Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • June 10, 2016 11:20 AM

@ Lambert,

Take away all the tissues and soap at the office when colds are going around, while insisting contagious employees come in to work.

Scott Adams of Bilbert fame noted that such methords were the only legal way “To use Weapons of Mass Destruction” against yot “Cow orkers”…

Clive Robinson • November 6, 2016 3:43 PM

@ Wael,

You are showing your age again,

Have a feeling it was written by an English person. Since when did the US use centimeters as a unit of length?

Or in this case the lack of it.

Back in 44 it was only some of the Continental Europeans that used centimeters, the English along with their old colonies –including the US– still used “Imperial Measurements”.

The “English” did not “decimalise” bit by bit until the 1970’s and later.

In fact due to SI Units the US started to use decimal measurments in greater numbers than the English, prior to the English and still do for that matter.

Aarguably the switch from the old Pounds Shillings and Pence (LSD not an English invention) to decimal currancy has caused quite a bit of harm to British minds.

Because having to think in 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1/12 1/20 1/40 1/80 and 1/240 and the various coin sizes including farthings, ha’pennies, pennies, thru’penny bits, tanners, shillings, two bobs, half crowns, crowns and ten bob notes to make change etc made teaching “clock mathmatics” oh so much easier. And don’t get me started on rods, poles, perches, chains, fathoms, cables and all sorts of other measurments like quarts, firkins, tunns and other less known measures such as barlycorns (still used for shoes) and grains as well as the difference between Imperial and Troy ounces.

Oh and the one measure of all to slay all the measures of man through their stomachs, by their wives and cooks. The “egg” which is used for volume, mass and length measures in the kitchen, before man had even come up with the idea of using the length of a kings foot or similar (even if he was a giant of a man).

If you look up a sponge recipe you get akward sounding measurments. But if I said “the weight of four eggs in butter flour and sugar” it would make more sense, especially as the old style kitchen weighing machine “The scales” frequently had no weights to hand. You would put four eggs in one side and weigh the flour, tip that in a bowl, likewise the sugar and then the butter in another, cream the butter and sugar, crack in and mix the eggs one by one untill smoth, finally sifting in the flour and folding in so there are no lumps. Pour the mixture into well buttered four egg length diameter by two egg width high cake tin and bake…

If you were poor you could avoid using butter and eggs by a basic bread dough of four egg weight of strong flour a pitch of salt an egg size piece of levened (sour) dough and an egg weight of the kidney fat (lard) from a well fattened pig and around six egg weights of warm water. When kneeded and proved you then add two egg weights of soaked dried mixed fruits and a further four egg weights of lard and sugar into a paste which you then fold into the dough as part of the knock back, put in a well floured tin and allow to rise befor cooking to make a lardy cake or similar (which would give you two or three times the keeping time of butter). Similar tea breads and cakes can be made this way by varying the egg weights of the ingredients and the type of liquid (tea, milk, malt beer, and other infusions of what we would now call herb / berry / flower teas).