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Post by amanda on Jul 4, 2024 7:30:37 GMT
Learned something new or just interesting? Put it here.
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Post by amanda on Jul 4, 2024 7:31:58 GMT
While doing some research for a short composition on writing implements, I have learned that the US Supreme court has 20 quill/goose feather pens every day that court is in session and attorneys can take one home.
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Post by jenny on Jul 7, 2024 12:53:09 GMT
I wonder if anybody uses them to actually write with!
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Post by Guy Barry on Jul 7, 2024 14:28:07 GMT
[deleted]
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Post by alexanderhoward on Jul 8, 2024 9:55:33 GMT
While doing some research for a short composition on writing implements, I have learned that the US Supreme court has 20 quill/goose feather pens every day that court is in session and attorneys can take one home. I imagine there is a book dedicated to that narrow subject, which could be fascinating if written well. I once delved into a long book in the Guildhall Library (City of London) that was just about drinking vessels. There is a fascinating amount to learn just on the subject of drinking horns. One item that sticks in the mind is the Pusey Drinking Horn (now in the British Museum), which was used to prove that King Canute made a grant of land, because the inscription records the grant - so it served as a title deed. The inscription though is in a form of Middle English, from several centuries after Cnut's day. The museum dates it to the early 15th century.
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Post by efros on Jul 8, 2024 16:15:02 GMT
That this thing a Polaris Slingshot is classed as an autocycle or motorcycle in most US states and some require that you wear a crash helmet.
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Bondee
KWC
Bearer of Ye olde Arcane Dobbynge Sticke.
Posts: 290
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Post by Bondee on Jul 11, 2024 15:57:37 GMT
I was watching an episode of The Good Doctor earlier today. I was a bit taken by the actress who played the mother of one of the patients. She had the most amazing, piercing blue eyes. I looked at the cast list on IMDb and discovered that her name is Elyse Levesque, and the best bit of all... ...she's a redhead! No hair, just a red head!
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Post by jenny on Jul 12, 2024 13:51:57 GMT
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Post by suze on Jul 12, 2024 15:45:57 GMT
Gotta be Canadian with a name like that, thought I, so I looked her up.
She is indeed Canadian, although she's from Saskatchewan which is some way west of what I'd have guessed. Her partner is a French-Polish actor called Maximilien Seweryn. I'm not sure that he's all that famous in himself, although his father Andrzej is a big name in Polish theatre (and was in Schindler's List).
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Post by crissdee on Jul 15, 2024 13:42:20 GMT
When I got up this morning, I realised I has no fresh milk, as I had been away. I always have some milk powder on hand, as I was advised to add it to milk in order to put back the weight I lost through diabetes. I had never really looked at the instructions before now, just putting "some" in my milk to make it "milkier", but I wanted to make up a pint, so I looked at the instructions to see how much to use. Now, it may be me overthinking things as usual, but it seemed a bit odd. To make up 1 pint, it said I should use 57g of powder. Note that, 57g, not 60g, not about 60g, but EXACTLY 57g. It's fairly light stuff, but 3g is still a very small amount, so why not say 60g? Furthermore, the container holds 340g, so if the 57g is critical, it holds just under 6 pints worth. If it's not that critical, why not call it 60g to the pint and put 360g in the tub?
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Post by Guy Barry on Jul 15, 2024 13:54:09 GMT
To make up 1 pint, it said I should use 57g of powder. Note that, 57g, not 60g, not about 60g, but EXACTLY 57g. It's fairly light stuff, but 3g is still a very small amount, so why not say 60g? I presume it's because 1 pint equals 568 ml, so has a mass of approximately 568g. If the concentration of the powder is 1:10, that would mean 56.8g of powder to make 1 pint. They've just rounded it up to the nearest whole number. EDIT: Or to put it another way, 57g is the metric equivalent of two ounces. A pint is 20 fluid ounces, so a pint of pure water weighs 20 ounces. Nine parts water to one part powder gives you one pint.
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Bondee
KWC
Bearer of Ye olde Arcane Dobbynge Sticke.
Posts: 290
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Post by Bondee on Jul 16, 2024 21:48:24 GMT
I learnt that the band Gaye Bikers On Acid used to dress in women's clothing and play as their own support using the name...
Lesbian Dopeheads On Mopeds.
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Post by crissdee on Jul 17, 2024 8:37:04 GMT
To make up 1 pint, it said I should use 57g of powder. Note that, 57g, not 60g, not about 60g, but EXACTLY 57g. It's fairly light stuff, but 3g is still a very small amount, so why not say 60g? I presume it's because 1 pint equals 568 ml, so has a mass of approximately 568g. If the concentration of the powder is 1:10, that would mean 56.8g of powder to make 1 pint. They've just rounded it up to the nearest whole number. EDIT: Or to put it another way, 57g is the metric equivalent of two ounces. A pint is 20 fluid ounces, so a pint of pure water weighs 20 ounces. Nine parts water to one part powder gives you one pint. That may well be the case, but we are talking milk powder in a kitchen, not chemicals in a laboratory. No one is going to be measuring things that exactly (my scales do not even work to that degree of finesse). "5-6 tablespoons" is close enough......
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Post by Guy Barry on Jul 17, 2024 8:44:18 GMT
Why are they mixing metric and imperial units anyway?
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Post by jenny on Jul 17, 2024 19:29:42 GMT
Because many of us don't think in metric yet.
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Post by Guy Barry on Jul 17, 2024 19:34:09 GMT
Because many of us don't think in metric yet. Well then why would they say "57g"? Crissdee's right, it's very odd. Either say two ounces to make up a pint, or 50g to make up half a litre.
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Post by crissdee on Jul 18, 2024 0:24:26 GMT
But why even be that specific in any system? It's just milk powder, a few grammes either way is not going to make much difference....
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Post by Guy Barry on Jul 18, 2024 5:11:36 GMT
Well they've got to give some guidance, haven't they? Unless you know how concentrated it is, you've got no idea whether to use a couple of spoonfuls or tip the whole packet in.
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Post by Guy Barry on Jul 18, 2024 13:15:02 GMT
What I learned today was a new word, "divagate", meaning to stray or digress. It's marked in the COED as "literary", which probably explains why I hadn't come across it before. (The pronunciation is DIE-vuh-gate, by the way.)
I learned the word from the following suitable groanworthy crossword clue:
Stray from the subject of scandal involving Mariah Carey?
(Geddit?)
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pdr
Posted
Supremecy
Posts: 103
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Post by pdr on Jul 19, 2024 7:25:50 GMT
But why even be that specific in any system? It's just milk powder, a few grammes either way is not going to make much difference.... I suspect it's because at some point in the past the instructions said "2oz per pint", and then they had to convert it to metric units due to legislation on units of sale*. When doing the conversion they made it accurate to avoid people asking why it had "changed". If they had set the new value at 60g/pint I would bet money that SOMEONE would spot that it used more powder to make the same stuff and would claim it was a nefarious plan to trick consumers into using more than they needed to increase profits for the Davos forum to spend on the chemtrail operations which hide sight of the firmament (to help them fool us all with this "globe earth" lie). Back in the late 90s the MoD finally funded a switch to metric units in the Harrier maintenance manuals. This caused many issues, but the classic illustration was screw torques. In the manual whenever something is fastened there must be an indicative torque figure to tell people how tight it should be. Where things were just snugged "finger-tight" the appropriate torque number is around 1.5ft-lbs, so the manuals would say "tighten to between 1.3 and 1.7 ft-lbs". The maintainers knew it was only indicative because where it was important they would use the term " torque-tighten to 1.5ft-lbs" (which meant that the torque must actually be checked with a calibrated torque wrench). But when these values were converted to metric there was no funding to review the technical aspects, so the text was changed to "tighten to between 1.763 and 2.305nm". It still meant "finger tight", but it cou8ln't be rounded to (say) "between 1.7 and 2.3nm" because that would be a technical change which required the engineering analysis which underwrote the original number to be repeated and documented. There were tens of thousands of references in the suite of manuals and the costs would have been in the tens and hundreds of millions even if the engineering manpower existed to do it (which it didn't). So we had to keep these high-precision expressions of approximate values for the life of the aeroplane. I suspect the milk-powder case is similar. PDR * it became illegal to sell in units of ounces/pounds but pints and gallons remained (like miles on road signs) as an option for liquids for reasons too detailed to go into here
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Post by suze on Jul 19, 2024 11:07:40 GMT
pints and gallons remained (like miles on road signs) as an option for liquids for reasons too detailed to go into here
It even depends what the liquid is!
Draught beer and cider must be sold by the pint (or half pint), and may not be sold by the liter.
Milk in recyclable or returnable containers may be sold either way. For reasons that I don't know, supermarkets mostly go in pints, but corner shops often go in liters.
Other liquids must be sold in metric.
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Post by amanda on Jul 19, 2024 11:21:54 GMT
Glad it's all mls/litres here. The only things with pint etc printed on the carton/bottle are probably imported, I haven't looked enough to check.
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pdr
Posted
Supremecy
Posts: 103
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Post by pdr on Jul 19, 2024 11:32:41 GMT
pints and gallons remained (like miles on road signs) as an option for liquids for reasons too detailed to go into here
It even depends what the liquid is!
Draught beer and cider must be sold by the pint (or half pint), and may not be sold by the liter.
ITYM "Draught beer, cider and Watneys must be sold by the pint (or half pint)" [not going to byte on the liter thing] PDR
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Post by crissdee on Jul 25, 2024 9:21:28 GMT
TIL that the word "vedic" has a meaning outside the world of STAR TREK: DS9.
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Post by crissdee on Jul 25, 2024 17:27:20 GMT
Some time ago, I posted this in our old home forum;
I've had a bit of a strange idea, and I was wondering what other QI folk might have to say about it.
For many years, it has been my habit to carry nothing smaller than £1 coins. Anything I get smaller than that either goes into whatever charity collection box comes to hand, or gets emptied out at the end of the day, and saved up until it is worth something, at which point I tend to hand it over to a charity shop. To that end, I have just bought a money box bearing the words "stupid little coins". As I have looked at it, the idea has come to me of just abolishing all coins under £1. Even 50p is worth so little these days, they only serve to make change, which is only necessary because we split pounds into smaller units. If we stopped the latter, the former would no longer be needed. There is very little, if anything, that I buy singly these days for under £1. I did buy some wall fixings for a job that were something like 16p each, but I was buying 30 of them, so if they were 6 for £1 it would not have been a problem. Anyone buying that sort of thing would not surely object to having a few extra on hand for subsequent projects, so having to buy 5 or 6 at a time wouldn't be a problem. I don't buy newspapers, but I suspect any decent paper is now at least £1, and for the "red tops" it could be arranged so that your initial purchase for £1 entitled you to subsequent issues to make up the value.
I can't say I have examined the issue in depth, but so far, I can't think of any reason why it should not work. What say you lot?
suze then replied: Scrub £1 and make the smallest denomination 10p though, and I'd be right with you.
and Brock added:
I'd be OK with that. I agree with you that £1 is too high, but we could probably get rid of 1p, 2p and 5p coins without too much difficulty. I don't think I've used any of them for years.
Well it may be on it's way. One of the tabloids (possibly the Express) is noting on its front page that the Royal Mint is not making any copper coins at all this years, apparently the first time in history this has occurred. 1p, 2p, and 5p are such trivial amounts these days, I wouldn't really care if everything was rounded up to the nearest 10p.
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Post by amanda on Jul 25, 2024 23:08:19 GMT
In the 1980's in Australia it was realised that our then one and two cent copper coins, (not actually made of copper but a combination of stuff) were costing more to produce than their face value so they were discontinued.
Now our lowest coin is five cents but supermarket prices still display 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 etc with it being rounded down if under five cents or up if over.
The receipt's total may show $13.43 etc but it's rounded up to 45 cents that only changes last minute when putting in cash at the self serve register.
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Post by suze on Jul 26, 2024 13:42:33 GMT
A similar system is used in Canada, but I don't especially like it.
When the 1c coin was done away with, the government did acknowledge that this rounding system was a bit silly. It was felt essential all the same, because the alternative - for all prices simply to end in 0 or 5 - would be inflationary. That was a decade ago though, and perhaps it's time to move to that.
Now of course, here in 2024 a lot of payments are not made in cash. Cheques just about still exist in Canada, although they are becoming uncommon except in B2B transactions, and many retail transactions use plastic cards or cellphones. If one pays by any non-cash means, one still pays to the penny.
This reminds TGH of something. Britain had a ½p coin until 1984. This too existed because the government of the day felt that its abolition would be inflationary, but TGH has it that the banks wouldn't deal in halfpennies. If the bank owed you 7½p, it would actually pay you 8p - and if you owed it 7½p, it would settle for 7p. That all sounds a bit generous for banks, but does he have it right?
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Post by jenny on Jul 26, 2024 16:11:33 GMT
I learned this yesterday but still...
Apparently when the QI talk forums close, what will happen is that the old posts will be there to read, but nobody will be able to post on it. So don't panic about rescuing posts you want to keep.
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Post by RLDavies on Jul 26, 2024 16:34:49 GMT
I've heard that the Royal Mint won't be minting coins this year. It's got nothing to do with phasing out small denominations, though. Fewer people are using cash, so there's plenty in circulation and no need to add more.
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Post by crissdee on Jul 26, 2024 17:13:06 GMT
jenny. That's nice to know. I had considered trying to archive all my ramblings, but decided that it might tax my techie know-how rather too far, and my motivation beyond breaking point...
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