What's anachronistic about converting in a modern encyclopedia the currency of the time to the modern currency of that very country? It is also adjusted for inflation.
Pre-decimal pounds, shillings and pence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/£sd), with a few guineas (21 shillings, while a pound was 20 shillings) thrown in for fun.
That would make sure nobody alive would understand it.
I read somewhere that internationally-oriented auction houses ask & take bids in guineas so that bidders based in _all_ currencies are equally inconvenienced, and none is favored.
> No doubt any attempt to correct it would be rapidly suppressed
Wikipedia has consistent style rules around usage/conversion of currencies[1][2], so yes your edit would probably be swiftly reverted if it didn't follow those.
I'm not really sure why you're using such a conspiratorial tone.
[2] (From above page) "For obsolete currencies, provide an equivalent (formatted as a conversion) if possible, in the modern replacement currency (e.g. decimal pounds for historical pre-decimal pounds-and-shillings), or a US-dollar equivalent where there is no modern equivalent."
How come? It gives modern context to the amount lost, in the currency that country now uses. Surely as long as you follow the conversion rates between currencies when they changed, then it's possible to provide an approximate current value in a relatable currency. The confusing bit for me is "equivalent to £5.45 million in 2019" as it is not clear why it would be a value in £, being in Euro using Ireland (and pedantically if it means Irish or British pounds).
I would lean toward the £ means sterling, as Ireland used that from 1868 - 1928, the period in question (and the punt was de-facto pegged to it until the 70s).
That would also have to be inflation adjusted and would be pretty meaningless to as a value to people in Dublin. And then it would more or less only be understood without further calculation by UK inhabitants.
The Pound of today is pretty much a different currency to the 19th century
> would be pretty meaningless to as a value to people in Dublin
Utter horseshite, that's like saying a Canadian along the border would be clueless as to CAD-USD conversion rates. The UK is our next door neighbour. It's common enough to buy goods up north, online from the UK, and to travel there. We can generally do a rough conversion in our heads; the same goes for USD nowadays due to the prevalence of online shopping (and the fact that its now at near parity with EUR helps).
> The Pound of today is pretty much a different currency to the 19th century
True of any currency. You may as well argue that any measurement in an inflation adjusted currency is nonsense if you're going to go down that route.
Given that the Sterling was in use then and now, I'd argue that the most meaningful way to calculate value would be to adjust the value for the inflation of Pounds Sterling. That can then be converted as appropriate to euros for convenience (as it seems to have been in the first paragraph of this article).
Wiki articles are written for easy and accessible comprehension; if you want to know more about the specific currency and amount used at the time, read the sources.
I for one can't be bothered to read the sources and will just take in the factoid as-is and move on.
Agreed, "Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875" or some such, would be fine.
From the article:
None of the fatalities suffered during the fire were due to smoke inhalation, burns, or any other form of direct contact with the fire itself; all of them were attributed to alcohol poisoning.
old joke -In a letter to her son: your grandpa drowned the other week, he fell in the vat of whiskey, they tried to pull him out 4 times but he fought them off. It took one week for his remains to stop burning in the crematory
> The fire is believed to have started in Laurence Malone's bonded storehouse on the corner of Ardee Street, where 5,000 hogsheads (262,500 imperial gallons or 1,193,000 litres or 315,200 US gallons) of whiskey were being stored...
Hogsheads sound like a fictional unit of measure made up to mock the imperial system.
It's not a unit per se but an actual size of liquor casks, equivalent to two barrels (also a standard unit in England but is the generic term for casks in US) or fourth (1/4) of a tun (the largest liquor cask defined), although you can use them all as units.
According to Wikipedia and Wiktionary its etymology is English. I also checked with A Pronouncing and Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language by Malcolm McLennan, which has "tocsaid, n. f. a hogshead ; fr. the Eng." Gaelic for barrel is "baraille".
Perhaps the Gaelic word for barrel somehow came from the English measurement hogshead, but more likely that it was spoken Gaelic for barrel overheard and adopted by English speaking stevedores.
The main problem with that is that the first recorded occurrence of the word was in Middle English in 1390: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti... i.e. before (Scottish) Gaelic diverged from Irish. If the word had a Middle Irish origin predating this, it would be shared by its descendants in both modern languages. But the Irish word is oigiséad (m), and the Gaelic word is tocsaid (f). Different genders, and Irish dropped the h sound, which (after lenition) Gaelic preserved. So the word must have arrived in Irish and Gaelic independently, presumably from Modern or Late Middle English after Gaelic and Irish diverged into separate languages.
The other problem is that there is no known Irish etymology for either tocsaid or oigiséad, or Malcolm McLennan would have included it in his faclair, but there is a plausible English one. Other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish) have variants of ox-head. Whether it originated in one of those languages or in English is disputed.
I am going to defend imperial (and other ancient) units of measurement.
The metric system is unintuitive but standardized.
The imperial system is intuitive but (traditionally) non-standardized.
A standardized but unintuitive system is useful in modern science and engineering, where reliability and precision are of utmost importance.
An intuitive but non-standardized system is useful for day-to-day communication and conceptualization, where a standard deviation away from the average of the unit's reference does not have a meaningful effect.
Before standardization, many old units of measurement could be immediately related to everyday things, making conceptualization simple and intuitive.
Examples:
Imperial pound of mass: A pound of wheat berries is more or less how many wheatberries I can fit in my hand. I deal with wheat berries and my hands every single day - I can quite concretely conceptualize a pound and more or less relate that pound (of wheat berries) to other things: a pound of meat, a pound of wool, etc.
Imperial acre: An acre is more or less the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day. In our old little village, oxen and farm fields are something we observe every single day, and so an acre is conceptually intuitive to us.
Ancient cubit: This is more or less the length of my forearm, which again serves as a very useful reference point for measuring and conceptualizing things. Say I go to build a cabinet. I may measure in cubits. Then, when I go to cut lumber, I just measure it with my forearm, cut, and that's it.
Imperial hogshead: I speculate this barrel size is more or less either the size of an ox's head, or can tightly fit one inside it. Again, this is an animal I might observe daily, making conceptualization simple.
Note that a standard deviation of the size of an average man's hand or forearm, or of the amount of land a given pair of oxen can plow on a given day, does not have a meaningful impact on how I use and relate these units of measurement to everyday life - I'm not precision engineering a space telescope here. I'm just buying wheat berries, plowing fields, and building cabinets.
Contrast these origins with metric's.
Metric meter: "one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris" - whoa get me outta here! I can't relate that to anything I encounter in my day-to-day life.
Metric gram: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water", or "the mass of one cubic 'one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris' of water"
Of course we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions.
This is why imperial is a more useful system for relaying measurements colloquially, for everyday life.
What's completely balderdash about it? The definition of centimeter is accurate, so it cannot be the case that the post is completely balderdash? Like you've requested with my oxen and my days and my wheat berries, perhaps you could you also be more precise?
Again, the point is that you use these measurements in situations where micrometer-tier precision is unnecessary. You can hear "pound", immediately be able to conceptualize it, and then move on with your life, not waste all day haggling with the merchant over his wheat berries that happen to be 0.2mm shorter on average than what you typically might consider to be a wheat berry.
For one, many units are actually defined using relatable things like your example: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water". Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries (I literally had half a unit kilo weight in my hand an hour ago). Or celsius, 100 is boiling point of water and 0 is freezing point, which you will also encounter in your daily life (cooking and your fridge, at least approximately) and are easy to relate.
But more importantly, it doesn't matter. Most "personal" definitions are vague. My girlfriend is significantly shorter and a meter is way longer for here than for me, also her forearms are like two thirds of my forearm. Nobody knows how a meter is defined and I think many have forgotten how a gram or a kilo are defined, it's a scale you internalise. How to define them, that's up to the scientist. The day to day advantage is that it's so easy to calculate with these units and every single unit has the same concept behind it (from current to weight to acceleration).
>Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries
Metric units can certainly be adapted to be fractionally relatable, though their origins are certainly not, as I mentioned:
>we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions.
The grandparent comment mentioned how nonsensical or absurd "hogshead" is as a unit of measurement, and the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural.
> the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural.
So, its an appeal to nature then? Somehow, I doubt it'd make a difference if meter was derived from the total lengths of bishops mitres at parish (everyone knows how tall those hats are - relatable!).
Units are only "intuitive" because that's what you've internalized - similar to how the the golden age of music was when one was a teenager or young adult.
If you want to try using bishops mitres as a unit of measurement, you're more than welcome, but the length of that hat was probably made using a more intuitive reference unit, you might want to use that instead, maybe it was cubits, I'm not sure.
>an appeal to nature then
No. It's an explanation that imperial & similar ancient measurement units were adopted with the goal of being simple and intuitive for people to quickly understand. This was accomplished by choosing immediately relatable reference points. In the case of a hogshead barrel, that reference point was the ox head.
A mile, that's 1000 paces, that's both simple to remember and intuitive.
A kilometer, that's 621.4 paces, that's neither simple to remember nor intuitive.
No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to, this is by definition of each unit in the system.
> No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to
This "intuition" is not intrinsic, though, but is because of familiarity. If you've done track sports (or watched athletics), you can visualize 100m. If you've watched NFL, you can "intuit" 10 yards empirically - not because it equals to 30 feet and you look at your own feet. The same goes for 21"/27"/42"/60" (TVs).
The only scenario I can imagine where of human-relatibility would matter is when the unit is unknown to the listener, e.g. if someone introduced me to a carlength (or the notoriously unintuitive 'length of a football field'); however, this is now completely unnecessary with modern education and standardization
The origin of the measure is just lore, and counts for nothing; which is why being immersed into a system which you were previously unfamiliar with (metric or imperial) bestows the same "intuitiveness" - as anyone who joined the US army can tell you.
The argument that imperial units are somehow relatable as they are similar to naturally occurring things is a textbook appeal to nature.
I certainly don't want to run afoul of the etiquette rules here but I would ask yourself if you are projecting your long-standing familiarity and the resulting intuition that you have with these units onto everyone else.
Nobody who uses meters outside of setting the international standard or working in particle physics would have a working idea where they denoting meters in wavelengths of radioactive decay or hemisphere spanning fractions. They approximate it to something they can relate to just like you do. It's easy to skewer imperial units too with silly examples stories e.g. Fahrenheit.
Similarly just because it's convenient to me to think of (mile!) country roads, quarter sections, and acres from familiarity despite using metric elsewhere due to the grids from historical land allocations in Western Canada doesn't devalue other ways of measuring.
>I certainly don't want to run afoul of the etiquette rules here but I would ask yourself if you are projecting your long-standing familiarity and the resulting intuition that you have with these units onto everyone else.
If you want to be rude, do it, but be direct about it and own it. Or rather, don't be rude. Please do not presume anything about the author of a comment nor attempt to make personal attacks against the author, as it's not only rude, it's irrelevant to the substance. I am not the substance of my comment, the origins and intuitiveness of units of measurement is the substance.
>Similarly just because it's convenient to me to think of (mile!) country roads, quarter sections, and acres from familiarity despite using metric elsewhere due to the grids from historical land allocations in Western Canada doesn't devalue other ways of measuring.
I would add that the league and the (ancient) parasang are right around three miles, about the distance the military thinks appropriate to walk between breaks.
the idea of Irishmen drinking themselves to death in a whisky flood is... something my wee dram of Irish blood is not qualified to comment on, but it only killed a dozen people.
The density of molasses is about 1.4 tonnes per cubic metre, 40% more dense than water, resulting in the molasses having a great deal of potential energy. The collapse translated this energy into a wave of molasses 25 ft (8 m) high at its peak, moving at 35 mph (56 km/h)... nearby buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 ft (60 to 90 cm)
"Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage …. Here and there struggled a form—whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was …. Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings—men and women—suffered likewise."
I witnessed a watered-down version of an incident like this a few months ago on the road between Campos dos Goytecazes and Rio de Janeiro - traffic slows down, then stops, and as we look ahead, trying to see what causes the jam, we find that several people walk along the roadside carrying beer cans and kegs, laughing and being in an excellent mood.
Just our luck, driving right into some festivities, we think. Then, minutes later, we find the origin of the beer - a truck has veered onto the road shoulder and toppled over, the locals helping themselves to the free beer strewn all over.
I imagine that village still being collectively tipsy...
> the idea of Irishmen drinking themselves to death in a whisky flood is... something my wee dram of Irish blood is not qualified to comment on, but it only killed a dozen people.
Kind of shocked by this. Why did the indulge like that? One could go to any college party in the US and find enough alcohol to kill themselves and yet it rarely happens. Were there that many people in Dublin that were hopeless alcoholics at the time?
This has to be the most 'Irish' mishap in history ever, perhaps.
>People drank from the 6 inches (150 mm) deep river of whiskey that is said to have flowed as far as the Coombe.
Can't help but laugh hysterically whilst imagining this scene. Guess I found a brand new piece of trivia to share with my Irish friends and co-workers.
The Irish have been amongst the nicest and the most 'jolly' group of people I've known/worked with. Look very forward to visiting the island someday.
Yeah, maybe don’t. I’m Irish and I’m sick to death of the stereotype of Irish as jolly drunkards. I recently went to see “The Glass Menagerie” play and the biggest (maybe only) laugh of the night was when the mother expressed surprise that an individual was “Irish on both sides but not an alcoholic”. Ha fucking ha. If I could go to the theatre and not have my nationality be the butt of lazy racist jokes that would be great, thanks.
And this isn’t harmless. I’ve worked in tech all my life, mostly outside of Ireland, and the “jolly drunkard” is certainly not a helpful stereotype when you’re trying to be taken seriously and progress in your career, I’ve experienced the unpleasant labelling myself (despite I’m teetotal) and frequently seen it applied to other Irish people.
Wait until cannabis is legalized over there. Alcohol is such a crappy drug and is laden with so many problems. Not saying weed is better, but it's better than alcohol!
Irish also, but different perspective. (Have lived away for past 5 years & reflected from afar on our relationship to alcohol)
- Strongly dislike the cultural glorification of getting excessively drunk, but can't deny it's there - the stereotype is not based on fiction.
- Also strongly like the international reputation we have as being hospitable, fun, and friendly (as evidenced by the comment above), which is essentially a positive stereotype.
- In my experience when meeting new people, acknowledgement-that-the-Irish-are-drinkers (in a non-antagonistic way) is not in itself harmful, and can often be a good ice breaker and rapport builder. As in, the stereotype itself is not the harmful part. Most people I've encountered tend not to make negative assumptions, are smart enough to reason about group vs individual behaviour, and give the benefit-of-the-doubt, and those who don't have a being-an-asshole problem, not a infected-by-a-stereotype problem.
- My reading of the comment above was that the spirit was non-asshole-y.
Irish also, twelve years to the day I've been living abroad.
I'm not really interested in "drinking", I've more a European approach to it, enjoying a relaxed pint or a glass of wine etc.
I 100% agree with you though, part of the Irish culture people look to experience is the good times around a few pints and some traditional music, with the reward of a hangover in the morning to mark it as a successful night.
The few negative things I've ever experienced were off hand comments about the famine, and some nonsense about the North of Ireland.
Maybe, but maybe rapport based on “I don’t know you but I’ve heard your kind are a harmless lot who are always up for a drinking party after work”, is useful in a very limited set of circumstances, such as meeting a new team of peers, maybe. I’d still argue not, since the point of rapport building is to get to know the person in front of you, not how well they fit your preconception / stereotype.
In a large majority of situations in my experience, like being a senior manager of a new team, the CEO of a company meeting clients or negotiating with vendors and partners, it’s utterly irrelevant at best.
Also, the fact that Ireland has a major, major alcohol problem is no justification for the stereotype; so do many northern hemisphere countries. London had its Gin Crisis of the 18th century, with huge death toll and virtual breakdown of society, and the UK still has astronomical alcohol consumption, but they don’t get labelled the same way as the Irish
> the UK still has astronomical alcohol consumption, but they don’t get labelled the same way as the Irish
It shows how sticky stereotypes are and how they allow people to point at others without really thinking about themselves. I've got an example too. Within the UK Scotland gets a bad rap for being a nation of overweight people who eat deep fried food every other meal, when in reality the rate of obesity within the country are within a couple of percentage points (something like 27.5% in Scotland, 25% in England). I have literally had overweight English people trying to crack wise with me (Scottish, 83kg/190cm - basically in shape) about Scottish people being fat which is kinda funny. I thought it would be a bit rude to turn it round on them - there's a line between banter and direct insults after all :D
Ireland gets it a bit worse though. So many people love to try to mirror the accent or joke about the potato famine or the troubles (not excluding Scotland from this, this stuff occurs across the English speaking world) wee bit edgy for my liking.
Yes, people “doing” the stage-Irish accent in response to an Irish person speaking in a relatively neutral accent is incredibly common, I just don’t get how people don’t realise what they’re doing- and I know for fact that many times it’s meant in a friendly, almost affectionate way, which boggles my mind even more, and then of course there are times when it’s intended to irk and offend but the person doing it hides behind the “banter” and thinks they won’t get called out for it.
>the UK still has astronomical alcohol consumption, but they don’t get labelled the same way as the Irish
To be fair we certainly do have a reputation for drunkenness and general loutishness in parts of the Continent, apparently in anywhere with cheap holiday resorts the UK has a bad name.
Looking at the cited source text for this quote, the Wikipedia rewrite seems to take some licence, and the original source itself cited "folk memory", likely itself coloured by stereotypes at the time (a time when Ireland was still under British rule & the population thereof still derided by most academics/ writers, who were by-and-large not Irish) and from an American perspective (the paper is a University of California Press/London publication) Irish immigration was at its highest (with all the accompanying societal prejudices that entails).
Needless to say, this probably happened, but I'd take the specific details of the events described with liberal handfuls of salt.
> Guess I found a brand new piece of trivia to share with my Irish friends and co-workers.
I really wouldn't. They'll probably laugh politely, we're very used to this. But this won't endear you.
> None of the fatalities suffered during the fire were due to smoke inhalation, burns, or any other form of direct contact with the fire itself; all of them were attributed to alcohol poisoning.
As an Irish person myself I've always felt the stereotype was a little overblown.. It seems I'm completely wrong. We will literally drink until we die if there is a literal river of whiskey.
> During the evacuation many people gathered by the streams of whiskey, filling any vessel at hand with the substance. “Caps, porringers, and other vessels" were all gathered to lap up the burning liquid, resulting in 24 hospitalisations due to alcohol poisoning and 13 subsequent fatalities.
Whisky from the barrel is considerably stronger than the stuff that’s bottled (which is diluted). Add to that the shorter drinking period too (the urgency of drinking it while the river is still flowing). So I can fully believe people literally drank themselves to death. In fact I’d be surprised if the same fatalities didn’t occur in most cities had they encountered this kind of scenario too.
In the entire UK, 8,974 deaths attributed directly to alcohol in the whole year of 2020 (18.6% higher than in 2019). Most are not acute "drinking yourself to death" but rather alcohol-related liver disease. Scotland and Northern Ireland fare worse than the other countries.
For London specifically, in 2020 it was ~800 deaths, or about 2.2 per day on average.
For what it's worth I don't think an incident like that would have played out any differently if it had occurred in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester or London.
Saying a river of whiskey sounds interesting but it was more likely that they drank pure alcohol or it was simply contaminated from the journey through the city.
I wonder if there's a definition of a non-water fluid in this context.
Would zero-calories lightly flavored seltzer count? Most people probably consider that water... But presumably hard seltzer would definitely count, as would Pepsi Max. So maybe it's a combination of factors like energy content, flavor, aroma, color, etc.
Good question actually, after all even whisk(e)y usually contains > 50% water (not sure about 19th century whiskey though). I would say: as long as it can be identified (by smell, taste or color) as non-water, it is a non-water flood. Or, better still, you could go by the source: if the flood is caused by rain, melting snow, a river, a dam failure etc. etc., it's a water flood, if it's a failed fruit juice tank, it's a non-water flood :)
No, that effect can affect the strength in both directions, and it's not the reason for the higher ABV in "cask strength" whisky.
After distillation the whisky is at "still strength" (typically ~70% ABV) and diluted to "cask strength" before maturation. Then after that, it's usually diluted further for bottling.
This makes me think about a pipeline leakage somewhere in South-America a couple of years ago. People flocked with vessels of all sorts to fill them up, until the leakage ignited and exploded at some point incinerating the people... there are some horrific videos of the said event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlahuelilpan_pipeline_explosio...
There's a PG version at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwood_%26_Company_shipping_... – ‘Waverley Avenue [was] coated in butter and chocolate. […] an ocean of fudge ... flooding the street ... like lava, sufficiently deep to float a rowboat for two blocks along Flushing Avenue. The flood attracted "a thousand and one" local children, keen to taste the mixture. The police initially made no attempt to stop them but around an hour after their arrival truant officers began collecting the children to take them to their schools.’
107 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadThat would make sure nobody alive would understand it.
Wikipedia has consistent style rules around usage/conversion of currencies[1][2], so yes your edit would probably be swiftly reverted if it didn't follow those.
I'm not really sure why you're using such a conspiratorial tone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Date...
[2] (From above page) "For obsolete currencies, provide an equivalent (formatted as a conversion) if possible, in the modern replacement currency (e.g. decimal pounds for historical pre-decimal pounds-and-shillings), or a US-dollar equivalent where there is no modern equivalent."
The Pound of today is pretty much a different currency to the 19th century
Utter horseshite, that's like saying a Canadian along the border would be clueless as to CAD-USD conversion rates. The UK is our next door neighbour. It's common enough to buy goods up north, online from the UK, and to travel there. We can generally do a rough conversion in our heads; the same goes for USD nowadays due to the prevalence of online shopping (and the fact that its now at near parity with EUR helps).
> The Pound of today is pretty much a different currency to the 19th century
True of any currency. You may as well argue that any measurement in an inflation adjusted currency is nonsense if you're going to go down that route.
Given that the Sterling was in use then and now, I'd argue that the most meaningful way to calculate value would be to adjust the value for the inflation of Pounds Sterling. That can then be converted as appropriate to euros for convenience (as it seems to have been in the first paragraph of this article).
I for one can't be bothered to read the sources and will just take in the factoid as-is and move on.
From the article:
None of the fatalities suffered during the fire were due to smoke inhalation, burns, or any other form of direct contact with the fire itself; all of them were attributed to alcohol poisoning.
What a way to go.
Hogsheads sound like a fictional unit of measure made up to mock the imperial system.
Fun fact: hogsheads are abbreviated as hhds :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_measurements
The Irish for hogshead and barrel can be found at https://www.focloir.ie
Perhaps the Gaelic word for barrel somehow came from the English measurement hogshead, but more likely that it was spoken Gaelic for barrel overheard and adopted by English speaking stevedores.
The other problem is that there is no known Irish etymology for either tocsaid or oigiséad, or Malcolm McLennan would have included it in his faclair, but there is a plausible English one. Other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish) have variants of ox-head. Whether it originated in one of those languages or in English is disputed.
The metric system is unintuitive but standardized.
The imperial system is intuitive but (traditionally) non-standardized.
A standardized but unintuitive system is useful in modern science and engineering, where reliability and precision are of utmost importance.
An intuitive but non-standardized system is useful for day-to-day communication and conceptualization, where a standard deviation away from the average of the unit's reference does not have a meaningful effect.
Before standardization, many old units of measurement could be immediately related to everyday things, making conceptualization simple and intuitive.
Examples:
Imperial pound of mass: A pound of wheat berries is more or less how many wheatberries I can fit in my hand. I deal with wheat berries and my hands every single day - I can quite concretely conceptualize a pound and more or less relate that pound (of wheat berries) to other things: a pound of meat, a pound of wool, etc.
Imperial acre: An acre is more or less the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day. In our old little village, oxen and farm fields are something we observe every single day, and so an acre is conceptually intuitive to us.
Ancient cubit: This is more or less the length of my forearm, which again serves as a very useful reference point for measuring and conceptualizing things. Say I go to build a cabinet. I may measure in cubits. Then, when I go to cut lumber, I just measure it with my forearm, cut, and that's it.
Imperial hogshead: I speculate this barrel size is more or less either the size of an ox's head, or can tightly fit one inside it. Again, this is an animal I might observe daily, making conceptualization simple.
Note that a standard deviation of the size of an average man's hand or forearm, or of the amount of land a given pair of oxen can plow on a given day, does not have a meaningful impact on how I use and relate these units of measurement to everyday life - I'm not precision engineering a space telescope here. I'm just buying wheat berries, plowing fields, and building cabinets.
Contrast these origins with metric's.
Metric meter: "one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris" - whoa get me outta here! I can't relate that to anything I encounter in my day-to-day life.
Metric gram: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water", or "the mass of one cubic 'one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris' of water"
Of course we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions.
This is why imperial is a more useful system for relaying measurements colloquially, for everyday life.
1. What is a "wheatberry"? 2. What is an "oxen"? 3. How long is "a day"?
What's completely balderdash about it? The definition of centimeter is accurate, so it cannot be the case that the post is completely balderdash? Like you've requested with my oxen and my days and my wheat berries, perhaps you could you also be more precise?
Again, the point is that you use these measurements in situations where micrometer-tier precision is unnecessary. You can hear "pound", immediately be able to conceptualize it, and then move on with your life, not waste all day haggling with the merchant over his wheat berries that happen to be 0.2mm shorter on average than what you typically might consider to be a wheat berry.
For one, many units are actually defined using relatable things like your example: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water". Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries (I literally had half a unit kilo weight in my hand an hour ago). Or celsius, 100 is boiling point of water and 0 is freezing point, which you will also encounter in your daily life (cooking and your fridge, at least approximately) and are easy to relate.
But more importantly, it doesn't matter. Most "personal" definitions are vague. My girlfriend is significantly shorter and a meter is way longer for here than for me, also her forearms are like two thirds of my forearm. Nobody knows how a meter is defined and I think many have forgotten how a gram or a kilo are defined, it's a scale you internalise. How to define them, that's up to the scientist. The day to day advantage is that it's so easy to calculate with these units and every single unit has the same concept behind it (from current to weight to acceleration).
Metric units can certainly be adapted to be fractionally relatable, though their origins are certainly not, as I mentioned:
>we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions.
The grandparent comment mentioned how nonsensical or absurd "hogshead" is as a unit of measurement, and the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural.
So, its an appeal to nature then? Somehow, I doubt it'd make a difference if meter was derived from the total lengths of bishops mitres at parish (everyone knows how tall those hats are - relatable!).
Units are only "intuitive" because that's what you've internalized - similar to how the the golden age of music was when one was a teenager or young adult.
>an appeal to nature then
No. It's an explanation that imperial & similar ancient measurement units were adopted with the goal of being simple and intuitive for people to quickly understand. This was accomplished by choosing immediately relatable reference points. In the case of a hogshead barrel, that reference point was the ox head.
A mile, that's 1000 paces, that's both simple to remember and intuitive.
A kilometer, that's 621.4 paces, that's neither simple to remember nor intuitive.
No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to, this is by definition of each unit in the system.
This "intuition" is not intrinsic, though, but is because of familiarity. If you've done track sports (or watched athletics), you can visualize 100m. If you've watched NFL, you can "intuit" 10 yards empirically - not because it equals to 30 feet and you look at your own feet. The same goes for 21"/27"/42"/60" (TVs).
The only scenario I can imagine where of human-relatibility would matter is when the unit is unknown to the listener, e.g. if someone introduced me to a carlength (or the notoriously unintuitive 'length of a football field'); however, this is now completely unnecessary with modern education and standardization
The origin of the measure is just lore, and counts for nothing; which is why being immersed into a system which you were previously unfamiliar with (metric or imperial) bestows the same "intuitiveness" - as anyone who joined the US army can tell you.
The argument that imperial units are somehow relatable as they are similar to naturally occurring things is a textbook appeal to nature.
Nobody who uses meters outside of setting the international standard or working in particle physics would have a working idea where they denoting meters in wavelengths of radioactive decay or hemisphere spanning fractions. They approximate it to something they can relate to just like you do. It's easy to skewer imperial units too with silly examples stories e.g. Fahrenheit.
Similarly just because it's convenient to me to think of (mile!) country roads, quarter sections, and acres from familiarity despite using metric elsewhere due to the grids from historical land allocations in Western Canada doesn't devalue other ways of measuring.
If you want to be rude, do it, but be direct about it and own it. Or rather, don't be rude. Please do not presume anything about the author of a comment nor attempt to make personal attacks against the author, as it's not only rude, it's irrelevant to the substance. I am not the substance of my comment, the origins and intuitiveness of units of measurement is the substance.
>Similarly just because it's convenient to me to think of (mile!) country roads, quarter sections, and acres from familiarity despite using metric elsewhere due to the grids from historical land allocations in Western Canada doesn't devalue other ways of measuring.
I agree.
Why then, haven't imperial analogs appeared for data storage?
"This hard drive is old, about 87 Shakespeare's"
"Oh, Twitter was ruined for me when they increased the character limit to a Poem"
"We are web-scale, we serve fourscore Libraries of congress worth of video per second"
Near twice that number died in the molasses flood in Boston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
The density of molasses is about 1.4 tonnes per cubic metre, 40% more dense than water, resulting in the molasses having a great deal of potential energy. The collapse translated this energy into a wave of molasses 25 ft (8 m) high at its peak, moving at 35 mph (56 km/h)... nearby buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 ft (60 to 90 cm)
"Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage …. Here and there struggled a form—whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was …. Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings—men and women—suffered likewise."
Just our luck, driving right into some festivities, we think. Then, minutes later, we find the origin of the beer - a truck has veered onto the road shoulder and toppled over, the locals helping themselves to the free beer strewn all over.
I imagine that village still being collectively tipsy...
1. Gas truck tips over. Usually with 0 fatalities
2. Locals go over to collect free gas
3. Truck explodes. 30+ fatalities
If there's an actual flood of heated alcohol, then you might get poisoning just from inhaling? It's hard to avoid breathing, really.
But imagine the cleanup.
Kind of shocked by this. Why did the indulge like that? One could go to any college party in the US and find enough alcohol to kill themselves and yet it rarely happens. Were there that many people in Dublin that were hopeless alcoholics at the time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1hvvTm85UY
>People drank from the 6 inches (150 mm) deep river of whiskey that is said to have flowed as far as the Coombe.
Can't help but laugh hysterically whilst imagining this scene. Guess I found a brand new piece of trivia to share with my Irish friends and co-workers.
The Irish have been amongst the nicest and the most 'jolly' group of people I've known/worked with. Look very forward to visiting the island someday.
And this isn’t harmless. I’ve worked in tech all my life, mostly outside of Ireland, and the “jolly drunkard” is certainly not a helpful stereotype when you’re trying to be taken seriously and progress in your career, I’ve experienced the unpleasant labelling myself (despite I’m teetotal) and frequently seen it applied to other Irish people.
- Strongly dislike the cultural glorification of getting excessively drunk, but can't deny it's there - the stereotype is not based on fiction. - Also strongly like the international reputation we have as being hospitable, fun, and friendly (as evidenced by the comment above), which is essentially a positive stereotype. - In my experience when meeting new people, acknowledgement-that-the-Irish-are-drinkers (in a non-antagonistic way) is not in itself harmful, and can often be a good ice breaker and rapport builder. As in, the stereotype itself is not the harmful part. Most people I've encountered tend not to make negative assumptions, are smart enough to reason about group vs individual behaviour, and give the benefit-of-the-doubt, and those who don't have a being-an-asshole problem, not a infected-by-a-stereotype problem. - My reading of the comment above was that the spirit was non-asshole-y.
Just my two cents
I 100% agree with you though, part of the Irish culture people look to experience is the good times around a few pints and some traditional music, with the reward of a hangover in the morning to mark it as a successful night.
The few negative things I've ever experienced were off hand comments about the famine, and some nonsense about the North of Ireland.
In a large majority of situations in my experience, like being a senior manager of a new team, the CEO of a company meeting clients or negotiating with vendors and partners, it’s utterly irrelevant at best.
Also, the fact that Ireland has a major, major alcohol problem is no justification for the stereotype; so do many northern hemisphere countries. London had its Gin Crisis of the 18th century, with huge death toll and virtual breakdown of society, and the UK still has astronomical alcohol consumption, but they don’t get labelled the same way as the Irish
It shows how sticky stereotypes are and how they allow people to point at others without really thinking about themselves. I've got an example too. Within the UK Scotland gets a bad rap for being a nation of overweight people who eat deep fried food every other meal, when in reality the rate of obesity within the country are within a couple of percentage points (something like 27.5% in Scotland, 25% in England). I have literally had overweight English people trying to crack wise with me (Scottish, 83kg/190cm - basically in shape) about Scottish people being fat which is kinda funny. I thought it would be a bit rude to turn it round on them - there's a line between banter and direct insults after all :D
Ireland gets it a bit worse though. So many people love to try to mirror the accent or joke about the potato famine or the troubles (not excluding Scotland from this, this stuff occurs across the English speaking world) wee bit edgy for my liking.
To be fair we certainly do have a reputation for drunkenness and general loutishness in parts of the Continent, apparently in anywhere with cheap holiday resorts the UK has a bad name.
Needless to say, this probably happened, but I'd take the specific details of the events described with liberal handfuls of salt.
> Guess I found a brand new piece of trivia to share with my Irish friends and co-workers.
I really wouldn't. They'll probably laugh politely, we're very used to this. But this won't endear you.
As an Irish person myself I've always felt the stereotype was a little overblown.. It seems I'm completely wrong. We will literally drink until we die if there is a literal river of whiskey.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
That's a lot of whisky
> During the evacuation many people gathered by the streams of whiskey, filling any vessel at hand with the substance. “Caps, porringers, and other vessels" were all gathered to lap up the burning liquid, resulting in 24 hospitalisations due to alcohol poisoning and 13 subsequent fatalities.
I doubt any other city would do better. London sure as hell wouldn't.
For London specifically, in 2020 it was ~800 deaths, or about 2.2 per day on average.
Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
The most recent of which being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_fruit_juice_flood from 2017 - thankfully no victims.
Would zero-calories lightly flavored seltzer count? Most people probably consider that water... But presumably hard seltzer would definitely count, as would Pepsi Max. So maybe it's a combination of factors like energy content, flavor, aroma, color, etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel#Angels'_share
After distillation the whisky is at "still strength" (typically ~70% ABV) and diluted to "cask strength" before maturation. Then after that, it's usually diluted further for bottling.
> bounded by Flushing Avenue on the north, Park Avenue on the south, Waverley Avenue on the west and Washington Avenue on the east
Found it. It's by the Brooklyn Navy Yards: https://goo.gl/maps/uat3hq47dvV9tQaTA
in fact, the building still exists,
from wikipedia "Front of main plant, 1918": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Industri...
it's on the Washington and Park corner: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6960688,-73.9674585,3a,75y,3...
Surprising. But not surprising.
Well, there goes my morning.
I have a hard time picturing large numbers, so I use railway tanker cars the way some people use bananas for scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vARd-Vnwbo