I have said it before, but I think it's worth repeating:
When it comes to exploiting (other) natural resources in a high seas region it's important to prove that you have been economically active there for a long time, and still are. The whaling is an investment. This investment requires that the programme is pretty openly non-scientific. Just 'scientific' enough so a sufficient number of other countries in the International Whaling Commission can be convinced to allow it, where necessary through a bribe. But no more so, because at some point later Japan will have to prove that it was an economic activity, not research.
I was asked for sources on the pogromes against gypsies, and it was questioned that the ruling party was involved. As this was only from memory, here is what I found out with a quick search.
Apparently, the worst incident so far was the one in Gyöngyöspata, a village with 2500 inhabitants and a Jobbik mayor. Jobbik is fascist party comparable to the Greek party Golden Dawn. It does not seem to have been in any government coalition. However, the incident in Gyöngyöspata was so serious that it reflects very badly indeed on the government for not preventing it or at least ending it swiftly. Here is what happened.
In March/April 2011, the leader of a local right-wing militia invited neo-nazis from around the country to his estate for military exercises. In the sequel, local gypsies were terrorised by uniformed nazis for several weeks. In the end, the Hungarian Red Cross chartered several busses and evacuated 300 women and children.
So for several reasons it wasn't precise to say the ruling party (Fidesz) openly supports pogroms. Jobbik is quite open about it but has 'only' little over 10% of votes nationally and has never been the ruling party. And Fidesz doesn't support the pogroms openly but only through selective action. This may, however, be due in part to a large percentage of Jobbik supporters in government institutions such as the police.
Regarding the desire to annex parts of neighbouring countries: The reactions here speak for themselves. *Of course* these were once Hungarian. And before that they belonged to another country which also left its traces in the languages represented in the region. It's like that everyhwere in Europe. The Alsace region of France was once German, and the old people there (as well as some of the young ones) speak a German dialect. (And the trains still run on the right-hand side as in Germany, not on the left-hand side as in France.) Yet nobody in Germany wants to annex it. Nowadays. That's what the EU is all about.
Hungary was deprived of an important step in the development of today's Europe: fascism. And they insist on catching up without any shortcuts. Unfortunately I am not joking. As the current government wants Hungary to leave the European Union anyway, they are shamelessly breaking all of its principles. Apparently this is only going to end after the Hungarians have spectacularly lost a war right in the heart of Europe.
Being homeless is now officially a crime. The ruling party quite openly supports pogroms against gypsies. Hungary is quite open about wanting to annex all Hungarian-speaking regions of neighbouring countries. (Ethnic Hungarians in those countries can already obtain Hungarian passports.) The media is censored to such a degree that when the current law came into effect, lots of journalists had to look for a job immediately as they were left with a choice between creeping up the government's posteriors or facing draconian punishment. Even citizens from other European countries cannot by land in Hungary. Austrian farmers who already own land in Hungary are punished when they cross the border in a tractor to cultivate it. When the Swiss Franc rose a lot, causing problems for enormous numbers of Hungarians (and Hungarian institutions) that idiotically had taken Swiss loans because of the low nominal interest rates, Hungary *unilaterally* decided that they only have to pay back these loans to the amount owed theoretically if the exchange rate had been constant. In other words, the Hungarian government unilaterally partially dispossessed the banks of an EFTA country.
The new photography law is just another in a series of rubber laws that criminalise almost everything so that they can be applied selectively to members of the opposition and other likely targets.
I almost agree. But there is the little detail that she probably doesn't have too many airlines to choose from and this one will likely put her on its own blacklist if she does this.
The article says they have spent 6 years researching the technology. 6 years ago is also when German researchers published their discovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_carbonization (The German version of the Wikipedia article is much more informative.)
As far as I know, it started with a researcher wondering how exactly the Earth produced coal and oil and discovering that for almost a century nobody had done any new experiments. So he did some, adding some of today's knowledge.
It turns out that if you put water and basically arbitrary organic waste (wood, grass cuttings, leaves, entire weeds, whatever) into a pressure cooker, add some citric acid as a catalyser and then heat it to 200 degrees Celsius, then you get an exothermic reaction which makes the stuff keep that temperature without further input of energy. Provided you are not using an ordinary pressure cooker (which will explode) but some special thingy.
You stop the reaction after 8-12 hours and filtrate the water to get the product. Depending on the precise time you stop, you can create topsoil, oil, brown coal or low-quality stone coal. While the method doesn't seem to produce any excess heat, you can theoretically make an industrialised country CO2 neutral by treating all of its green waste that way and storing the resulting low-quality coal underground, e.g. in an old coal mine.
As Gutenberg was German, the first printing presses only had letters as required for German. Discarding the umlauts from the printing presses imported from Germany was easy, but creating new letter types for eth and thorn was tricky. An initial workaround for eth was to use y because in certain handwritings the two looked similar. Later they used th for both eth and thorn.
You abused it anyway. Thorn is not for the sound in 'that' (which is the same as the sound in 'this'), but for the one in 'with'. Just think about whether someone with a heavy accent would replace th by d or by f. ('dis' and 'dat' require an ed, 'wif' requires a forn).
Well, yes, there are times when I have to use the system of measurement used by roughly 5 % of the world population rather than the one used by the other 95%. But there shouldn't be so many of these occasions.
Just like a news report in the US should not assume familiarity with the Spanish language just because it's the mother tongue of 12 % of the US population.
It's not really about whales or their meat. It's about oil and similar resources.
According to international treaties, under certain conditions a country has the right to drill for oil in a certain area if it has traditionally and recently been exploiting the area economically in other ways. This explains a few things about the Japanese whaling programme that would make no sense otherwise. Why they are doing this even though they have no need for the meat, as the article makes clear. But also why they are not making a better effort to disguise the whaling as scientific. Sure, they are arguing before the IWC that it's primarily scientific. But sooner or later they will have to argue before a different body that it's primarily economic, and has always been so. The more obviously economic the programme is, the better it is for their purpose, so long as they can get away with it before the IWC.
Who would have thought that the f... article addresses this devilishly ingenious workaround?
"And even if Eve steals the glass, they estimate that it would take her at least 24 hours to extract any relevant information about its structure.
This extraction can only be done by passing light through the glass at a rate that is limited by the amount of heat this creates (since any heating changes the microstructure of the material). And the time this takes should give the owners enough time to realise what has happened and take the necessary mitigating actions."
Obviously you (the authors) are not to blame for this. In the original article everything was in the proper context. But the author of the report in Science should have explained what bladderworts are like and instead ran away with a misunderstood bit of information ripped out of context. *This* is what provoked comments such as "Where pray tell then are the GM tomatoes that eat aphids?" and references to killer tomatos. (Of course, otherwise we might have been speculating instead on how many of you gave their lives for science during this research. Carnivorous plants are still a man-bits-dog topic, after all.)
That claim is seriously misleading. According to Wikipedia, the closest connection between the bladderwort and the tomato seems to be that both are asterids of clade euasterids I. As are all other solanaceae besides tomatos (e.g. potatos, tobacco, petunias), all other lamiales besides bladderwort (e.g. acanthus, olives, plantains - the little green plants not the bananas, verbena) and many other plants such as forget-me-nots or gentiana. Initially they even got the time of the evolutionary split wrong by a factor of 1000!
I guess the truth is that the tomato genome is exceptionally well known and the two species are close enough to make a comparison reasonable. And to quote from the actual original article's abstract: "Unexpectedly, we identified at least three rounds of WGD [whole genome duplication] in U. gibba since common ancestry with tomato (Solanum) and grape (Vitis)."
... they are applying stratagem 29 and decking the tree with false blossoms.
A user called "Anonymous Coward" has said it earlier in different words, but that was voted "funny". Probably because Mr(s). Coward didn't explain it properly.
1/25 is a big improvement because it's 4/100, with the 100 on the metric side -- where it doesn't matter (4 in = 1/3 ft = 100 mm = 10 cm = 1 dm).
There is nothing wrong with calling 1/2 litre a metric pint if it facilitates your sense of the amount, just like 1/2 kg is a metric pound. The metric system doesn't force you to dramatically change unit sizes, it just urges you to adapt them a little bit to get round numbers. So the following further response doesn't even matter:
1 litre sizes are more commonly seen in German shops than 2 litres or 1/2 litre. I guess that's in part because we still have lots of inner cities where people walk to for shopping, in part because glass bottles are still relatively popular, and in part because we are not being supersized. The most common sizes here are 1 litre tetrapaks and glass bottles for milk, juice and wine, 0.7 litres and 3/4 litre for mineral water (glass/plastic bottles) and 1 1/2 litre plastic bottles for lemonades. 1/2 litre and 330 ml (roughly 1/3 litre) are also common, but only because they are virtually the only unit size for (glass) bottles of beer. The unit in which beer is sold in Munich at Oktoberfest, called the "Maß", was 1.069 litres before metrication and is precisely 1 litre now. Otherwise the most common drink sizes in restaurants are 0.2 litres, 0.3 litres and 0.4 litres. 2 litre bottles are extremely rare here.
"1 liter bottles of anything are unloved orphans -- too big for one serving, but not big enough for the leftovers to even be worth saving."
I can't tell you how happy I am that I am neither your balance nor your rubbish container. And that there is still such a thing as a family meal without TV here, for which 1 litre of apple juice, 3/4 litres of carbonated mineral water and 1 litre of beer seems about right in the case of 2 adults and 2 children.
Many months ago I actually read a lot of laws and documents published by various national standardisation bodies in order to get to the bottom of the mass/weight/pound problems. But I did this in connection with specific discussions, not scientifically. I vaguely remember reading the UK's W&MA 1985 and noting that it specifies explicitly that the pound is a unit of mass. Apparently I missed, or later forgot, that this act distinguishes between mass and weight in the same way that physicists do. I believe that's a relatively recent development. I believe the W&MA 1976 only uses the words "mass" and "weight" in the form "mass or weight", so treats them as synonyms in the sense of the act. I guess this was an intermediate step towards making the distinction, probably reflecting a gradual change of approach.
I have also re-read the US' Mendenhall Order of 1893 now. It also referred explicitly to mass. So I definitely stand corrected as far as usage of "mass" and "weight" in recent key legislation of the US and UK is concerned.
I am still pretty sure that historically only mass featured in UK law, but was called weight. But apparently that was earlier, probably until early 19th century or so.
It's a shame Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson couldn't have talked the French into a compromise & gotten them to define 1mm as being exactly 1/24th of an imperial inch.
More likely 1/25th, which is more in the spirit of the metric system and closer to what we have. But at the time nobody expected that the Americans of all people would be so mad as to hold out against the metric system longer than everybody else. Part of the appeal of the metric system came from the fact that it was a completely new system and derived from things that everybody could connect with - such as the length of the equator for the metre. If they had wanted to compromise this, there were a numer of other systems that they might have wanted to connect with instead.
There is also the kilopond, which is defined as the weight of a kilogramme. In the same way that the pound-force is defined as the weight of a pound (which in turn is defined as precisely 0.45359237 kilogrammes).
There is only one definition each for mass and weight and that is the physics one. This is the definition behind laws used to govern trade - or at least you had better hope it is because otherwise the first lunar colonists are going to be able to fleece earth-based merchants!
True, but misses the point. The point is that the word "weight" refers to a type of force in physics and to mass in trade and law.
It is not true that the pound is nominally a unit of force, at least not in the way that you apparently meant. The pound has been defined as a precise multiple of the kilogramme, hence as a mass, for ages. Before that it was defined as the "weight" of a certain artifact, without specifying a location. In colloquial and legal contexts the term "weight" is ambiguous, but usually refers to mass, not weight. In this case mass was intended, as is clear from the fact that when standard pound artifacts were moved from one place to another for comparison, they never made corrections for the variation of gravity depending on location.
There is a tradition among engineers, and maybe also educators, in the English-speaking world that the pound is a unit of force. I guess this is due to several factors: In some branches of engineering, especially civil engineering, the pound-force is considered more useful than the official pound. The usage in physics, where based on etymology the word "weight" became used for force rather than mass when the two notions split, diverged from the usage in law and trade - a fact that is easy to miss because it's rarely mentioned. And considering the pound to be a unit of force can serve as a shibboleth for groups that are closer to engineering than to trade.
Yup. I was thinking in German and had forgotten that the translation isn't so straightforward in this case. I also completely agree with your parenthetical remark.
(Btw, I just learned from Wikipedia that the league was originally defined as the distance that a man can travel in an hour, and so was subject to considerable variation and different standardisations in various places.)
I realise that the headline is meant as a joke anyway, but I think it can reinforce a misconception that may be to blame for much of the resistance against metrication: Contrary to what many people think, you don't have to suddenly change the way you speak. Nobody wants to do that.
The really extreme style of metrication where 7-mile-boots would become 11-kilometre-boots was tried during the French revolution. It went so badly that they had to revert to a complicated system of customary units that was a compromise between metric and the old units. Only decades after that were metric units accepted by the population.
Here is how metrication has been done everywhere ever since the French realised that even a revolutionary terror regime couldn't make people switch units directly: For the most important units you introduce informal customary units of roughly the same size but with a nice factor. Say one (metric) inch = 2.5 centimetres = 1/4 decimetre, 1 yard = 1 metre, 1 mile = 1.5 kilometres, 1 gallon = 4 litres (a compromise between US and imperial, closer to the US gallon), 1 pint = 1/2 litre (a similar compromise between US and imperial pints, very close to the US pint), 1 pound = 1/2 kilogramme (close enough for everyday life, and equal to the informal pound of Belgium, Netherlands, Germany etc.). Of course even those units which are not treated this way remain in common parlance in expressions such as "miles and miles". In Germany, hardly anybody knows how much a Meile is or was, but it doesn't matter when we still say "meilenweit" to indicate a long distance.
Your observation is not stupid at all. Socket drive sizes are in inches everywhere in the world because those are the standard sizes. Such an international standard makes even more sense than using inches for screen sizes everywhere. As an inch is legally defined to be precisely 2.54 centimetres (even in the US), there really is no problem. The metric system doesn't come with an obligation to only use nice multiples of metric units.
By the way, for most purposes it's sufficient to think of the inch as a customary unit worth 2.5 centimetres. People in metricated countries typically have many such customary units. E.g. in Germany and many other European countries we informally have the pound of 1/2 kilogramme. My mother still buys half a pound of butter, not 250 grammes (1/4 kilogramme). Smaller distances on British motorways are measured in metres, but the metres are referred to as yards, ignoring the conversion factor because it is close to 1.
As another German I can confirm this. In the year when the Euro was introduced (2002), there was an exceptionally poor harvest in Europe due to exceptional rainfall. As a result, foor prices increased significantly. Of course people blaimed the Euro for that.
As to the immediate changes: End prices are arbitrary to a large extent. 1 Euro = 1.96 DM, so most prices were simply divided by 2 and for compensation a few things were made significantly more expensive. Of course most people noticed these, while ignoring the much larger number of things that got a little cheaper.
For these reasons we need statistics rather than gut feeling, and these say that life did not get more expensive overall.
True for Ryanair. But it's not legal, they have just been getting away with it for rather long.
Re train tickets: Sounds as if you bought a ticket for local trains and a reservation for an express train. Depending on how you bought them, this could be either your own fault or the fault of whoever sold them to you.
Slashdot Mirror
I have said it before, but I think it's worth repeating:
When it comes to exploiting (other) natural resources in a high seas region it's important to prove that you have been economically active there for a long time, and still are. The whaling is an investment. This investment requires that the programme is pretty openly non-scientific. Just 'scientific' enough so a sufficient number of other countries in the International Whaling Commission can be convinced to allow it, where necessary through a bribe. But no more so, because at some point later Japan will have to prove that it was an economic activity, not research.
I was asked for sources on the pogromes against gypsies, and it was questioned that the ruling party was involved. As this was only from memory, here is what I found out with a quick search.
Apparently, the worst incident so far was the one in Gyöngyöspata, a village with 2500 inhabitants and a Jobbik mayor. Jobbik is fascist party comparable to the Greek party Golden Dawn. It does not seem to have been in any government coalition. However, the incident in Gyöngyöspata was so serious that it reflects very badly indeed on the government for not preventing it or at least ending it swiftly. Here is what happened.
In March/April 2011, the leader of a local right-wing militia invited neo-nazis from around the country to his estate for military exercises. In the sequel, local gypsies were terrorised by uniformed nazis for several weeks. In the end, the Hungarian Red Cross chartered several busses and evacuated 300 women and children.
So for several reasons it wasn't precise to say the ruling party (Fidesz) openly supports pogroms. Jobbik is quite open about it but has 'only' little over 10% of votes nationally and has never been the ruling party. And Fidesz doesn't support the pogroms openly but only through selective action. This may, however, be due in part to a large percentage of Jobbik supporters in government institutions such as the police.
Regarding the desire to annex parts of neighbouring countries: The reactions here speak for themselves. *Of course* these were once Hungarian. And before that they belonged to another country which also left its traces in the languages represented in the region. It's like that everyhwere in Europe. The Alsace region of France was once German, and the old people there (as well as some of the young ones) speak a German dialect. (And the trains still run on the right-hand side as in Germany, not on the left-hand side as in France.) Yet nobody in Germany wants to annex it. Nowadays. That's what the EU is all about.
Hungary was deprived of an important step in the development of today's Europe: fascism. And they insist on catching up without any shortcuts. Unfortunately I am not joking. As the current government wants Hungary to leave the European Union anyway, they are shamelessly breaking all of its principles. Apparently this is only going to end after the Hungarians have spectacularly lost a war right in the heart of Europe.
Being homeless is now officially a crime. The ruling party quite openly supports pogroms against gypsies. Hungary is quite open about wanting to annex all Hungarian-speaking regions of neighbouring countries. (Ethnic Hungarians in those countries can already obtain Hungarian passports.) The media is censored to such a degree that when the current law came into effect, lots of journalists had to look for a job immediately as they were left with a choice between creeping up the government's posteriors or facing draconian punishment. Even citizens from other European countries cannot by land in Hungary. Austrian farmers who already own land in Hungary are punished when they cross the border in a tractor to cultivate it. When the Swiss Franc rose a lot, causing problems for enormous numbers of Hungarians (and Hungarian institutions) that idiotically had taken Swiss loans because of the low nominal interest rates, Hungary *unilaterally* decided that they only have to pay back these loans to the amount owed theoretically if the exchange rate had been constant. In other words, the Hungarian government unilaterally partially dispossessed the banks of an EFTA country.
The new photography law is just another in a series of rubber laws that criminalise almost everything so that they can be applied selectively to members of the opposition and other likely targets.
I almost agree. But there is the little detail that she probably doesn't have too many airlines to choose from and this one will likely put her on its own blacklist if she does this.
The article says they have spent 6 years researching the technology. 6 years ago is also when German researchers published their discovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_carbonization (The German version of the Wikipedia article is much more informative.)
As far as I know, it started with a researcher wondering how exactly the Earth produced coal and oil and discovering that for almost a century nobody had done any new experiments. So he did some, adding some of today's knowledge.
It turns out that if you put water and basically arbitrary organic waste (wood, grass cuttings, leaves, entire weeds, whatever) into a pressure cooker, add some citric acid as a catalyser and then heat it to 200 degrees Celsius, then you get an exothermic reaction which makes the stuff keep that temperature without further input of energy. Provided you are not using an ordinary pressure cooker (which will explode) but some special thingy.
You stop the reaction after 8-12 hours and filtrate the water to get the product. Depending on the precise time you stop, you can create topsoil, oil, brown coal or low-quality stone coal. While the method doesn't seem to produce any excess heat, you can theoretically make an industrialised country CO2 neutral by treating all of its green waste that way and storing the resulting low-quality coal underground, e.g. in an old coal mine.
As Gutenberg was German, the first printing presses only had letters as required for German. Discarding the umlauts from the printing presses imported from Germany was easy, but creating new letter types for eth and thorn was tricky. An initial workaround for eth was to use y because in certain handwritings the two looked similar. Later they used th for both eth and thorn.
You abused it anyway. Thorn is not for the sound in 'that' (which is the same as the sound in 'this'), but for the one in 'with'. Just think about whether someone with a heavy accent would replace th by d or by f. ('dis' and 'dat' require an ed, 'wif' requires a forn).
Well, yes, there are times when I have to use the system of measurement used by roughly 5 % of the world population rather than the one used by the other 95%. But there shouldn't be so many of these occasions.
Just like a news report in the US should not assume familiarity with the Spanish language just because it's the mother tongue of 12 % of the US population.
It's not really about whales or their meat. It's about oil and similar resources.
According to international treaties, under certain conditions a country has the right to drill for oil in a certain area if it has traditionally and recently been exploiting the area economically in other ways. This explains a few things about the Japanese whaling programme that would make no sense otherwise. Why they are doing this even though they have no need for the meat, as the article makes clear. But also why they are not making a better effort to disguise the whaling as scientific. Sure, they are arguing before the IWC that it's primarily scientific. But sooner or later they will have to argue before a different body that it's primarily economic, and has always been so. The more obviously economic the programme is, the better it is for their purpose, so long as they can get away with it before the IWC.
Who would have thought that the f... article addresses this devilishly ingenious workaround?
"And even if Eve steals the glass, they estimate that it would take her at least 24 hours to extract any relevant information about its structure.
This extraction can only be done by passing light through the glass at a rate that is limited by the amount of heat this creates (since any heating changes the microstructure of the material). And the time this takes should give the owners enough time to realise what has happened and take the necessary mitigating actions."
Obviously you (the authors) are not to blame for this. In the original article everything was in the proper context. But the author of the report in Science should have explained what bladderworts are like and instead ran away with a misunderstood bit of information ripped out of context. *This* is what provoked comments such as "Where pray tell then are the GM tomatoes that eat aphids?" and references to killer tomatos. (Of course, otherwise we might have been speculating instead on how many of you gave their lives for science during this research. Carnivorous plants are still a man-bits-dog topic, after all.)
That claim is seriously misleading. According to Wikipedia, the closest connection between the bladderwort and the tomato seems to be that both are asterids of clade euasterids I. As are all other solanaceae besides tomatos (e.g. potatos, tobacco, petunias), all other lamiales besides bladderwort (e.g. acanthus, olives, plantains - the little green plants not the bananas, verbena) and many other plants such as forget-me-nots or gentiana. Initially they even got the time of the evolutionary split wrong by a factor of 1000!
I guess the truth is that the tomato genome is exceptionally well known and the two species are close enough to make a comparison reasonable. And to quote from the actual original article's abstract: "Unexpectedly, we identified at least three rounds of WGD [whole genome duplication] in U. gibba since common ancestry with tomato (Solanum) and grape (Vitis)."
Obviously, in affluent countries you will have to make them expensive, not cheap.
Insects aren't so different from shrimps, and apparently grasshoppers have a similar taste. Here is an article on the taste of insects: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniella-martin/what-do-bugs-taste-like-a_b_901775.html
... they are applying stratagem 29 and decking the tree with false blossoms.
A user called "Anonymous Coward" has said it earlier in different words, but that was voted "funny". Probably because Mr(s). Coward didn't explain it properly.
Nope.
1/25 is a big improvement because it's 4/100, with the 100 on the metric side -- where it doesn't matter (4 in = 1/3 ft = 100 mm = 10 cm = 1 dm).
There is nothing wrong with calling 1/2 litre a metric pint if it facilitates your sense of the amount, just like 1/2 kg is a metric pound. The metric system doesn't force you to dramatically change unit sizes, it just urges you to adapt them a little bit to get round numbers. So the following further response doesn't even matter:
1 litre sizes are more commonly seen in German shops than 2 litres or 1/2 litre. I guess that's in part because we still have lots of inner cities where people walk to for shopping, in part because glass bottles are still relatively popular, and in part because we are not being supersized. The most common sizes here are 1 litre tetrapaks and glass bottles for milk, juice and wine, 0.7 litres and 3/4 litre for mineral water (glass/plastic bottles) and 1 1/2 litre plastic bottles for lemonades. 1/2 litre and 330 ml (roughly 1/3 litre) are also common, but only because they are virtually the only unit size for (glass) bottles of beer. The unit in which beer is sold in Munich at Oktoberfest, called the "Maß", was 1.069 litres before metrication and is precisely 1 litre now. Otherwise the most common drink sizes in restaurants are 0.2 litres, 0.3 litres and 0.4 litres. 2 litre bottles are extremely rare here.
"1 liter bottles of anything are unloved orphans -- too big for one serving, but not big enough for the leftovers to even be worth saving."
I can't tell you how happy I am that I am neither your balance nor your rubbish container. And that there is still such a thing as a family meal without TV here, for which 1 litre of apple juice, 3/4 litres of carbonated mineral water and 1 litre of beer seems about right in the case of 2 adults and 2 children.
Many months ago I actually read a lot of laws and documents published by various national standardisation bodies in order to get to the bottom of the mass/weight/pound problems. But I did this in connection with specific discussions, not scientifically. I vaguely remember reading the UK's W&MA 1985 and noting that it specifies explicitly that the pound is a unit of mass. Apparently I missed, or later forgot, that this act distinguishes between mass and weight in the same way that physicists do. I believe that's a relatively recent development. I believe the W&MA 1976 only uses the words "mass" and "weight" in the form "mass or weight", so treats them as synonyms in the sense of the act. I guess this was an intermediate step towards making the distinction, probably reflecting a gradual change of approach.
I have also re-read the US' Mendenhall Order of 1893 now. It also referred explicitly to mass. So I definitely stand corrected as far as usage of "mass" and "weight" in recent key legislation of the US and UK is concerned.
I am still pretty sure that historically only mass featured in UK law, but was called weight. But apparently that was earlier, probably until early 19th century or so.
It's a shame Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson couldn't have talked the French into a compromise & gotten them to define 1mm as being exactly 1/24th of an imperial inch.
More likely 1/25th, which is more in the spirit of the metric system and closer to what we have. But at the time nobody expected that the Americans of all people would be so mad as to hold out against the metric system longer than everybody else. Part of the appeal of the metric system came from the fact that it was a completely new system and derived from things that everybody could connect with - such as the length of the equator for the metre. If they had wanted to compromise this, there were a numer of other systems that they might have wanted to connect with instead.
There is also the kilopond, which is defined as the weight of a kilogramme. In the same way that the pound-force is defined as the weight of a pound (which in turn is defined as precisely 0.45359237 kilogrammes).
There is only one definition each for mass and weight and that is the physics one. This is the definition behind laws used to govern trade - or at least you had better hope it is because otherwise the first lunar colonists are going to be able to fleece earth-based merchants!
True, but misses the point. The point is that the word "weight" refers to a type of force in physics and to mass in trade and law.
It is not true that the pound is nominally a unit of force, at least not in the way that you apparently meant. The pound has been defined as a precise multiple of the kilogramme, hence as a mass, for ages. Before that it was defined as the "weight" of a certain artifact, without specifying a location. In colloquial and legal contexts the term "weight" is ambiguous, but usually refers to mass, not weight. In this case mass was intended, as is clear from the fact that when standard pound artifacts were moved from one place to another for comparison, they never made corrections for the variation of gravity depending on location.
There is a tradition among engineers, and maybe also educators, in the English-speaking world that the pound is a unit of force. I guess this is due to several factors: In some branches of engineering, especially civil engineering, the pound-force is considered more useful than the official pound. The usage in physics, where based on etymology the word "weight" became used for force rather than mass when the two notions split, diverged from the usage in law and trade - a fact that is easy to miss because it's rarely mentioned. And considering the pound to be a unit of force can serve as a shibboleth for groups that are closer to engineering than to trade.
Yup. I was thinking in German and had forgotten that the translation isn't so straightforward in this case. I also completely agree with your parenthetical remark.
(Btw, I just learned from Wikipedia that the league was originally defined as the distance that a man can travel in an hour, and so was subject to considerable variation and different standardisations in various places.)
I realise that the headline is meant as a joke anyway, but I think it can reinforce a misconception that may be to blame for much of the resistance against metrication: Contrary to what many people think, you don't have to suddenly change the way you speak. Nobody wants to do that.
The really extreme style of metrication where 7-mile-boots would become 11-kilometre-boots was tried during the French revolution. It went so badly that they had to revert to a complicated system of customary units that was a compromise between metric and the old units. Only decades after that were metric units accepted by the population.
Here is how metrication has been done everywhere ever since the French realised that even a revolutionary terror regime couldn't make people switch units directly: For the most important units you introduce informal customary units of roughly the same size but with a nice factor. Say one (metric) inch = 2.5 centimetres = 1/4 decimetre, 1 yard = 1 metre, 1 mile = 1.5 kilometres, 1 gallon = 4 litres (a compromise between US and imperial, closer to the US gallon), 1 pint = 1/2 litre (a similar compromise between US and imperial pints, very close to the US pint), 1 pound = 1/2 kilogramme (close enough for everyday life, and equal to the informal pound of Belgium, Netherlands, Germany etc.). Of course even those units which are not treated this way remain in common parlance in expressions such as "miles and miles". In Germany, hardly anybody knows how much a Meile is or was, but it doesn't matter when we still say "meilenweit" to indicate a long distance.
Your observation is not stupid at all. Socket drive sizes are in inches everywhere in the world because those are the standard sizes. Such an international standard makes even more sense than using inches for screen sizes everywhere. As an inch is legally defined to be precisely 2.54 centimetres (even in the US), there really is no problem. The metric system doesn't come with an obligation to only use nice multiples of metric units.
By the way, for most purposes it's sufficient to think of the inch as a customary unit worth 2.5 centimetres. People in metricated countries typically have many such customary units. E.g. in Germany and many other European countries we informally have the pound of 1/2 kilogramme. My mother still buys half a pound of butter, not 250 grammes (1/4 kilogramme). Smaller distances on British motorways are measured in metres, but the metres are referred to as yards, ignoring the conversion factor because it is close to 1.
As another German I can confirm this. In the year when the Euro was introduced (2002), there was an exceptionally poor harvest in Europe due to exceptional rainfall. As a result, foor prices increased significantly. Of course people blaimed the Euro for that.
As to the immediate changes: End prices are arbitrary to a large extent. 1 Euro = 1.96 DM, so most prices were simply divided by 2 and for compensation a few things were made significantly more expensive. Of course most people noticed these, while ignoring the much larger number of things that got a little cheaper.
For these reasons we need statistics rather than gut feeling, and these say that life did not get more expensive overall.
True for Ryanair. But it's not legal, they have just been getting away with it for rather long.
Re train tickets: Sounds as if you bought a ticket for local trains and a reservation for an express train. Depending on how you bought them, this could be either your own fault or the fault of whoever sold them to you.