Giant rolling rock almost crushes man

Holy shit indeed! :open_mouth:

What kind of ounces, exactly?

large boulder on mt spanknix

I remember smuggling a bottle of cheap Indian scotch into Pakistan in 1977 very shortly after General ZIa banned alcohol as contrary to sharia law. Apparently you were allowed it if you were a foreign tourist, so not quite ‘smuggled’, but I’m sure it would have been confiscated if found.
Spent a worrying half an hour or so trying to find a local at the main train station once we arrived, and eventually sold it for several times what we paid.

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That Irish “Holy Schiit” warms my heart.

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“At the end of my rainbow lies a golden oldie.”

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Well, the USA does not use Imperial measures.

Our money is metric, our temperatures are Fahrenheit, and most of our other usage is traditional US measures. The US traditional system was standardized well after the metric system was determined (by Thomas Jefferson, no less) to be inappropriate for most of our uses (that situation has since changed - metric is very appropriate to the DNA labs and suchlike that we didn’t have in the 18th century) and well before Imperial units were created.

As for the guy’s question, sixteen is an OK number - three whole divisors not counting itself and one, and one of the divisors is 2, so you can make a measure or scale extremely easily without lab equipment or electrical power. A bit more practically useful in the field than base ten, which has only two such divisors, but far less useful than base 12, which has four whole divisors including three, which is super useful since it’s commonplace to need to divide by three for creative/constructive purposes.

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I bet that guy Schist himself.

Was just thinking, 'Sisyphus Cosplay goes horribly wrong".

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Laundry day, amirite?

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The link I posted quoted a Scot. I am Canadian. And Thomas Jefferson was a rapist racist hypocrite. The US system of measurements is just as fucked and moronic as the Imperial system. Thank God the UK and Canada have had the good sense to convert to metric, leaving you backwards colonial rebels as the only major country in the world still clinging to a ridiculous and antiquated system of measurement.

“Throw away every book, table, instrument, and start over? I know that some of my ancestors did that in switching from old English units to MKS–but they did it to make things easier . Fourteen inches to a foot and some odd number of feet in a mile. Ounces and pounds. Oh, Bog!”

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Holy Schist!

Tell us how you really feel! I think you’re holding back for fear of hurting my feelings! :rofl:

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I still sometimes wonder how the Florida Man made out with the Whitworth spanner set he stole from me.

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In many ways, the American system is like trying to use Roman numerals for solving a long division problem.

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Ugh, British plumbing. Why does the pipe dope always reek like rotting herring?

An excellent example of using the wrong tool for a job. Roman numerals are optimized for chiseling in stone, not for long division. Do the long division in Arabic notation, then carve the triumphal arch in Roman notation.

Roman numerals are still used today, BTW, for their intended purpose, and work quite well. When I reconstructed my shattered stable, the beams were all marked and numbered with chisels by expert craftsmen (Hi Bruce! Hi Kirk!). Roman numerals were the optimal solution for the specific problem, absolutely the right tool for the job.

People who think that their use case is the only use case typically see the work of others as unimportant and will often proclaim the tools optimized for the work of others are backwards and dumb. Everyone is subject to Dunning-Kruger syndrome, after all!

So you agree that most cases of using SI for measurement is akin to using “Arabic” numerals and decimal notation instead of the old-fashioned “Latin”, leaving miles and inches and pounds for when one wants an old-timey feeling?

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I mean… isn’t MICK JAGGER in a position to do something about that?

No, that’s pretty much the opposite of what I said!

I said it’s dumb to use a screwdriver for a hammer, only I tried to be less confrontational about it. And I gave a specific, real-world example of appropriate use of an ancient measure in a modern context, too. There are hundreds more…

In many fields of science, old-timey metric measures (remember, they are older than US customary units) are highly appropriate. In others, completely inappropriate!

As an educated person, I can use Kelvin, Centigrade or Fahrenheit as appropriate to a specific task in a specific environment. My children know how, too. (They also know the difference between a kilo and a K and a klick.) Metric zealots are anti-intellectual in this limited sense; they oppose increased capability of measurement and, like Ma Barker, want to settle on what’s good enough for them.

Anyway, if the goal is to make everyday chores cheap and easy, US customary units win, because teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups, because water weighs eight pounds a gallon, and because of the divisibility of base 12 architectural measures. If the goal is to make things more precise, then SI is not a spectacular success (Planck’s constant is 6.6262 x 10-34 kilogram-meters2 per second, Avagadro’s number is 6.0221415 × 1023, and the value of π can’t be expressed) but it’s really pretty great for wet chemistry labs and computerized trades. But! then again if the goal is to be more concise, fractions express more data in fewer characters than decimal notation, and precision can be quite harshly limited by lack of space. Computers are also pretty harshly limited by real number respresentation schemes that use fixed numbers of bytes (i.e. most of them). The key is to suit the tool to the goal.

For some people the goal is to have the annoying minority who can use the best tool for the job just shut up and go away, and for them metric is the purest and most cromulent of choices, it’ll just take a couple generations, vast treasure, and possibly a pogrom. :wink:

Hoping you take all this in good nature! I’m not emotionally invested in what people other than my own children choose to measure with, honestly, it’s just an interestingly complex topic of conversation to me, with many corners and edge cases.

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