Metric was made necessary when the Americans and the British couldn't agree on the size of a pint.
Change My Mind
In this episode of 'Things That Piss Me Off'.........
- Thread starter cdclndc
- Start date
Change My Mind
Ditto with the back spasm here. Yesterday was the worst of it, but still painful today. Your post at least reminded me to finally take some meds. (I always forget)
If it's the kind with codiene, you can.
I don't know if this suggestion will help you, but it was seriously life changing for me, so I'll toss it out. TENS units have gotten quite cheap.
TENS sort of muffles pain temporarily, while doing a bit of muscle massage. If what you're dealing with is structural damage, it's not a long term solution. For me, a thing that happens is some amount of pain from overexertion, or sitting the wrong way for too long, or whatever, then leads to a chain reaction where eventually my entire back is trying to clench against itself, causing more pain, sometimes for as long as a week. The TENS unit interrupts that chain reaction, and usually gets me back to a (careful) normal in a couple days.
Our city, in its deep paranoia about wildfires, will fine you $1,500 for use of any firework, no matter how safe or sane.
We will see if it curbs those who don't care, and never have cared.
It will start any day now that we're in July and go a few days past the 4th.
We will see if it curbs those who don't care, and never have cared.
It will start any day now that we're in July and go a few days past the 4th.
Especially here in Canada, where Tylenol #1's with codeine are over the counter.
If we're going there, let's really acknowledge the insanity. And this is not intended to poke fun at Americans for still using it, just the sheer level of "dear god why?!", cried out in pain at our mutual ancestors who originated the fucking thing (1).
Firstly, there are some genuinely sensible units in there. Even as a metric-sexual, I have to admit, inches and feet are actually genuinely useful "ish" values, and I do occasionally use multiples of them myself. On the other hand, mathematics is a beutiful and elegant thing, and we just start there by making it awkward.
Because of course, inches are 1/12th of a foot. Not 1/16th. Sure, 12 is a really sexy number, gotta love all of those divisors, but that means we need a secondary multiplication table, we can't just stick with powers of 2. And why stop there? Let's have 14 pounds in a stone, but only 8 stone in a hundredweight. On the one hand, yay, power of 2, but on the other hand, that means a hundredweight is 112lb. Would it not have made more sense to have a stone as 12lb and a hundredweight as 96lb, one might ask? One might not, fuck off with your logic right there.
Going in the other direction, one starts by dividing inches up into fractional powers of 2. Which, great, that looks like a system, and a natural one two, because it's much easier to divide something accurately into 2 than it is into 10. So we have 1/2, 1/4, 1/64 and so on. But, of course, then the industrial revolution came around, and we both needed much finer measures, and the ability to calculate those finer measures with, at best, a slide-rule. So at some point, you have to start mixing, say, a rod sized in thousands of an inch with a thread sized in 1/64ths of an inch, and good luck with that (insert pained rage face here)
Meanwhile, inches and feet are great for small scale stuff, but they get to a bit of a pain when you need to know the size of a field, or the distance to market. So we have a progressively larger set of units, all of which are, with the benefit of hindsight, thoroughly silly.
A yard is 3 feet. Not 2, not 8, not 12, not 16. 3. Great, not even a multiple of 2, never mind a power. Ternary it is! (And while we're on the subject, a barleycorn was 1/3rd of an inch)
A fathom is 6 feet, and a cable-length is 100 fathoms, ish.
A chain is 22 yards long.
A furlong is 10 chains long (... so we're throwing some decimal in for good measure? Cool.)
And then we come to miles. Which have no fewer than 22 different definitions on WIkipedia, and while many of those are minor variations defined by different countries, England used no fewer than 4 definitions simultaneously (The old mile of about 2100m; the statue mile of 8 furlongs, except not those furlongs the nautical mile of 60 arcseconds at the equator, defined as such long before there was any kind of general agreement on the size of the Earth(2), and the roman mile, because of course)
I could go on, and one day I will be annoyed enough to do so, because metrology and its history is fascinating even if it is infuriating, but just going through some of the basic distances and weights, never mind volumes, we're up to multiples of, count them:
- 2
- 3
- 6
- 8
- 10
- 12
- 14
- 15.5 (did I mention perches?)
- 22
Some of those are degenerate - if you can work with powers of 2, then 8 and 16 kinda come along for free, but still. In a world where we can bang out replicas of known dimensions to high precision and in industrial quantities (so, basically, post 1750 ish), the relationship to natural units such as the width of a finger, or the length of a foot, or the height of a man, became much less important. And the need for precision made the complexity of the system a bit of a liability compared to the elegance of the metric system (3)
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(1) Yes, I know why it developed this way: much of this originated long before standardisation was needed for anything other than tax purposes, all you had as a reference were natural units such as relations to body parts, and the communications and travel technology of the day amounted to "shouting" and "walking" respectively, so as long as a local area of villages could roughly agree, it was Good Enough.
The thing is, standardisation was important long before improvements in communications technology moved even as far as the metalled road, and figures in authority - from the king, emperor or pope, all the way down to local landowner - had strong incentives to agree upon known values, either locally or throughout a whole polity, because tax, and rent. Within Britain, commonly defined weights and measures were in place before the writing of the Doomsday book, and while those common measures would not have been as ubiqitously equal as they are today, there was still interest in ensuring that the pound of grain paid in tax in the east was about the same weight as the pound of grain paid in tax in the west.
(2) As annoying as they are today - they get used for measuring altitude, which is just bonkers - nm are a case of technology preceding knowledge. While the sextant as we would recognise it today only showed up in the early 1700s, meaningful measurements of latitude via the stars was used for navigation in the 1500s.
(3) Pocket calculators post about 1965 have helped reduce the complexity of conversion, and I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that wonders of the world were built with, not in spite of such measurement systems - from the pyramids of antiquity to the wonders of the industrial age. Vast creations like the SS Great Eastern, to the tiniest, finest clockwork.
Possibly the favourite thing I've learned, ever, is that America doesn't use the metric system because it was stolen by pirates.
The big tent shops selling questionably legal fresh out of the seacan Chinese pyro have been at it for a couple weeks now and I guess some people just can’t stand to wait anymore. Thursday will be worse, but I’m hoping that since Friday is not a holiday and plenty of businesses will be open it’ll be somewhat subdued.
You could call the department and tell them somebody on your street is fucking around with fireworks and you're afraid they'll start a fire.
I live in a western state, which is to say a wildfire-prone state where 75% of the fires are started by people doing dumb stuff. Setting off fireworks that leave the ground, without an event licence, is against the law all over the state. But we still have jerks setting them off not just on the fourth but for weeks before and after, usually when normal people are trying to sleep.
MF's.
Fireworks have always been illegal to use in Ohio, but not illegal to sell (?), so you will hear random pops and booms the entire week of the 4th. Friday will probably sound like Operation Phantom Fury from about 3 PM to 2 AM.
Someone was setting off actual mortar-launched fireworks in LF's neighborhood on Saturday night. Not a lot, like every five minutes.
Apparently it became legal to set them off a couple years ago, just found that out because I couldn't remember the laws around it. I seem to recall as an OH resident you could buy stuff in PA that PA residents couldn't, and that anything you bought in OH needed to be taken out of state in 2 days. And yeah, there were always people's setting them off anyway.
Our dog has upped his passive-aggressive stubbornness over the last 36 hours. We've had to be rescued by my wife three times in the last 36 hours because the dog refuses to continue walking. He'll just freeze in place. I'm tempted to start carrying him next time he does this.
I will comment that "dozen" and "gross" makes a lot of sense in that context when you realize that mildly more advanced finger counting (count finger joints instead of whole fingers, use your thumb to index) means you count to a dozen on one hand, then count your dozens on the other hand - giving you a gross.
While it's unsafe to take more acetaminophen or ibuprofen then directed, it is perfectly safe to take both at the same time. And we get both with codeine OTC here. With the legal maximum being ~12.5mg, it adds up to 50mg codeine as a perfectly safe dose. (because codeine won't hurt you, the other painkillers will) It makes for a very casual afternoon when you've had a headache all morning.
How about that. I know they stopped having Ohio fireworks buyers sign a "liar's form" saying they were going to use the fireworks out if state.
So I imagine it's still up to each city to say it's against the regs to do it in city limits, because our mayor has sent that message out a couple of ways in the past weeks.
Punishment for not coming when I called you is being carried like a football. Both of our dogs are sub-30lbs, and one is part Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, who is firmly imprinted on Mrs. F. So he goes where she does, even when he shouldn't. So he gets the football treatment pretty often. One treatment (like yesterday) usually makes him more compliant for a couple of days. I would like to point out that in no way, shape, or form is the football treatment painful, it simply lacks the comfort and dignity of two-armed carry.
The Supreme "Court".
(Edit: to discuss the current situation, there is a thread in the soapbox. I'm just venting feelings here.)
(Edit: to discuss the current situation, there is a thread in the soapbox. I'm just venting feelings here.)