Petrol less than £1 a gallon!!!!!!

Why should we? All those zeroes in furniture measurements are just so
much noise. Who the heck measures a fridge to the mm? A cm is the
right kind of tolerance for the purpose, very roughly half an inch in
real money.

--
Dave OSOS#24 Remove my gerbil for email replies

Yamaha XJ900S & Wessex sidecar, the sexy one
Yamaha XJ900F & Watsonian Monaco, the comfortable one

http://dswindell.members.beeb.net

 

Ah. Dole bludger, then.

 

...

1/8d = 1 shilling 8 pence = 1 2/3 shillings
The nearest whole number is two
10/- (ten shillings) divided by 2 = 5
Remainder 5 x 1/3 shillings = 1 2/3 shillings, so add 1 to 5, giving 6

Alternately and probably much easier, except that I don't recall being in
the habit of converting money into pennies for calculations.
1/8d = 20d
10/- = 120d
120 / 20 = 6

Colin Bignell

 

....

As I said, it is a sign of the lowering of educational standards. Mental
arithmetic just involves breaking down the calculation into a series of
simpler sums, then doing those one at a time. In many cases, a close
approximation is all you really need and those are even easier. I still do a
quick mental check when using a calculator, so that I know that I didn't
push a wrong button somewhere. In the days of slide rules, you had to have a
fair idea of what the answer was going to be before you started, so that you
knew where to put the decimal point.

.....

These days they probably have a programmed till, with a different button for
each type of drink.

I used to run a bar. For me, the most difficult bit was keeping track of all
the drinks that a large group wanted. The person at the bar had usually
memorised a list and would rattle it off quickly, as if to get it all out
before any of it was forgotten.

Colin Bignell

 

What a pathetically narrow interpretation.

 

Is that really how we used to write "one and eight" ? If it had been a
shilling and tuppence per gallon, would that not look exactly like a
ha'penny - 1/2d ?

 

I'm not sure there were 20 'decent' universities when I went. To really
count, the university had to be able to measure its history in centuries.
However, the proliferation of degree factories that followed the granting of
university status to the CATs in the late 60s has now made the redbricks
pillars of the establishment.

Colin Bignell

 

^^^^^
Do you mean 28.35 grams of intelligence or the intelligence of a type of
cat?

 

<grin>
If you're going to misread 1/8d[1] as 1/8 of a penny instead of 1s 8d it
should be 8 x 240 gallon.
[1] Said /one and eightpence/ - there was some sort of logic to dropping the
s when using /.

Anyway -
3 gallon at 1/8d was 5 bob, or 1 gallon was 20d.
12 gallon for a quid.

Simple innit.

 

No, because the use of the forward slash (/) to denote a fraction with
all characters on the same line was not then in common use. Written
fractions would either have a horizontal line between numerator &
denominator or the two figures would be at different levels
(superscripted and subscripted) which could be done with half
linefeeds on a typewriter. Typewriters also had keys for the most
common fractions. So a ha'penny would have been written ½d (if you
are using the same character set on your PC as I am and the non-ASCII
character does not get mangled by Usenet).

Zero pennies would be denoted by a dash (-), so an amount of 2
shillings would be written 2/- d

 

Ah hah.

I am old enough to remember "old money" ;-) But the addition of the
trailing d to 1/8 or 2/- somehow doesn't look right if the context is
clearly monetary.

 

It would appeear comon sense was something you learned there too.

 

Christ, I drive a lorry and can do that in my head. Must've been a piss
poor school you went to.

 

Mine was OK.
Its a bit of a party piece to be able to do anything that complex
accurately, and there are far better things to do in school than learn
mental arithmetic, esp since the common sense thing to do would be to reach
for a calculator.

OTOH hand I believe doing estimations is in the NC now. so "about 39 quid"
should do.

 

I bow to the old farts My simple logic was that I thought the "/" *was*
the shorthand, everything in front shillings, everything after pennies.
Writing 1/8d for 1s8d doesn't seem to have saved any characters.

 

half_pint wrote

Nope. The slightly abusive posts are normal business for ukrm when
talking to the rest of the world. Especially if they are cagers

 

Sanity checks are your friend.

 

I rather doubt you learnt spelling there.

 

Always a sign that someone is loosing the debate when they have
to resort to that one.