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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
250 years is older than most nations, if you go by the age of their current governments. Russia today isn’t the same country is was 40 years ago, never mind 250. Or any country on the losing side of the world wars, or those that have had revolution in the past century. etc.
@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 Ever get any of the history about why a bunch of revolutionaries were so into metrology they invented the metric system?
Every Ancien Régime county had its own units, and every county had a variable list of different units for different things; an iron pound and a bread pound were not the same mass. You just had to know what unit was used for what thing where you were, which included tax assessments.
@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 The UK has also been on the metric inch since like the 1930s. Saved our bacon in WWII because American-machined parts *weren't* a few thou per inch out.
Of course, in practice both the US and the UK had been on the metric inch for a while before then because the (I think Swedish) chap making the gauge blocks got fed up with having to maintain two product lines and split the difference between the two inches.
@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.