Novocastrian

Oh, do stop going on with this tedious and pretentious rant. I suppose your local store shows prices not only in pounds, but in shillings and pence too?

What's more, in your IT thingy life, would you like to program in a system which had random multipliers between increasing categories?

OK, with that hint, here's a puzzle for you...

Series:

16 17 18 22 24 31 100 ? ?

fill in the next two numbers.

If you can do that I'll renounce metric.

LHK

454 g = 1 lb
290 g = 0.64 lb
http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/weight

But I agree with you. The idea is always to confuse customers. Something which is inbred in metrical-worshipers. I for one, charge for my translations not by the word, but by 0.732 word... My two ounces of good sense.

LHK

Do you wanna be my friend?

Alberta_Rose

A Canadian bemused me the other day by bemoaning the fact that prices were for 454g, and she couldn't understand <why couldn't they just use the "metric pound", ie 500g> ????

Uh?!!!!!

LHK

Maybe that's the way to go to promote the metric system there!

Actually, we do have some imports that do not come in round gram figures. It's always very weird to see them as over 90% of the produce you find in the grocery stores are usally in round figures: 100g, 200g, 250g, 500g, 1kg, etc.
Chocolate bars use to come in 200g. Bloody manufacturers changed that to 190g and even 180g bars! Obviously, prices remained the same. :curse:

Same applies to beverages, but that's another story...

Calgal

A man ran out of the house, he jumped over a five bar gate, passed three horse chestnut trees, was chased by a black bull as three spotted cows looked on, and two sheep ate freshly mown grass; what colour were his socks?

Hope that helps!

(I should add that this is my hubbies response, not mine, after several glasses of wine )

LHK

Blue?

Butch Cassidy

Brown when he'd finished I imagine.

Steve_P

That's my guess too, but I'll bet they were white when he started.

LHK

Guess we'll have to wait till he washes them.

Calgal

Well...duh! RED, of course

dbd33

No, they use dollars here. The local store, (Loblaws at Vic Park and Gerrard) has genetically mutilated turbot for $7.99 a pound this week. I make that about $60.60 for 290grams though I don't know that 290grams is the metric unit of fish used in Toronto.

dbd33

You mean like milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days and years? Computers can deal with that.

They could deal with metric in the same way, the programmer chooses some standard unit, say the pound, and converts all the metric measures to it. It keeps a unit of measure for display which can be as odd as you like (290grams, 454grams, whatever) and translates the internal measure at the time of display. The key is that everything internal to the machine is best kept in one unit and the metric units are only used when dealing with people.

Since the internal tracking is seperate from the "presentation layer" the display can be quite sophisticated, for example, if Loblaws is selling fish for $9.99/lb the computer at a metric competitior can automatically adjust the size of the metric unit used for the sale of fish so as to price the fish at $9.50; the consumer is not likely to notice that the grams offered only equal 3/4 of a pound. I assume this is how they came up with 290grams and that, week by week, they juggle the number of grams. You can't do this with proper measures, of course, a consumer is not going to stand for being offered fish in units of "a bit less than five eigths of a pound" or any such nonsense, they only put up with it in metric because the standard units are so awkward; once you accept that 454 is a sensible base unit (as in metric butter) you accept anything.

Novocastrian

To paraphrase something my old granny used to say, "dbd my lad, if you push your tongue any further into your cheek like that, it'll get stuck there"

Pax vobiscum.

Novo.

Novocastrian

dbd, have you tried this puzzle yet? It's great way to win beers etc from folk who think they're good at this sort of thing. The last time I used it was at a barbeque party where there were about a half dozen (note non-metric metric) hot shot Romanian IT professionals mostly working for IBM. None of them could solve it and I won two bottles of single malt and pair of Cuban cigars.

Give it a go, but if you can't solve it just ask...I'm sure you couild use the single malt.