Re: There are no stupid questions....
Re: There are no stupid questions....
- Subject: Re: There are no stupid questions....
- From: email@hidden (Anthony Sanna)
- Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 17:31:35 -0600
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OK, I've learned to spell lots of words with letters missing, like
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color and behavior and aluminum, but I'm a Scot, and I meant proper
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British billions, not those wimpy american ones! (A British billion
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is 1,000,000,000,000,000, or what you Yanks call a trillion.)
I once had the wrong dictionary selected in Word (UK English), and I
happened to find all your lost syllables. For a few weeks my letters had
a rather hoity-toity air about them.
...and as far as the Empire's measurement system goes, don't sit too high
on your Scottish horse, Bruce. Remember, its basic unit is the length of
the Royal Nose (or other appendage). How else could you arrive at 12
inches to a foot (the King's, I assume), 3 feet to a yard, 5 1/2 yards to
a rod, 40 rods to a furlong, 8 furlongs to a mile, and 3 miles to a
league?
Not a land-lubber, you say? Then of course 6 feet to a fathom, 120
fathoms to a cable, 8.439 cables to a mile (nautical, of course), and 3
nautical miles to a marine league must make sense. Oops! Did I forget
that a nautical mile equals 1.15 of the dirt-road type?
But you say that you want to survey that dirt road? Well then.... A
mile equals 8 furlongs, of course, each furlong containing 10 chains. A
chain, obviously, is 4 rods (66 feet or 792 inches), and a rod is, as we
previously stated, 5 1/2 yards, right? Sorry. Not when laying out
plats. A rod is comprised of 25 links, which, we all know, are 7.92
inches each.
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Just another example of two peoples separated by a common language...
And bound by an uncommon measurement system.
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(And as Robin notes, these are color definitions, not colors. Besides
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which, you'd need an awfully big monitor to display even 16.7 million
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colors. My monitor only has 1,920,000 pixels...)
My curiosity was purely academic. ...and would have been quick & simple
as well, if my my standard digital reference source hadn't been written
by a Scot. Nudge, nudge... Wink, wink...
Tony
Anthony R. Sanna
Vice-President
SACO Foods, Inc.
6120 University Avenue
Middleton, Wisconsin 53562 USA
email@hidden
www.sacofoods.com
1-800-373-7226
(608) 238-9101
(608) 238-8149 - fax