djwbrown

> So...what's an ounce a twelfth of?

It's a twelfth of a troy pound, or Roman libra (lb).

These two episodes from The History of English podcast trace these seemingly arbitrary units through history and give them some context. My favorite is the derivation of 5280 feet per mile. Also, that "mark twain" is a depth sounding of two fathoms.

http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2018/07/26/episode-114-th... http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2018/08/21/episode-115-th...

Schemes for international geocoding really shouldn't shrug off this altitude problem. When you say third floor, are you using 0-indexing, or 1-indexed floors as in the US?

Impressive response to the HealthCare.gov fiasco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F Some other interesting projects here: https://github.com/18f

Cumulative time wasted using 'Command+[': none. Cumulative time wasted due to overloading of the backspace key: hours.

Relying on current context to determine the behavior of backspace was a terrible idea from the start. To hell with your muscle memory. Re-learn a shortcut that makes sense, and which will save you time one day, rather than insisting with hacker-machismo that you've never lost data in a form.