Genuine curiosity, other than the Queen Anne pound of wine (a joke I meant to contrast the imperial gallon’s definition) and saying “Queen Anne gallon of wine” instead of the “wine gallon” defined by Queen Anne in 1707 (now referred to as the “Queen Anne wine gallon”), which parts are incorrect?

That’s a ridiculous mischaracterization. The word “Ounce” derives from a word meaning “one twelfth”, so just like the inch to the foot, an ounce is either one sixteenth of a queen Anne pound of wine (which is itself based on the Queen Anne gallon of wine, or 231 cubic inches of wine), or one twentieth of an imperial pint, which is an eighth of an imperial gallon, which is ten water pounds.

Flasks are a unit of mercury weight, obviously.

$1,750 per job assuming ten jobs per week is $17,500 per week of working. Assuming 4 weeks per month, that’s $70,000 per month. Assuming 12 months of working per year, that’s $840,000 per year. I’d be calling it “almost a million” at that point. I think the math works out, but the business prospects don’t.

You mean I can’t have my new plastic in a particular shape for a WHOLE WEEK? I knew the commies were up to no good when they said technology could make the world a better place.

The town I grew up in, and the next town are connected by a road (shocking, unusual, I know). There was an 8 month period where the police departments and politicians all agreed that there should be a way to pass high urgency alerts back and forth, in case there’s someone fleeing along that road, or anything like that.

It was eventually decided that the viable ways were:

1. a desk agent would fax over a document and call to notify/confirm about the event.

2. one department would have to replace some substantial portion of their IT system so it could work with the other system.

3. they could pay for a custom solution, maybe.

They settled on option 1, and it worked. Every time I hear politicians talk about sharing information across organizations, I think back to a working meeting with two vendors going down a list of protocols and standards, eventually deciding there was no common ground. It’s been made difficult, and no one in the industry appears to want to fix that.

I was trying to add a column of numbers in LibreOffice Calc the other day, and I ran out of fingers. Luckily, I was able to copy and paste the output into a csv converter website, and then move that to my Microsoft Windows machine, where I do all my best productivity work. Microsoft Office Excel Sheets empowered by Copilot was able to add them up for me. (17 was the total, in case you wondered)

My dorm building in college had exit doors that were undersized for the fire codes. They fixed this by moving the exit/entrance door to one side of the hallway, and adding an emergency exit door on the other side. The emergency exit door had a single red sticker on the push bar that said “Emergency exit - Alarm will sound”, and it really would. It happened at least 75 times in the first month after everyone moving in.

They fixed this by sending everyone 75 angry emails about it. The same thing happened the next year, and also every year since then. I heard (but could never confirm) that putting double doors for the entry/exit doors would have cost a total of $3,000 more, for the multiple exits.

I have a buddy with a wife, so I know it can take a while to go from wife to single. Months, or more :(

I’m about to go to sleep. I’ll sleep better knowing I have $19, but probably wouldn’t sleep at all knowing $7 billion is showing up tomorrow. I don’t think I’m cut out for the billionaire life, but I’m prepared to try.

We surrender language to scientific/other detail oriented pursuits too easily.

According to some, a raspberry is not a berry, but a pumpkin is. That’s dumb. The word berry existed before botanists tried (and failed) to determine exactly what it meant, and the original meaning is still way better/more useful than the botany one.

So here it is: a berry is a small fruit, which is usually sweet, and usually edible. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, cherries, grapes, gooseberries, currants, and blueberries are all berries. Pumpkins, watermelons, tomatoes, zucchini and bananas are not.

Other terms that have been co-opted this way include “work”, “salt”, and “rock”. I believe the fields stealing these terms should be forced to come up with their own, different words.