Re: There are no stupid questions....
Re: There are no stupid questions....
- Subject: Re: There are no stupid questions....
- From: email@hidden (Bruce Fraser)
- Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 15:59:24 -0700
At 5:31 PM -0600 11/1/01, Anthony Sanna wrote:
>OK, I've learned to spell lots of words with letters missing, like
color and behavior and aluminum, but I'm a Scot, and I meant proper
British billions, not those wimpy american ones! (A British billion
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.
If you'd ever seen a Scottish horse, you'd know that that's not possible!
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.
I think you're confusing rods (or poles, or perches, all of which
equal 25 links), with roods, which are 40 square poles or perches...
but a rod is indeed 25 links, or 198 inches, or 16.5 feet, or 5.5
yards.
I also grew up with 4 farthings to the penny, 12 pennies to the
shilling, 20 shillings to the pound, and 21 shillings to the
hoity-toity guinea. (I was too young for 5 shillings to the crown,
but a 2s6d coin was still referred to as half a crown.)
Also, four gills to the (real) pint (not the wimpy american one), 8
pints to the gallon, 2 gallons to the peck, 4 pecks to the bushel.
and
16 drams to the ounce, 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the
stone, 8 stone to the hundredweight, 20 hundredweights to the ton.
I managed to spare you all that in Real World Photoshop, and you're
going to beat me up about billions?
<g>
Bruce
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