Inner Thought

What things annoy more than other things?

We all have our own personal annoyances, and some are probably more popular than others.

Here are some I thought of:

1. People who smoke, smoking in general, especially when people smoke where there are No Smoking signs or where smoking is banned.
2. Lying.
3. Hypocrisy.
4. Inconsistency (behaviour, character, use of words/styles in published texts).
5. The Imperial system and other measurements people use that are not metric (because only the metric system is good enough).
6. am and pm times (because the 24-hour clock is so much easier to use).
7. Russell Brand and his immature humour, pathetic girly hairstyle and everything else about him.
8. The annoying music during the countdown to the headlines as used on BBC News 24.
9. People who do not show respect to others.
10. George Bush and his foreign policies (especially the ones that drove all muslims to hate the West, invading Iraq, etc.)
11. When people confuse the letter O with the number zero, as in saying, for a phone number, something like oh two oh seven five three, etc... when they really mean zero two zero seven five three, etc...
12. When people use "double" for repeated numbers, e.g. in a phone number that ends 1244 they might say "one two double four", when the number is actually "one two four four" -- if I were dialling it I would like to dial the digits 1244 rather than wonder which key is the "double" key on the phone keypad.
13. People who sweat a lot and do not use any kind of deodorant, shower gel, soap, etc., and end up stinking the place out.
14. Bad breath (do some people not realise that they can buy mouthwash?).
15. When people locate places wrongly, such as putting a place in London in some other place where it used to be many years ago before they were born, e.g. Croydon is actually a town (and a London Borough) in Greater London, not in Surrey, although it used to be in Surrey (but that is ancient history so why pretend it is still correct?).
16. Bendy buses in London -- the streets are too narrow for them, people can steal rides on them making them more expensive to run and thus higher fares for everyone who pays to use buses in London. What was Ken Livingstone thinking of when he bought those awful things?
17. Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London (replaced by Boris Johnson by democratic vote in 2008, thankfully).
18. The stench of pig flesh, especially bacon which is particularly vile in smell.
19. Microsoft Windows in general. It has its good points but too many things just go wrong with using Windows so it is best to not use it but find an alternative OS.
20. People who are nasty, vile, aggressive or vulgar.

This list is not in any particular order, and you will perhaps agree with some of these, or not many, or maybe even most. But this is just one person's viewpoint.

In a bit of a blow to those who want to cling on to good old British Imperial measures like pounds and ounces - it turns out it was an Englishman who invented the "foreign" metric system.

Or so claims Pat Naughtin, a metrication specialist from Australia, who carried out his research at Wadham College in Oxford, at Trinity College in Cambridge, and at the Royal Society in London.

He says John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, first published his ideas for a metric measure in 1668 → 120 years before the French adopted the metric system.

Wilkins' system was complete in that it was based on decimal numbers (10s, 100s, and 1000s) and its measurements were to be based on an internationally agreed 'universal measure', which would become the basis for other measures.

Our modern measuring methods now use all of Wilkins' ideas: we use prefixes to go from millimetres via metres to kilometres, we have a universally agreed definition of a metre, and a litre of water has a mass of a kilogram.

Although Wilkins did not use the word 'metre', its use became common after Tito Livio Burattini translated Wilkins 'universal measure' to its Italian equivalent, 'metro catholico' and, it seems that this was later translated, and shortened, to the French word, metre.

(From a Press Release from the UKMA)

Despite the media hype of recent weeks, the EU is not going to withdraw metric from the UK. Here in the UK the law requires all traders to use metric for pricing and measuring goods being sold, the only exception being pints for milk delivered to homes in glass bottles and beer and cider sold in pubs on draught. Bottled beers and ciders must be metric, all loose foods, e.g. fruit, veg, must be metric and all packaged goods have required to be metric for many years. I remember the metric sizes on packaging back in the 1970s.

Traders such as grocers may price their goods using a per kg price with a supplementary per lb price. The EU has been requiring that the UK forbid the per pound supplementary price and have a per kg price only, from 1 Jan 2010. But then someone in the EU decided it would be better to remove the 2010 limit so that supplementary pricing could continue beyond that. As far as I know, the EU has not yet formally made this law, so that at present we are still probably going to have to abandon imperial pricing completely by the end of 2009. And quite rightly so. Why should we cling to these old useless foreign units like pounds?

It is still illegal for traders to price things per lb only, as many do, but local authorities are failing to prosecute these traders, many of whom no doubt are deceiving their customers by making their prices look less. A shop like Tesco might sell tomatoes at £2 per kg, a local trader might sell them at £1 per lb. So which is cheaper? It is hard for consumers to see which is correct. As 1 lb is 454 grams, i.e. 1 kg = 2.2 lb. Thus the price of £1 per lb is actually £2.20 per kg, making the small trader's tomatoes 20 p more expensive, per kg, that those of Tesco. (I made the prices numbers that are easy to deal with, they are not based on actual prices of tomatoes in Tesco).

It is about time that we all went metric and that all trade, without exception, was in metric. Many English-speaking countries went metric decades ago, e.g. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada. And they are not even in Europe, so it is hardly an EU conspiracy to make the UK use the same units as its own Commonwealth countries.

Go metric now, it is the best way for Britain and the world.

There is a strange idea amongst British people that the use of "old units" is somehow essential to their national identity.

People sometimes believe that metric is foreign, yet imperial-lovers feel so patriotic about using "avoirdupois" weights (French) and Fahrenheit temperature (Prussian).

The UK has made many contributions to the modern metric system. The idea for a consistent set of measurement units came from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in the 1860s, in the form of the metric system. BAAS also proposed the prefixes mega- and micro-. Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Louis Gray, James Joule, James Watt and Lord Kelvin all have metric units named after them.

When I see joules (energy), kilowatts (power), megabytes (something which uses the mega- prefix meaning million), newtons (force) and micrograms (used a lot for medicines, the prefix micro- is used, meaning millionth) I can feel proud of our Great British contribution to the international system of units, aka metric.

Metric is more British than the imperial system. Consider as well that the mile is Roman, the stone is Babylonian and the pint is French. Do we really want to hang on to these foreign units? I would rather use a British-based system like metric any day.

Look at the websites or literature for donating blood, here in the UK, such as the National Blood Service. They say they take an amount which is about 470 ml, some sites say 450 ml, or maybe just around 400 ml. But they refer to it, misleadingly, as just under a pint.

They should quote it as just under half a litre, about 9% of an average person's blood. Or maybe even cut down the amount taken, to a round amount, something like 400 ml, or even just 300 ml or 250 ml. But never a pint, nor an amount that they mistakenly describe as a pint even though it is at least 25% less.