make things interesting*, I think.
(*for those of us not bored rigid by the sport.)
(In looking for that image, I came across this page, which I missed at the time and is utterly hilarious: https://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/news/british-epp-compares-brexit-ballot-paper-to-hitlers-rigged-voting-slips/)
We vet people working in the security services or MoD on the basis of is there any risk they are working for a hostile state. The same level of vetting should apply to people who donate money to spend time with the PM, regardless of nationality or birth place.
(Ideally don't allow anyone to donate money in exchange for spending time with the PM or cabinet, but that is not going to happen).
That could be done from inside NATO borders + satellites.
https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1496534053884940290
Still, if that's all we're plunged into in the next few days, it would surely be a major relief.
"at the beginning of Johnson’s tenure as Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, they would often “plot” late into the evening over a bottle of wine on the balcony of Johnson’s office at parliament in Westminster."
Given what we know about Johnson's respect for the rules applying to him, I doubt he would have had much concern about discussing classified information with that donor.
Escudos and before them milreis were always decimal
"What l want to know is if my house is decimated by a nuclear bomb will my insurance company pay out? Or do you thinks this may be a silly question, but l am very worried."
"Also - how will it affect house prices ? Daily Mail readers will want to know".
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2022/02/europe/russia-ukraine-crisis-poll-intl/
Suggests that any plebiscite which was genuine would be very disappointing for Putin, even in the eastern regions.
Russian attitudes are basically imperialist.
LAB: 42% (+2)
CON: 35% (-)
LDEM: 9% (-1)
GRN: 3% (-)
via @Survation, 17 - 21 Feb
Chgs. w/ 25 Jan
The hundreds of thousands of traumatised refugees that we'll end up having to find new homes for at short notice is just the start of it.
https://twitter.com/russincheshire/status/1496534446287331329?s=21
https://medium.com/swlh/life-would-be-simpler-if-we-counted-in-base-12-do-you-agree-with-this-statement-f88b7805fb78
Also polled before Putins declaration
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1496550885987700750
(And, by the way, who measures their weight in stones these days?)
The previous 10 polls per Britain elects have the LLG score at:
Redfield & Wilton 21 Feb '22 57%
TechneUK 16 Feb '22 55%
YouGov 16 Feb '22 54%
Redfield & Wilton 14 Feb '22 55%
YouGov 10 Feb '22 55%
Opinium 10 Feb '22 54%
Opinium 10 Feb '22 56% (different one on same day)
Redfield & Wilton 07 Feb '22 57%
Savanta ComRes 05 Feb '22 56%
Deltapoll 03 Feb '22 56%
The combined score is way more stable than the Lab-Tory gap or Labour only score.
It's the same principle as the media- if you're not paying for the content, you're not the customer, you're the product being sold.
He's also very good at hitting the political sweet spots and his bombs land 'The Tory Party have been living off DIRTY Russian money and now they're doing NOTHING..... It's a SEWER running under the TORY party'
Starmer by contrast 'Why hasn't the government gone further?' Is always going to sound insipid and opportunistic. Following the government but a little bit behind is not a good look
For a small Party the SNP are punching well above their weight
England's leading Test wicket-taker James Anderson says he is "praying" his international career is not over after being dropped for the West Indies tour...
Since turning 35, Anderson has taken 160 wickets in 44 Tests at an average of 21.72.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/60496031
Obviously if we are reducing things down to which places are great based on x/y or not.
And the phrase “outflanked” is super stupid as it suggests that it’s a competition/war against the US or EU to outdo each other and that what the EU/US do to “outflank” the UK means that it will damage what the UK can do - clearly not….
Perhaps there are certain things that have greatest effect at certain times and it’s not wise to do it all at the same time?
The BBC today programme had a chap on this morning who is a senior advisor to the US gov on sanctions and he had no problem with what the UK was doing so maybe he knows something that media wankers don’t?
So is Orban gonna be just another Putinist in the woodwork at the Brussels summit?
Even if it’s not a Putin Puppet cash for access, it’s still a rich Russian businessman (I said businessman not gangster) with goodness knows what links, cash for access?
Ideally when we've worn their bowlers out and amassed 50-9.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terms_used_for_Germans
So possibly Les sales boches is a misunderstanding of Les alboches.
Times is headlining that "Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putin’s “genius” actions in Ukraine and described the Russian president as “smart” and “savvy” for recognising separatist-controlled regions in eastern Ukraine"
I was wondering how that was playing in the US. Is that being attacked or ignored by other Republicans?
You need to be talking in the trillion cubic feet (tcf) before it gets an exciting amount.
So if I'm asked what my weight* is does it make much sense to say that I weigh 209 lbs, rather than 15 stone?
Using pounds gives a misleadingly accurate measurement, while stones is a more appropriate level of accuracy.
* Not my actual weight, obviously, not wanting to give away my personal data...
But, selling it as some kind of acme of Brexit bonusses, the very first thing they happened on, should be rightly derided in he same manner as blue passports.
Pounds only? - didn't you ameriicanise quickly?
I know some will say “what, no rally round flag bounce?” “Is that best Boris can do with more favourable news narrative?” “Ha ha, Labour getting the handling crisis best bounce”
Not great for Libdems, but their upturn is coming after being best party on the night in May’s locals.
I’m still very pro the ability to turn the screw tighter as required - fire a warning shot but keep the ability to add more sanctions tactically but I know many people want to blow it all up front. We will never really be able to tell I suppose.
538 hasn't written articles yet but this morning Courts appear to have approved new maps for North Carolina and Pennsylvania - Court map for NC is significant improvement for Dems re last time and they've now held their own in PA as well.
With just 6 States to go the change re last time is now:
Dem +12
Rep -5
Competitive -7
Big Dem gains in New York still subject to Court challenge but overall situation is way better than Dems could have dreamt of.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/
I'm sure someone will be along to say that these are the wrong kind of polls in Eastern Ukraine
Most that 3% is the Bristol greenwash for Snooks to be right!
Like you I've been struck by the incredible stability of the polls. This one by Survation is slightly different in that the Tories are at 35%, whereas they have been polling hitherto in a very tight band between 32% & 34%.
The Green figure looks suspiciously low so maybe that explains it but really you are not talking about anything outside of standard deviation, margin of error, or what I would call 'noise'.
Only around a fifth of the 42,000 people who could nominate have done so, and Le Pen is about 100 short (albeit it isn't quite as simple as that as there are rules on regions etc). So she'll make it, even if it ultimately means a few Macron supporters saying "I don't like her one bit, but she's second in the polls so I did it for democracy..."
Of course, if they do that and she wins (like Corbyn winning the Labour leadership) they'll look absolute fools. But both times a Le Pen has made it to the second round they have been buried in massive landslides, so it's not a totally unreasonable gamble by any means.
But elsewhere it seems it's mainly unwinding of previous Republican gerrymandering, more states doing it independently and some Courts stepping in to stop / reverse Republican gerrymandering - in particular what's happened this morning in NC and PA.
NC is really dramatic - Republicans had drawn a map to give them a much better map than last time - now Court has not just stopped that but Court map is better for Dems than last time.
I'll get my cloak
There seems to have been a wider discussion of the sanctions with other countries (including the EU stuff). There probably was some kind of general agreement on various things, multi-laterally.
It's quite possible that Putin is driving apart two countries with more in common attitudes than is generalised realised.
Rest of GOP is like rest of American public: opposed in principle to Putin and sick of his no-goodnick ways, yet weary of war AND wearier still of active US involvement in war, regardless of how good the cause or foul the foe.
Perhaps don't have my ear close enough to the ground, but so far on this side of Atlantic (and Pacific) but am NOT hearing anti-war-with-Russia let alone pro-Putin sentiment, anywhere to the left of You-Know-Who that is.
This is about a surprising as the existence of people in the UK who think of themselves "ethnically" as Pakistani and speak a language from that country. But consider themselves British in terms of nationality.
Crazy, awful times.