NeoTar

I think in part it's because its harder to transfer money between banks in the US - no equivalent of the faster-payments-scheme which allows a free transfer within a few minutes in the UK. Cheques do provide a layer of universal compatibility.

I think its also the reason behind the success of Venmo (and earlier PayPal) to allow for free/very low-cost money transmission.

There UK still used miles per hour for speed limits, and I’ve debated how we may change with my partner.

I think the battle here is now lost - if you want to use km/h a sufficiently advanced modern car will show you the current speed limit and convert from imperial to metric for you. In the ten-to-twenty years a full change would take to complete we’ll proabably have cars which are close to self driving, so who cares what value they use for speed limits?

But for everything else - please do look to the UK as an example. We converted in the 1970s and it’s still a bit messy today, but it’s mostly worked.

Beer at a pub/bar is mostly sold in pints, but to sell in litres is legal. Bottles of beer are often 330 or 500 ml. Wine is sold in millilitres, as are spirits.

Basic milk is in pint sized containers (sizes in litres are shown). ‘Fancy’ milk is often sold directly in litres.

You get the occasional container which is a weird size - like golden syrup is still sold in a 454g (1 lb) container.

Ovens can be dual calibrated, and English language recipes often already will give both metric and imperial units for readers in the UK, AU, NZ, CA, etc.

When cooking - if I find an American recipe with unconverted values I will just use Google (“what’s 6oz in grams?’), etc. In fact a bigger problem for me is that American recipes tend to use volumetric units (e.g. 4 cups of flour) where I’m used to weight (e.g. 500g of sugar).

But an average one cent coin is involved in more than a single transaction - if you amortise the cost of the coin over every transaction it is involved in, then it’s much less than one cent.

If the cost of metals in a coin is more than its value, you do have a point.

> making merchants lose ~3% per transaction

Cash also has costs - mistakes in making change, forgeries, time to count/cash up, time to visit banks for cash deposit and/or getting change, theft - it’s been estimated that these can easily exceed any costs of handling credit/debit cards.

It happens in Europe where we have inclusive pricing in almost all, if not every nation.

(apart from very rare circumstances like bottle deposit costs (which are refundable) not being included)

That’s my point – they are not. Your previous comment implied to me a belief that any attempt to draw inference from past events was doomed to failure!

Each circumstance is different. Sometimes the past is a good guide to the future – even for the notoriously unpredictable British weather apparently you can get a seventy percent success rate (by some measure) by predicting that tomorrows weather will be the same as todays. Sometimes it is not - the history of an ideal roulette wheel should offer no insights into future numbers.

The key is of course to act in accordance with the probability, risk and reward.

Let’s just throw away all past experience then?

It’s a mistake to assume that there will be 100% correlation between the past and future, but it’s probably as bad of a mistake to assume 0% correlation. (Obviously dependant on exactly what you are looking at).

One very ,into point which I would add – if initials are important to your use–case, allow people to specify them. A previous company used initials as identification in our bug tool, and I always resented being (something like) AC1 when my full initials (ABC) were available.

I mostly agree, just one needs to be careful, especially when dealing with people whose first language may not be English, when asking these more complicated questions since they may be misunderstood. I like the final example a lot.

It's normalising for different things.

If you normalise for the the same ratio of cement / water / gravel / sand then sharp-sand (crushed rocks) is stronger.

If you normalise for workability (i.e. the concrete flows and can be worked easily) you need to add additional water to sharp-sand, which means that the smooth-sand (e.g. river-rocks) end up stronger.

The BBC Maths and Statistics programme 'More or Less' has coined a term for statistics like this - 'Zombie Statistics'. An initial, often misquoted fact, which is useful as a soundbite and gets repeated over and over and over again, despite multiple debunkings.

I'm less positive; when badly implemented it can mean that it's hard to get the bottle cap correctly attached - I had a bottle of sparkling water which literally went flat within a couple of hours recently because I reattached the bottle cap incorrectly.

But in the grand scheme of things it's fine. Not something I'd especially fight to implement, but also not something I object to.

It sounds similar to how animal/plant species often work.

A species will specialise for a niche, and outcompete a generalist. But when conditions change, the generalist can adapt and the specialist suffers.

This feel like a model which should benefit when the limit for LEGO ideas is increased from 3000 to 5000 pieces.

https://brickset.com/article/113876/lego-ideas-maximum-part-...

Interesting - if any computer program can be rewritten in the form of a Collatz-like function, is it at all surprising that the BB problems appear in this form?

Well, also knowledge of the distances between the objects involved (at least the Earth and Jupiter), which in turn depended on a series of further investigations.

Which is not to denigrate the achievement, but if I were to drop you on an alien world with only a telescope and an accurate time keeper, you're not going to be able to recreate it.

(Oh, and in case it’s unclear, in this case by LEGO pieces I mean all of LEGO/DUPLO/Technic).

I can’t comment in the specific of this case, but in general adult LEGO builders will acquire pieces through a range of methods - the biggest being bricklink - a website where independent sellers sell individual pieces, often which they’ve ‘parted out’ retail sets to acquire.

LEGO has a similar service (‘pick-a-brick’), or in LEGO stores there is a ‘brick wall’ where you can pick up a small range of individual pieces (sold by volume - i.e. you fill up a box of pieces) and if you ever find yourself near Ulm, LEGO-land Deutschland has a physical location where you can buy pieces by mass.

But in summary, I don’t think there is a magic bullet - it’s an expensive hobby!

The number of days in a month sits in a nice space of complexity for me - it's hard enough to be non-trivial, but simple enough you feel you should know it.

Probably the easiest thing to remember is that short and long months generally alternate (the exceptions are December/January, and July/August).

I like the 'use the knuckles of your hands' technique - put your hands next to each other, and count the months using your knuckles and the spaces - so January (knuckle - high so long-month), February (space - low so short-month), March (knuckle - high so long-month). When you reach July, you get your left-and-right knuckles next to each other, so two long months in a row. [EDIT: I can now see that I'm about the fifth person to mention this!]

There’s a difference between going to a bar alone, and going alone with the sole intention to find a one-night-stand. It’s the latter people find creepy.

True, but in the context of making a ‘finger in the air’ calculation, 1 billion or 100 million (approximating to the nearest power of ten) should be “good enough’.

And if you’re interviewing, consider that for a decent proportion of people it may not be the country they live in (at least at the time you’re asking the question).

> Like assuming the population of the USA was 1 Billion people.

Is that comically bad? It's only like three times too much (if you're using the American, 10^9 billion), but we'd accept a much greater margin of error in some other assumptions (like in the classic 'how many Piano tuners are in the city', I think an assumption of 1-in-30 or 1-in-300 households having a piano (that would need tuning) all sound like they could be true!)

In terms of real-life off-by-one errors, it's hard to beat the town of Wemding in Bavaria (Germany).

Here a pyramid of 120 blocks is planned, with one placed every ten years. It started on the 1200th anniversary of the town, and is planned to be complete 1200 years later... and I'm sure you've spotted the problem.

Matt Parker, the 'stand-up Mathematician' has a video on it: https://youtu.be/FAdmpAZTH_M?si=_u8fM-fprUWiEqZ9

I do the NYT mini most days too. I consider solving the Americanisms an additional part of the challenge !

I think that might be called an 'Arrow word' in at least some English dialects, if I am getting your description correct in my head...

E.g. see: https://images.app.goo.gl/mErh6pEEnR9Eexpf8

Crosswords are one of those interesting things where there is a quite a bit of trans-atlantic difference which is worth taking a brief look at if you aren't familar. To quote Wikipedia:

> Crossword grids such as those appearing in most North American newspapers and magazines consist mainly of solid regions of uninterrupted white squares, separated more sparsely by shaded squares. Every letter is "checked" (i.e. is part of both an "across" word and a "down" word) and usually each answer must contain at least three letters. In such puzzles shaded squares are typically limited to about one-sixth of the total. Crossword grids elsewhere, ... have a lattice-like structure, with a higher percentage of shaded squares (around 25%), leaving about half the letters in an answer unchecked.

There are staggered holidays, but it's uncoordinated, based around local council areas - i.e. areas with a population of a hundred-thousand to around a million people. One council may run mid-July to end-of-August, another council a week earlier, and a third a week later.

The UK summer vacation (summer holiday in British English) is significantly shorter than in other countries - only six weeks, where I understand eight or nine is common in other European countries. This probably significantly adds to the holiday congestion and higher surge pricing.

> which is why it’s spelled in the somewhat Francophile Center Parcs, and not Centre Parks. (I thought this is why we did Brexit?)

Pardon me?

The French for center/centre is centre - the 're' ending of British English spelling is either taken from the French, or sometimes a direct reference to French spelling (i.e. 'prestige' spelling - like how some American publications will use British English spelling because they 'look more posh' or similar).

This has the ring-of-truth to me. There were different patterns of local conventions and over time as it became important for large-areas to follow the same convention, these homogenized.

Theoretically it would be called 'hyperchondria' (akin to hypoglycemia and hyperglycaemia) which would be very confusing, and doesn't appear to be used, apart from an Urban Dictionary entry.

> The persistent conviction that one is never or is likely to never become ill, often involving blatant disregard for emergent symptoms, and persisting despite reassurance and medical evidence to the contrary.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hyperchondri...