Did you know........

bbb wrote : "The word 'pound' is abbreviated 'lb.' after the constellation 'libra' because it means 'pound' in Latin, and also 'scales'. The abbreviation for the British Pound Sterling comes from the same source: it is an 'L' for Libra/Lb. with a stroke through it to indicate abbreviation. "

while growing up in hamburg/germany i worked for several years in the port of hamburg. of course, most goods either being imported or exported had to be weighed (mostly still on manual weighscales ! - gives you an idea when that was). while the official weight in germany was the "kilo = kilogram, the weight used in the harbour was the "pound" , but the weighmaster would never say : "it's so-and-so may pounds" , instead it was always " this sack of coffee - or whatever - weighs "200 libs" , going back to the old roman "libra".
also most measurements were not in "meters" or fractions thereof but always in inches and feet(usually cubic feet). since we did not have mechanical/electronic calculators , the weighmaster and his associates had conversion tables that allowed to quickly make the necessary calculations.
i'm sure those "old fashioned " methods are no longer in use. hbg

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Hamburger
Hamburger, thanks for your memories.

Do you think the United State will ever convert to the metric system and join most of the rest of the world?

BBB

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bbb : isn't the metric system now in use in the medical/scientific community ?
canada has - officially - switched over to the metric system, but ... just looked at a package of butter (made and packed in canada !) and it's 454 grams !!!
i understand that when australia switched to the metric system, it was decided that such practices would not be allowed, i.e. that weights should be in multiples of ten or such. in canada we have many packaged goods in odd metric weights - toothpaste 112 grams , might as well be four ounces. hbg

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Well here we just recently changed from miles into the kilometre for speeds and distances on our Roads.... It's not the same, and to be honest kilometres are not half as impressive as the miles.. My speeding record is around 160 kmph which is impressive but here it doesn't register until you tell them in miles.. 100 mph...
Well some of the 'old' imperial measurements are good... Well Inches anyways are good for measuring things... yes things.....
yep some things are dumb... how many litres in a gallon and how many pennies were in the pound before the decimalisation came in...

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Did you know that people in N Germany have smaller feet than those in Austria?

A traditional distance unit in German speaking countries, is the meile which is much longer than the mile units of western Europe. Typically the meile was equal to 4000 klafters (fathoms) or 24 000 fuß (German feet). In Austria this came to 7586 meters (4.714 miles); in northern Germany it was 4.6805 miles or 7532.5 meters.

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All scientific work uses the MKS system or SI or Standard Internationale. Thats fine so long as you dont mix it.

We were supposed to adopt the metric system here decades ago, but road signs are still in miles. (And some in metres...which get vandalised)

But all loose products etc eg market vegetables are now sold by the kg. Personally I have no time for people who cant get a feeling for approximately how much is a kilogramme or a kilometre, or a millimetre.

But I have some sympathy over objections to centimetres. An inch is about the length of the top of the thumb. A foot is ....well a foot long. And 12 inches in a foot is easily divisible by 2 3 4 6. If I want a piece of wood about 91 cm long, or 3 feet, which is easier to visualise?

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Yeah-but a twentyfiver sounds better tnan a nine incher surely.

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Spendius

spendius wrote:

Yeah-but a twentyfiver sounds better tnan a nine incher surely.

I knew one of you guys would come up with that before long.

BBB :wink:

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BBB

Did you predict it would be me?

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Spendiusq

spendius wrote:

BBB
Did you predict it would be me?

Nope, I thought it would be Slappy Doo Hoo.

BBB

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Andrianople is the most fought over city in the world..

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thomas Jefferson had red hair.

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Famous redheads in history:

Th. Jefferson (already mentioned)
Christopher Columbus
Queen Isabella
Erik the Red (hence his name; contrary to popular belief, it had nothing to do with his bloodthirstiness.)

I might think of some others.

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Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

Did you know that people in N Germany have smaller feet than those in Austria?

A traditional distance unit in German speaking countries, is the meile which is much longer than the mile units of western Europe. Typically the meile was equal to 4000 klafters (fathoms) or 24 000 fuß (German feet). In Austria this came to 7586 meters (4.714 miles); in northern Germany it was 4.6805 miles or 7532.5 meters.

The Scandinavian mile is 10 kilometres (in countries where distances are long it is easier to use large measures like league at sea or werst in Russia).

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Lord Ellpus wrote:

Shark skin is made of a matrix of tiny, hard, tooth-like structures called dermal denticles or placoid scales. These structures are shaped like curved, grooved teeth and make the skin a very tough armor with a texture like sandpaper. They have the same structure as a tooth with an outer layer of enamel, dentine and a central pulp cavity. Unlike the scales of scales of bony fish (ctenoid scales) that get larger as the fish grows, placoid scales stay the same size. As the shark grows, it just grows more placoid scales.
These scales also help the shark swim more quickly because their streamlined shapes helps decrease the friction of the water flowing along the shark's body, by channeling it through grooves. Also, the shark's skin is so rough that contact with it can injure prey. All of the spines of the denticles point backwards (towards the tail), so it would feel relatively smooth it you moved your hand from head to tail (but rough the other way).

In the Middle Ages shark skin leather, called segrin (later bastardised to "chagrin leather" as a synonym for bad quality), was used to cover the hilts of swords as a kind of old-fashioned anti-slip coating.

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In the winter of 1736-37 Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis used the spire of the church tower of Tornio in his triangular measurements to prove that the earth is flattened towards the poles.

The wooden church (and its tower) dates from 1686 and is one of the few surviving wooden churches in Finnish Lapland (because the Germans burned the rest in 1944-45 during their retreat towards Norway).

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The Swedish Warrior King Karl XII was killed by a ball that passed through his head from left to right. The bullet was rumoured to have been fashioned from a button of his own uniform (because no other weapon could touch him according to the legend).
The official Norwegian version is that it was a ball from a Norwegian shell fired from the fortress of Fredrikshald.
According to the Swedish version it was a Swedish officer who fired the lethal shot.
Either way, there is documentary evidence that the king was set up to be killed by his own staff who feared for the survival of their country if Karl was allowed to continue to wage his disastrous war.

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The oddest naval hero of the Netherlands was Van Speijk, captain of a Dutch gunboat in the port of Antwerp during the Belgian rebellion against the Dutch in 1831. He apparently was a lousy sailor because his ship floated against the quay when the sails were hoisted in adverse winds, allowing rebels to board her. Rather than surrendering his ship, with the legendary last words: "I'd sooner blow myself up", van Speijk fired his pistol into a powder keg in the powder magazine blowing the ship, crew, rebels and all to kingdom come (alledgedly only his thumb was recovered). Thus he became a hero, with a state funeral for his thumb, but his crew surely had no say in the matter and no one remembers their names.
I wonder how anyone could report his last words anyway, since there were understandably few eye witnesses among the survivors Laughing

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The French colony of Cameroon was the first French territory to declare itself for de Gaulle and the Free French government in 1940.

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The Swedish humanitarian Aviator Count Carl Gustav von Rosen led several succesful attacks on the jet fighters of the Nigerian federal air force, using tiny MFI-9 propeller planes, during the Nigerian Civil War in Biafra (1967-1970).

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