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@jlargentaye @tilton One of the maniacal pitches of the pro-Brexit campaign was "we must protect our traditional currency from this vile dastardly scheme to replace it with the Euro!"
Dude, the "traditional" British currency is only 29 years older than the Euro at this point.
@cstross @jlargentaye @tilton The first thing learning English that gave me a culture shock was to find out that 2 shirts each 1 pound 10 pence were not 2.20 but 2 pound 1 shilling and 8 pence. Ok, 12 pence to a shilling and 12 shilling to a pound, like on the clock? No, 20 shilling to a pound, of course...
@tilton @a_cubed And inches are 25.4mm give or take a few microns! I mean, who ordered THAT? It's almost as crazy as the pre-revolutionary French Foot, which was the distance from the tip of the king's nose to the end of his right middle fingertip (arm extended stiffly from the shoulder) because why the fuck not (and also, it varied from king to king).
@cstross @tilton @a_cubed NIST ordered it, and there's no give or take. A US inch is exactly 25.4mm to as much precision as your equipment allows. That is the official definition, and why I like to call US customary units The Worst Version of the Metric Syste. NIST redefined everything in terms of metric units half a century ago.
@overeducatedredneck @tilton @a_cubed Oh good grief. That's as bad as the British Metric Pint (568ml precisely, legal/statutory measure for serving beer in pubs, used for NOTHING else.)
@cstross @overeducatedredneck @tilton @a_cubed I seem to remember some supermarkets selling milk in plastic bottles in multiples of 568ml. Did that stop? I left the UK almost 20 years ago.