Ah, I’m afraid I’m not familiar. I’ve heard of H.R. Pufnstuf, but not Lidsville. I’m always on the lookout for new lids, though.
I’ve never measured pot in lids myself, but for some reason I associate it with David Crosby. Maybe it was a story Neil Young told about David Crosby? No clue.
“pi seconds is a nanocentury” - Tom Duff
(ed: within 1%)
1 attoparsec/microfortnight ≃ 1in/s
Looks like a haberdasher’s nightmare
You really get the sense that the Kroffts were running out of steam by their third kids’ show.
Sid, 1969: You know what kids freaking love? Dragons and witches and singing animals!
Marty: Goddamn right! Let’s do this thing!
Marty, 1970: OK, I say this time we do bugs. Kids love bugs, right?
Sid: Sure they do!
Sid, 1971: What kind of anthropomorphic characters should we do for this one?
Marty: Uh… hats with jobs?
now I want a new speedometer.
a butt of wine is 477.3 liters
a butt of beer is 491 liters
a butt of ale is 443.6 liters
see English brewery cask units - Wikipedia and English wine cask units - Wikipedia
Meanwhile, in South Korea…
Currently, the most widely used calculation method in Korea is the so-called “Korean age system”, in which a person is one year old at birth and then gains a year on the first day of each new year.
In a separate method - the “counting age” - a person’s age is calculated from zero at birth and a year is added on 1 January. This method exists primarily to calculate the legal age to drink alcohol and smoke.
But South Korea also uses the globally recognised system in which age is calculated by an individual’s birthday and the first birthday is celebrated 365 days after birth.
This means that, for example, as of 8 December 2022, a person born on December 31 2002 is 19 under the international system, 20 under the counting system and 21 under the Korean system.
Double it, subtract 10%, and add 32. 100% accurate, and simple enough to be done in most people’s heads.
-40C = -80 - -8 + 32 = -40ºF
0C = 0 - 0 + 32 = 32ºF
25C = 50 - 5 + 32 = 77ºF
50C = 100 - 10 + 32 = 122ºF
100C = 200 - 20 + 32 = 212ºF
The fact that I was able to figure that out one day while driving my car still baffles me.
someone else probably mentioned this but 60 is useful because of the year being 360ish days. that’s also where degrees come from too. the sumerians ( in theory ) brought things down to 12 because it works so well with 3/60, is human sized, and has so many divisors ( 1,2,3,4,6. )
Another machinist told me a “thou” is about the smallest change of surface height you can feel with your fingertips. Dunno if that’s true, but I like the sound of it.
Definitely apocryphal. I think everyone is different in that regard. I can feel a few tenths*, but some can’t even feel five thou. Mostly a function of how chewed up and leathery your fingers are. Fingernails help too.
*a “tenth” in imperial machining jargon is a ten-thousandth of an inch, or 0.0001” . It’s on the scale of a micron in metric machining and is the smallest unit dealt with until you get into lab-grade or toolmaker surface-grinding and lapping applications.
That’s such a human thing to say.
In my life, I’ve first had some assortment of dials that may or may not have borne any relation to a specified temperature - the thinking being that really all you need is “I am too cold, turn the dial towards the hot bit” or “I’m too hot, turn the dial towards the cold bit”.
And these days, it’s digital controls with decimal divisions so if for some reason I want to set the heating to 21.3 degrees C, I can.
I’m designing a smallish circuit board.
Half of the stuff on it is metric - mostly about 0.5 mm pitch.
The other half is imperial - there are some legacy components.
The third half is both as in 0805 imperial (in inches/100 units) == 2012 metric (in 0.1 mm units).
Beware of buying 0603 passives in metric instead of imperial:
they both exist but the metric ones are, well, not useful (for me, I hand solder).
And no, approximating one inch to 2.50 cm does not work after a few steps.
What a headache.
Respect and sympathy.
Then of course there are tools for doing the board layout that have this nifty “snap to grid” feature, but you have to pick either inches or millimeters, so your layout is constantly getting jerked around.
Unless you’re one of us leftys then the metric side is always the easiest to read. I’ve bought some two side tape measures to solve that problem.
UK tape measures always have inches on one side and centimetres on the other. I remember the massive culture shock when I bought a tape measure in Japan and it had cm on both sides.
Japan also has traditional measures still used for certain purposes, such as the area of rooms floored with tatami mats.
In some ways the world will be a duller place once we all go decimal.
The nearly complete switch to metric annoys me. To this day i still think of distances in mm - cm - meters - miles, because all our roads are still signed in imperial for no discernable good reason…
