Keith Tanner said:
Hands up if you understand the pre-decimal British currency.
You mean 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound? It went away before I was old enough to be aware of money, but AFAIK it wasn't really any more complicated than that in principle. There were a bunch of coins that other non-numerical names, but that's true of many systems -- think nickels or loonies for example.
And yeah, converting that system made sense because (unlike temperature) it's got multiple units to convert between and normal people do math with it all the time.
In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
"Volume."
volvoclearinghouse said:
The little threaded stud on the bottom of a camera is, AFAIK, still a whitworth thread.
No it is either 1/4-20 UNC or 3/8-16 UNC.
93EXCivic said:
volvoclearinghouse said:
The little threaded stud on the bottom of a camera is, AFAIK, still a whitworth thread.
No it is either 1/4-20 UNC or 3/8-16 UNC.
Supposedly some Leicas used a whitworth tripod thread instead.
codrus (Forum Supporter) said:
93EXCivic said:
volvoclearinghouse said:
The little threaded stud on the bottom of a camera is, AFAIK, still a whitworth thread.
No it is either 1/4-20 UNC or 3/8-16 UNC.
Supposedly some Leicas used a whitworth tripod thread instead.
IIRC the Royal Photography Society used to recommend a Whitworth thread so plenty of old cameras did use that but I don't believe any new ones do
codrus (Forum Supporter) said:
Keith Tanner said:
Hands up if you understand the pre-decimal British currency.
You mean 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound? It went away before I was old enough to be aware of money, but AFAIK it wasn't really any more complicated than that in principle. There were a bunch of coins that other non-numerical names, but that's true of many systems -- think nickels or loonies for example.
And yeah, converting that system made sense because (unlike temperature) it's got multiple units to convert between and normal people do math with it all the time.
That's pretty simplified. Those coins you refer to didn't just have non-numerical names, their relationships were all jacked up. A loonie is slang for a dollar, a nickel is slang for a $0.05 coin (which is never considered 1/20th of a dollar). Even a quarter has a nice decimal value. Makes it easy to add. If you want 3/10ths of a dollar, you don't think "1/4 + 1/20", you think "25 cents plus 5 cents".
This, though...
2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpence = 1 penny (1d)
3 pence = 1 thruppence (3d)
6 pence = 1 sixpence (a 'tanner') (6d)
12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob) (1s)
2 shillings = 1 florin ( a 'two bob bit') (2s)
2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown (2s 6d)
5 shillings = 1 Crown (5s)
There are guineas in there as well (1 pound plus one shilling, because it's "more gentlemanly" than a simple pound), half-crowns, half sovereigns, half guineas, groats and half-groats. Probably more.
Reference, because I sure wouldn't have come up with that myself
z31maniac said:
How many metric countries have been to the moon?
Boom! 'Murica.
In chronological order, (from wikipedia) the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, the European Space Agency, China, India, Luxembourg, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.
So, not only were we not the first to the moon, we are the only country NOT using the metric system. Boom! Metric system.
Keith Tanner said:
codrus (Forum Supporter) said:
Keith Tanner said:
Hands up if you understand the pre-decimal British currency.
You mean 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound? It went away before I was old enough to be aware of money, but AFAIK it wasn't really any more complicated than that in principle. There were a bunch of coins that other non-numerical names, but that's true of many systems -- think nickels or loonies for example.
And yeah, converting that system made sense because (unlike temperature) it's got multiple units to convert between and normal people do math with it all the time.
That's pretty simplified. Those coins you refer to didn't just have non-numerical names, their relationships were all jacked up. A loonie is slang for a dollar, a nickel is slang for a $0.05 coin (which is never considered 1/20th of a dollar). Even a quarter has a nice decimal value. Makes it easy to add. If you want 3/10ths of a dollar, you don't think "1/4 + 1/20", you think "25 cents plus 5 cents".
You can think of it as being 25 cents if you want (and most people do), but the inscription on the coin is "quarter dollar". I don't have a 50 cent coin handy to check, but I think they say "half dollar" on them too. The cent coin (which is not a "penny" despite what people call it), the nickel, and the discontinued half-cent are the only things officially denominated in cents. 10 cent coins have "one dime" written on them, from what I've read the US system was originally defined as having three types of currency unit -- dollars, cents, and dimes. That idea was dropped pretty early on, otherwise we'd have quarters being two and a half dimes.
Similarly, you can think of a crown as being 5s if you want a complicated system, or you can think of it as being 60d, and if you simply rewrite your list to express all the values in "d" then it looks a lot less weird. I agree the three-values-with-slashes notation is unwieldy -- I can see how it might have made sense in a pre-industrial society but converting it to the decimal version is much more useful in the modern world. And yes, getting rid of the 240 thing so that the pence can simply expressed with a decimal point is obviously also a win, this is a system that is intended for people to do math upon.
I'm not saying the "Lsd" system was better, it was a product of a thousand years of ad-hoc development so it's not surprising it picked up some warts along the way. I'm just saying it's not really all that complicated once you get past the fact that there are a bunch of name-to-number mappings to memorize.
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
I'd never noticed that US coinage didn't have the actual value in cents on it. Canadian ones do. So the US even resists metric currency :)
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
Dollars, cents, and dimes? That's factors of ten! 
IIRC the reason for "quarters" was because gold dubloons would be cut up into eight pie-cuts. Two eighths is two bits is one quarter (also a shave and a haircut).
Dimes is from dismes and I have completely overwritten the numismatics part of my memory...
I mean, obviously we need to ditch this outdated decimal currency and go with binary, right? That way a shave and a haircut would really BE two bits :)
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
Nerd.
Keith Tanner said:
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
Nerd.
Guilty as charged :)
Two areas where even France has failed to go metric are angles and time. Gradiens exist, but even in France they're only used for a couple obscure things and everyone else (well, other than mathematicians) use the kind of degrees where 360 of them make a circle. Then there's time where people use SI units for sub-second values (milliseconds, microseconds), but kiloseconds and megaseconds are unheard of.
Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:
z31maniac said:
How many metric countries have been to the moon?
Boom! 'Murica.
In chronological order, (from wikipedia) the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, the European Space Agency, China, India, Luxembourg, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.
So, not only were we not the first to the moon, we are the only country NOT using the metric system. Boom! Metric system.
As mentioned, it was a joke (and again I thought 'Murica would indicate that). But since you're the 2nd person to say this, I also would have thought it was pretty obvious I was saying put a man on the moon. BOOM!
z31maniac said:
I was saying put a man on the moon.
Yes. The complexity and difficulty of putting people on the moon (and returning them safely to the Earth!) is tremendously higher than that of landing uncrewed probes.
(also a great song by R.E.M)
I'm currently having a lot of fun imagining a binary currency. Two 1 coins = a 10 coin. Two 10 coins = a 100 bill.
Keith Tanner said:
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
I'd never noticed that US coinage didn't have the actual value in cents on it. Canadian ones do. So the US even resists metric currency :)
I will have to search for it if I remember but I think it was a PBS TV kids show that went into the history of why the actual value didn't appear on the USA coins. IIRC it was somewhat oddball like the initial coin maker just couldn't get the numbers to look right after striking several trial sets. So after a convoluted process the US Mint just sent the letter over to say, "whatever dude, just make some coinage however you can." (yes an actual historic quote!
)
The USA 1cent coin and $1 dollar bill are in the same weird twilight zone of fixed points in time and space as the USA using United States Customary Units (USCU.)
If you want to get all circular thought process inside a murky fog on this topic then understand that the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) defines all(well most) USCU using SI(formerly known as metric) units. So kind of, officially, the USA is using "metric" units like the rest of the world. We just happen to call 0.308meters of something a foot....
And about the inch: "In many other European languages, the word for "inch" is the same as or derived from the word for "thumb", as a man's thumb is about an inch wide (and this was even sometimes used to define the inch[4])"
Wikipedia.org: Inch
In reply to VolvoHeretic :
A cubit is the distance from a man's elbow to his finger tips.
z31maniac said:
Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:
z31maniac said:
How many metric countries have been to the moon?
Boom! 'Murica.
In chronological order, (from wikipedia) the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, the European Space Agency, China, India, Luxembourg, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.
So, not only were we not the first to the moon, we are the only country NOT using the metric system. Boom! Metric system.
As mentioned, it was a joke (and again I thought 'Murica would indicate that). But since you're the 2nd person to say this, I also would have thought it was pretty obvious I was saying put a man on the moon. BOOM!
All our measurement units, including U.S. customary units you’re familiar with (feet, pounds, gallons, Fahrenheit, etc.), are defined in terms of the SI—and mass, length, and volume have been defined in metric units since 1893!
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/busting-myths-about-metric-system
And where did they come up with the base 10 number system? Why not base 2, base 8, or base 12? 10 fingers?
VolvoHeretic said:
And where did they come up with the base 10 number system? Why not base 2, base 8, or base 12? 10 fingers?
Ten fingers, which made using a digital watch difficult, since you needed to push three buttons at the same time for the battery-intensive display to show the time. Man complained.
God saw Man's plight, and gave Man three extra fingers. Man complained again. Now everything is going to be in base 13 instead of base 10. Counting is going to be different! Math is going to be different! What do you get when you multiply six by nine?
And thus God's Final Message was "We apologise for the inconvenience."
As a resident of a country that went metric during my teens I have thoroughly enjoyed sitting on the sidelines watching the discussion. You don't need my 2c or thruppence ha'penny worth but I will leave you with a quote ...
Some years ago I waded through a several hundred page ICAO report of a multi-national working group looking at introducing metric units as a standard for use in the aviation industry. A complete waste of my time, but I was getting paid, however the highlight was the last sentence of the executive summary:
"This working group deplores the attitude of States (countries) that endorse the goal of metrication but are only inching towards it"
