blessings, ennumerated, personal, for the use of

[freckles_and_doubt]

Hey! When did it get to be May, all suddenly? Surely there are rules about that sort of thing?

I am, sudden unauthorised departure of April notwithstanding, pleased to report the following:

• Rain. Winter is apparently looming, in a way that makes me deeply happy. I had to dash to the library this morning in a light drizzle that wantonly became a downpour, as a result of which I look like a damp English sheepdog. (Although I hope I don't smell the same).
• Indecent triumph over the Powers of Darkness that reside on my computer. It is a relief to note that the random turning-itself-on trope wasn't, in fact, me sleepwalking or losing time to alien abduction of my hard-drive, but a mutant BIOS setting, which I have subsequently located and disabled all on my lonesome except for the power of Google. *flexes little, tiny geek muscle*. I'm also more or less caught up on all the missing programs and settings from the hard drive swop. Mutter.
• A couple of this batch of essays which have turned out to be astonishingly literate, which means I won't actually be forced to club to death both my classes in the interests of the human gene pool.
• Lost! It's cool! I like the way it's filmed, all fragmented, like. Although I'd be happier if the graphics card in this new hard drive didn't leave a regular grid of tiny, high-relief pimples all over the screen. That'll teach me to encourage evil bootlegs.
• Jo's game tonight, after many weeks of deprivation. I'm missing being monosyllabically obnoxious.

Comments

[mcmayhem.livejournal.com]

Is that so? I've heard most measurements of height in Western European countries expressed in centimeters, but it could well be that those were isolated incidents. It isn't as though I spend much time at the Department of Public Height Measurement in Wales, after all.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Dunno... I've just never heard anyone described as 1.77m tall. Mind you, I guess I should have visited more than 4 ostensibly metric countries before making that statement, eh?

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

I do, all the time. In the last many years, whenever I've had to give my height, to a doctor, say, or for some medical insurance thing, they've wanted it in cm. I only know it in feet and inches, so they always look long suffering and say they'll convert it later. And that *awful* body mass index thing (spit, spit spit!) requires m and cm.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Do you think that it's significant that both of the circumstances you cite involve an instrumental relationship with height, in a context where the units are significant because they are going to be plugged into charts and/or equations?

I ask because I would say that the metric tendency has totally won out in such fields, while persisting in more sloppy everyday talk. For example: even in the imperial-measurement holdout that is the US, the armed forces have spoken in kilometers and millimeters since the 60s at least, because calculations need to be made. But in the wider society, where height-depiction needs only to be fairly visualizable to the common folk, the imperial standard seems to persist.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

You might be right there, it sounds likely. I'm not sure what the insurance companies do with the information, but they probably plug it into some machine that cranks out my chances of living and dying in the next little while.

I actually find the inch a useful measure. It has more meaning in everyday life, sometimes, than the tiny cm.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

cf. Craig and Craig, 'Aesthetic and Instrumentality: Suboptimal Unit Choice and the Processes of Mathematical Cognition,' Journal of LJ Conversations that Go Wrong, Spring 2007, pp 308-332

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

You're fantastic :D Stacey as well. Both of you can come up with such magnificent academic jargonese. I plod along using my everyday langauge and getting papers rejected by journals. I must learn to obfusticate!

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

PS: You should totally try out the DPHM. They have a great emplloyees' llounge.

[herne-kzn.livejournal.com]

I've heard most measurements of height in Western European countries expressed in centimeters
Yes but only on the *gasp in horror* Continent