Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gpderetta 1347 days ago
And human weight in stones. Been living here for more than 10 years and still can't remember how much is a stone.
2 comments

The nice trick with stones is that I don't care how much they are.

They're nice and vague enough that it's like .. if I go from 10 stone to 11 stone, I need to care. If I go from 10 to 10.1 I don't need to care. I don't convert them to pounds or kilos because I don't want to know the answer, it just adds anxiety that I don't need.

The funny thing is I'm otherwise metric-all-the-things. But for body weight, the lack of precision lets me focus on the trends instead of worrying about the details.

1 stone = 14lbs. Learned this "whilst" (another chiefly British word) at study abroad in England. Ever after thought of the Bush album "Sixteen Stone" in a different light.
Of course I never remember that a how much a pound is.

From my d&d days (when we mix and matched Italian and English material) I remember that 2.5lbs is about 1kg, but that's a very rough approximation. Similarly I remember that 10ft is ~3m.

A pound is 7000 grains, hope that helps
Ah, so just a touch under 292 pennyweights. That makes sense :D
For a few seconds i read 'grams' and I thought it was on the heavy side. Well played!