Skirting Costs

[Kirbstone]

A cubit was the measurement from the fingertips to the elbow, which everybody knows is precisely 18 inches for all the inhabitants of the Earth. OK for building a big boat to house animals &c, but to make a skirt, for example, it would have to be somehow subdivided into smaller units.

There doesn't appear to be ny info. available on how this was done.

T.

[Sinned]

All right milfmog, so I was wrong about the metrication board - I suppose that I should have done my research beforehand. As for selling petrol in litres I have little concept of the quantity going into the tank. I only know that I buy 40 or 50 quid of petrol and that lasts me a few weeks. I still measure consumption in mpg and not miles per litre. Although engine capacity is in cc ( 1500cc, 1800cc ) and has been for as long as I can remember. Bore and stroke used to be in inches but is now in millimetres. Temperature is going towards Centigrade only although Fahrenheit still has a lot of meaning to me. Bah! Bring back pounds shillings and pence - that's what I say. Twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. Illogical maybe and based on old standards, but at least then we had REAL money.

As for the cubit the subdivisions were into palms and fingers - logical?

Sinned

[Milfmog]

Never mind we measure shoes in Barleycorn which is 1/3 of an inch - lets hope that does not change.

Really? My shoe size has been metric for about 20 years...

Have fun,


Ian.

[knickerless]

I will remember not to buy shoes in Buckinghamshire - I always buy a size 10 and never thought about metric sizes - goodness knows what that is in metric.

Nick

[crfriend]

I still measure consumption in mpg and not miles per litre.

I went over to using a distance/currency-unit notion quite some time back for most normal work and only refer to distance/fuel-volume if I suspect problems with the machine. 'Tis just two ways of looking at the same problem, although the distance/currency-unit one is more real-world than anything else. Another way of looking at it is distance-travelled/cost-of-ownership which is useful as a long-term view and points up why I will never buy a "prestige" car.

As for the cubit the subdivisions were into palms and fingers - logical?

Hands. That's how horses are still measured for height. Fingers work too, but only for certain cuts of chicken and certain "recreational pharmaceuticals". {duck-and-cover}

[Big and Bashful]

What is 6 foot 3 inches in points?

Ah I am 5400 points high, or thereabouts.

Must look out my 1954 book of Physics tomorrow, there are more units that I can shake a stick at. The Apothecary's dram is a good one. Yep, must look it up!

[Kirbstone]

....and of course the Scots only drink 'WEE' drams!, speaking of which, the official barman's measure for spirits is in fractions of a gil, so when one orders a whisky in the UK it's a quarter of a gil, standard optic measure. Over here on the Island of rogues & robbers the standard optic contains one third of a gil, which means that you get footless faster here.

....and speaking of petrol prices, measures and consumption, I am agreeably surprised that £50 worth lasts Sinned three weeks. Petrol has become my biggest weekly expense now and I have to calculate every trip in terms of what it costs in fuel. MPG is academic and not really relevant anymore. All cars here after 2005 don't have miles on their odometers anymore. My old steed does, of course. Eur 50 will only put about 33 litres in now, which is about 7.5 Imperial gallons. This will give me some 230 miles. Every time I sit in a boat I have to drive 50 miles total to do it. A trip to work is 17 miles total and any refuse disposal or shopping &c adds to all that, so 3 weeks on 50 quid is pie in the sky for me.
t.

[Milfmog]

I will remember not to buy shoes in Buckinghamshire - I always buy a size 10 and never thought about metric sizes - goodness knows what that is in metric.

Most manufacturers make their shoes in metric units these days and simply add a UK size for the convenience of those who still live in the past. Your UK 10's will almost certainly have a metric 44 or 45 on them if you look (strictly, a 10 would be 44.5 metric but those are like rocking horse manure). Manufacturers who buy soles from other companies (such as the Vibram soles much loved by walking boot manufacturers) have little choice in this. The fact that you think in old imperial sizes does not mean the manufacturers use those to make their product.

...the official barman's measure for spirits is in fractions of a gil, so when one orders a whisky in the UK it's a quarter of a gil, standard optic measure.

That was true once but the UK metricated spirit measures some years ago so a standard single is now 25ml.

Have fun (anyone know if there is a metric unit of fun?),


Ian.

[Sinned]

Kirbstone,

I've been through the travelling zillions of miles to work and back and now live within cycling of my work. So the car is only used for shopping and local stints hence the few miles I travel. Having said that I will be looking for work after New Year so I don't know what will happen then but I will try and make it local.

Seems to have pen a new direction on the units scale. I did have a few letters in Computing magazine about metricising (metricating? are these real words? ) the time scale.

Sinned

[Big and Bashful]

I will remember not to buy shoes in Buckinghamshire - I always buy a size 10 and never thought about metric sizes - goodness knows what that is in metric.

Most manufacturers make their shoes in metric units these days and simply add a UK size for the convenience of those who still live in the past. Your UK 10's will almost certainly have a metric 44 or 45 on them if you look (strictly, a 10 would be 44.5 metric but those are like rocking horse manure). Manufacturers who buy soles from other companies (such as the Vibram soles much loved by walking boot manufacturers) have little choice in this. The fact that you think in old imperial sizes does not mean the manufacturers use those to make their product.

...the official barman's measure for spirits is in fractions of a gil, so when one orders a whisky in the UK it's a quarter of a gil, standard optic measure.

That was true once but the UK metricated spirit measures some years ago so a standard single is now 25ml.

Have fun (anyone know if there is a metric unit of fun?),

Ian.

Spirits in Scotland can be sold in 25 ml or 35ml, we used to get 1/4 gill in some pubs, in most others erm (was it 1/5 gill or the English 1/6th gill, I think it was 1/5th). I remember looking at the measures in England and thinking that the measure hardly covered the bottom of the glass.

[Kirbstone]

Now a sixth of a gil really is a wee dram, but the Sasannachs usually pour soda or ginger or Lord knows what else in on top of it, so the amount of whisky in the bottom of the glass is immaterial.

Cycling to work here on this island of chancers and bullies is equivalent to commiting hara-kiri. You might survive a few trips, but that guy in the big 4X4 will get you soon enough.

Metricating time....Tough one, that. 10 Newhours per day, 100 newminutes in each hour, 100 newseconds per newminute....or like Tom Lehrer suggested, should all values be expressed in Base Eight??

I think it's time for another not-so-wee Dram.....Cheers everybody!

T.

[crfriend]

[...] or like Tom Lehrer suggested, should all values be expressed in Base Eight??

I'll second that notion! Just don't use yer thumbs when countin'!

Computers get along very nicely in human terms by using octal notation, and one evolutionary question I've always pondered, given how blazingly successful dinosaurs were and that they had eight digits to work with, was whether they were better suited to binary computers than we humans are.

If a single item in decimal notation is called a "digit" and a single item in binary is called a "bit" (short for "binary digit"), I can see why ternary computer designs never caught on. You couldn't express their units in polite company.

I think it's time for another not-so-wee Dram.....Cheers everybody!

Seconded, again! {hoists brew and toasts friends}

[Big and Bashful]

It's a long time since I have heard the following in digital speak:

nybble: a 4 bit word as in octal.

Oh, I thought there was more than just bits, nybbles and bytes. Either my memories going or..... no, it's gone!

[crfriend]

It's a long time since I have heard the following in digital speak:

nybble: a 4 bit word as in octal.

Oh, I thought there was more than just bits, nybbles and bytes. Either my memories going or..... no, it's gone!

There are also words. Here's how the scheme works from a computer-architecture point of view:

The basic unit in any digital computer is a bit (or binary digit). Since these little guys can only be in one of two states (to take the example of Tron, "Yes" or "No") it's tough to do much with only one of them, so a bunch of them get strung together into what's known as a "word" the width in bits of which represents the size of a number that the computer can process in one go. In elder computers, a word was the smallest chunk of data you could (usually) address and retrieve from memory.

As words grew, and they were not always measured in powers-of-two (8, 16, 32, 64), it became common to be able to process subsections of words independently which is where the term "byte" came from (one took a byte out of a word to deal with it). In modern powers-of-two machines bytes are always 8 bits in length; this was not always the case. For instance, the PDP-10 was able to manipulate "bytes" in sizes ranging from 1 bit to 36 bits (the entire word). The 8-bit byte is also known in communications terms as an "octet" to remove possible confusion from other-sized historical bytes.

The "nybble" (also, variously, "nibble") is a fairly modern construct (late 1960s or very early '70s) that refers to one-half of a byte (which, by this time was "standardised" at 8 bits) which now is 4 bits. I've never seen it used in programming parlance, but have in hardware usage, most notably in some Data General NOVA machines where 4 4-bit nybbles are serially processed to form a 16-bit word.

On "octal" and it's one-bit-bigger brother "hexadecimal": These have noting intrinsically to do with the design of a machine's hardware; these are shorthand notations to ease the burden on humans who do not deal well with long strings of bits. To use an example from a PDP-10 (which uses octal) try remembering this 010101100010000000001010011100101110. Good luck. Expressed in octal it comes out as 254200,,123456. That's a valid instruction by the way; have fun finding it.

The above example from the PDP-10 is a good use of octal notation as the machine had a 36-bit word; other contemporary systems had word-widths of 18, 12, and 24 bits which divide nicely into three-bit slices so using octal as a shorthand made good sense. In the modern power-of-two machines, however, octal leads to using a larger number of human symbols than needed and doesn't line up nicely on bit-boundaries; hence, the 4-bit-wide "hexadecimal digit" which splits the 8-bit byte perfectly. Note that not all power-of-two machines used hexidecimal as the shorthand; Data General used octal in both its 16-bit and 32-bit computer lines. Here's a NOVA instruction expressed in octal 063077. Kudos to those who know what it does.

[Uncle Al]

I'm getting to old for this

Uncle Al