http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=30255&dict=CALD

footage:
noun [U]
(a piece of) film especially one showing an event

in spanish, metraje (in french, probably metrage?) as related to metro (metre in shakespeare´s mother´s tongue)

I´d rather not have the americans nor british even try to use international measuring units... they´d have to change the dictionaries too!!!

regards from St. Carles, Il USA, where corporate brainwashing happens so often.

We Brits already use international units, at least for weight and volume, all be it with some hostility.

Napoleon only chanpioned the metric cause to make himself sound taller.

right, but still using pints and ounces (?) and stones (at least the stones in Ireland) for volume and weight!
please correct me if i am wrong.

regards.

Wrong.

We now use kilos and litres.

We still use feet, inches, miles and so on, but quite a lot of items are now sold in meters, and Imperial units are dying out.

Quite a lot of us oldsters still have to convert ius to Imperial to make any sense of them. Luckily our age group are pretty good at mental arithmetic because there were no calculators way back then!

quote:

Originally posted by gil:
Wrong.

We now use kilos and litres.

We still use feet, inches, miles and so on, but quite a lot of items are now sold in meters, and Imperial units are dying out.

Quite a lot of us oldsters still have to convert ius to Imperial to make any sense of them. Luckily our age group are pretty good at mental arithmetic because there were no calculators way back then!

i still drank pints of ale in december
and about arithmetics, you´d better not swtitch to euros!!! i still have problems when multiplying by 166,386 pesetas!!!

I'm a proponent of the Imperial system for the simple reason that the units of measurement usually correspond to something in the real world, as opposed to the metric system which is rather arbitrary. An inch is (roughly) the length of the last knuckle of my thumb; a foot is (approximately) the length of my forearm, wrist to elbow; a yard is (about) the distance from my fingertips to my nose when I stretch my arm straight out from my shoulder. Makes it a bit easier when roughing out measurement in that world we call RL.

But what the fuck is a meter? A division of half the circumference of the earth, measured from a pole to the equator, which distance in the real world is variable depending on where you measure, so Nappy's scientists had to fudge a ton of figures anyway. No good to me when I'm trying to buy lumber or decide how long of a garden hose I'll need.

Oh metrics correspond to real stuff too. For example, a meter is equal to the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. A second is the duration of exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at a temperature of 0 K. And a degree of temperature is the fraction 1/273.16 (exactly) of the thermodynamic temperature at the triple point of water.

I use that first one in particular a lot; my internal chronogravitron cycles 300 million times per second, making the measurement easy.

(On the other hand, the way all the derived units (Joules, Watts, etc.) cancel make such calcualtions much easier.)

Wow! A gil post! Good to see you, man.

The point being that the metric system is supposed to be a scientific system of measurement, which is why the units relate to each other and are periodically adjusted to be based on constants we can measure to insane accuracy. Scientists need to be insanely accurate in a systematic way.

Accuracy, schmaccuracy.

quote:

Originally posted by anarchocyclist:
I'm a proponent of the Imperial system for the simple reason that the units of measurement usually correspond to something in the real world, as opposed to the metric system which is rather arbitrary. An inch is (roughly) the length of the last knuckle of my thumb; a foot is (approximately) the length of my forearm, wrist to elbow; a yard is (about) the distance from my fingertips to my nose when I stretch my arm straight out from my shoulder. Makes it a bit easier when roughing out measurement in that world we call RL.

But what the fuck is a meter? A division of half the circumference of the earth, measured from a pole to the equator, which distance in the real world is variable depending on where you measure, so Nappy's scientists had to fudge a ton of figures anyway. No good to me when I'm trying to buy lumber or decide how long of a garden hose I'll need.

i kind of agree with you there :P (thanks for the illustrative post, now i know where measures like yard come from)

but, i cannot help to find funny a foot is not a foot´s lenght but the forearm's length.

AND you have to agreee Farenheit degrees suck! say water freezes at 0, boils at 100, sounds fare more reasonable?

regards from (the not as cold as Illinois) Spain, where still corporate brainwash happens too often (almost as often as in Illinois).

quote:

but, i cannot help to find funny a foot is not a foot´s lenght but the forearm's length.

It's also roughly the average length of a grown man's foot, which is where the name comes from, I'm sure. But I used forearm length because it's usually a bit more convenient than my foot for measurement purposes.

quote:

AND you have to agreee Farenheit degrees suck! say water freezes at 0, boils at 100, sounds fare more reasonable?

I agree that 0 and 100 seem more logical, but only 100 gradations between freezing and boiling seems a little inaccurate. I'd rather have 188, even if 32F and 220F seem arbitrary.

quote:

regards from (the not as cold as Illinois) Spain, where still corporate brainwash happens too often (almost as often as in Illinois).

You've travelled from Illinois to Spain since your last post?

quote:

Originally posted by anarchocyclist:
You've travelled from Illinois to Spain since your last post?

erm... no. I joined the forum and did a few posts while in St. Charles Illinois (1 hour drive west from Chicago) where i bought the book. Came back to Spain a week later, and been here since the 28th february.

AND, definitely Cayce would go mental (more) if she combined the normal soul-less jetlag, with a 2 y.o. kid getting his last 2 teeth (imagine the nights!), and a work as sysadmin and consultant for a big corporation for over 10 hours (imagine the days!) :P

regards!

quote:

I'm a proponent of the Imperial system for the simple reason that the units of measurement usually correspond to something in the real world, as opposed to the metric system which is rather arbitrary.

Contrary to a lot of popular international opinion the real world is where us metric/imperial mongrel Brits are happiest. A pint always seems to me to be about a comfortable stomach-full. Try drinking a litre.

We're going about this in a typically British way and assimilating the new stuff into our way of life without actually changing much that we really care about . I buy petrol by the litre but the road signs tell me the distance in miles. I bought a four pint carton of milk today labelled '2.27 litres' - a memorable little metric number. Strangely though UHT milk is only sold by the litre. I buy cheese by the gramme in the supermarket but a person's weight is habitually reported in stones.

The old and the new live quite happily next door to each other a bit like way that invader words have expanded the English language. Every couple of centuries a new language would march (or sail) in expecting to take over and would somehow end up just getting absorbed. The new words didn't quite rub out the old, they just shifted to one side a little to accommodate them.

You can 'start' (old English) 'initiate' (Latin) or 'commence' (French) for example. The thing above your head is either the sky (old Norse) or the loft (loft is the Friesian word for sky). Something is 'tiny' (old English) or 'minuscule' (Latin). Appel was the old English for 'fruit' - it's now retreated to a specific but hasn't died. The thesaurus is just the fossil record of invasion.

It all goes into the cultural soup and what emerges is stuff like that MIA vid linked from the blog.

quote:

The thesaurus is just the fossil record of invasion.

As is the literature and culture itself: Caesarian models of government and Christianity went North with the Romans, weird Nordic stuff jumped the North Sea with the Saxons, all that courtly Romantic Arthurian poetry with the Normans.

Great post, Blakkandekka. I love etymology.

quote:

Originally posted by Blakkandekka:

Contrary to a lot of popular international opinion the real world is where us metric/imperial mongrel Brits are happiest. A pint always seems to me to be about a comfortable stomach-full. Try drinking a litre.

Thanks a lot for the post. I do love the ethimology too (specially since my mother tongue is derived from latin, and enjoy seeing i can pretend i speak an educated english, when i´m actually doing quite straight-forward translations from Spanish into English )

regards!

ps: i feel far more comfortable after two pints of beer, which is like ONE litre, so i propose "litre" as the "real world" measure :P

What if I'd rather have a gallon? Probably a separate issue, then.

quote:

i feel far more comfortable after two pints of beer, which is like ONE litre, so i propose "litre" as the "real world" measure :P

That's a dangerous minimum.

I love the sound of Spanish and have made more than one attempt to learn it over the years pero hablo español como un entrenadoro alemán del futbol. Spanish spelling is much easier though.

quote:

Originally posted by Blakkandekka:


I love the sound of Spanish and have made more than one attempt to learn it over the years pero hablo español como un entrenadoro alemán del futbol. Spanish spelling is much easier though.

yes the "entrenadoro" is really funny sign (in spanish you´d say entrenador, without the o to mean masculine :P)) spanish is indeed easy to spell and read. I took german like 15 years ago... alles vergessen, except the "papichulo klingeltone, rufen sie an jetz" i constantly see in MTV2!!!
kind regards.

I'm writing from Brasil (problably warmer than both Illinois and Spain). We have Portuguese as native language, also derived from Latin, and yet I can't really learn Spanish! I read Spanish texts in college whenever I need to,
and stuff like that, but am unable to write a simple note using that. It's quite frustating.

When it comes to measuring units, though, international units are quite simple to use, for they are based on decimal counting. Imperial units, on the other hand, don't hold such relations.
I mean, I use lots of foreign equipment in my work, and most of them come with specifications in imperial units. The conversion of these especifications can take quite a lot. It's just not that convenient.

And as Colin mentioned, metric system is meant to be scientifically accurate. That's more important (for some people, anyway) than ease of use.

But i guess that's not that important in routine use, so you Brittish better take some 'mental conversion' lessons from your oldsters (Gil?) 'cause you'll live with both systems for a long time...