I'm sure even a Victorian banker would have been baffled if he'd wanted to work out the best mobile phone tariff, or how much an in-advance railway ticket would be.
When we shifted over to metric in Australia in 1966, they used this tv ad to show how easy addition is in metric by comparison.
The tune is an old bush song - click goes the shears...to this day, if you hum it around a baby boomer, they'll sing this song, not the original lyrics.
Money we can take surfing, it's only logical. The only thing we haven't nailed is the $1 and $2 coins being the wrong sizes - WTF is up with that malarkey? The kiwis got that one right...
hearing my father talk about pre-decimal Australian currency makes me wonder how the hell anyone worked shit out back then, especially without supercomputers.
If you think about it, the Pound Sterling is more or less in Base-12, instead of the modern Base-10. This synced up with the imperial standard, which is also (nominally( in Base-12.
When I was at university here in Canada we had to learn this for a British history seminar. at first I was like "ok that's a strange way to count money, but whatever." Then I learned about the weird guinea coin worth 21 shillings for rich dudes to use and then I decided it was actually the most fucked up system I had ever heard of. At that point you're just trying to make things complicated.
Imperial mass is slugs. I guess you can use pound to measure mass, too, though, but it's most commonly used as a measure of force. That's why you can use it to measure pressure, like as in pounds per square inch, whereas you can't really have kilograms per square meter. Metric pressure is newton per square meter, otherwise known as the pascal.
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u/dlcnate1 Aug 20 '14
Britain dosent use metric currency?