what where?

[fox]

i like giving directions to strangers.  i feel sympathy when i see people standing on sidewalks looking down at their map and then up at their surroundings, over and over again, trying to work out where the hell they are; and i feel (possibly a bit smug) satisfaction when i am able to solve the mystery by, for instance, turning their map ninety degrees to the right.  you can see everything snap into focus for them -- you can almost hear the click before the whrrrr.

but i realized, just now, helping a couple of young women from East Of Here to get their bearings and showing them, on their map, how to get to the other side of town, that my saying it's about a mile from here was probably utterly unhelpful.  among people of my acquaintance, the british tend to be pretty ambisystemic with metric and standard dumb old money; the americans, apart from those trained in the hard sciences, are metrically challenged; and the rest, which includes all non-native english speakers as well as canadians, australians, etc., are as baffled by feet and inches as i am by centimeters.  more so, actually, because i at least have the sense that i should be more comfortable with metric than i am.  at the blood bank a couple of weeks ago, i said to my friend -- just thinking and doing sums out loud, you know, like you do -- 'hang on, how many pints are in a gallon?' and he said 'i have no idea' as i was saying 'eight, right, because it's two pints to a quart, and obviously four quarts to a gallon' ... to which he said 'that's not obvious to me at all.'

quarts!  quarters!  nope.  it wasn't decimal, he didn't want to hear it.

in short, i should probably not expect that non-english-speaking tourists in europe will even be able, when i say a thing is about a mile away, to convert that into kilometers in their head.  more likely, no matter how helpful i've otherwise been, it's about a mile away is more or less meaningless.

Comments

[misia.livejournal.com]

Maybe we should all measure distances in six-packs, like they do in Texas.

[reginagiraffe]

I only know the km to mile translation because I used to run in 10k races. 10km = 6.2 miles. So a mile is about 1.5 km. (Close enough for direction purposes, anyway.)

And the blood bank takes *pints*? In England? Is that an international standard or something? (psst. 1 pint = 480 ml)

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

nah, i think they take 500 ml, actually -- a pint-like amount. :-) (and actually a british pint is 20 oz., not 16, which has thrown off more than one american trying to bake things that had liquid ingredients in them, lemme tell you what.) but the conversation was at the cookies-and-juice table after, with a canadian friend -- in canada, they definitely donate half-liters (half-litres, more like), and my concept of working out how long you've been donating regularly by how many gallons you've given was just totally foreign to him. :-)

[reginagiraffe]

actually a british pint is 20 oz., not 16

Bad for baking, good for beer. *g*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

You know, the other week I had what the ex-boss used to call "a Blinding Flash of the Obvious" and figured out why a foot is divided into twelve segments rather than ten: it's because that way it can easily be divided into halves, thirds, fourths, and sixths.

(When I was a kid, I used to believe that it was because it was created by aliens! who had six fingers on each hand!)

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i was talking to someone about that not long ago -- by which i mean some time in the past six months or so. possibly my brother or datlowen (it will amuse datlowen and would amuse my brother to learn that i sometimes confuse them in my head, when it comes to which conversations i've had with whom), or possibly cmshaw. about how hexidecimal is more useful than decimal because it is more multiply divisible, and the same for duodecimal.

what i have to remind myself of is which order it's more likely to have happened in. it's not that a foot is divided into twelve parts in order to make it easy to divide it into halves (which can be done to something with ten segments as well, of course) and thirds and fourths and sixths; it's that people found themselves dividing the thing not just into halves but into thirds and fourths and sixths, and said okay, you know what, let's mark it off into twelfths, whadaya say?

see, and i can get behind having twelve pence in a shilling, but what puzzles me is having twenty shillings in a pound.