For me it's too much E Nesbit as a child, and a father who used to collect old pennies he dug up from the garden. He discovered that the large pennies are just the right size to block the washing machine drain hose...
That's a nice detail. I went there once, the canal restoration camp I was on (excuse to spend a week shovelling mud and wearing a hard hat) arranged a visit out of hours, and let the organiser drive a tram :-)
I sometimes wish we'd stuck with the old penny and decimalised the system by creating a new unit of currency with a thousand pennies, to be a bit over four old pounds. We could have called it the New Guinea.
We could have made the new currency in metal (the New Guinea Pig) or as notes (the Papuer New Guinea).
We should never have decimalised. Base 12 (and 60) is far more useful for pretty much anything than base 10, and has the additional benefit of enforcing at least some basic numeracy.
And don't get me started on temperature: whoever thought that a linear scale was a good idea needs shooting; I'll grant that a logarithmic scale would retain the need for an arbitrary reference point, but it'd get rid of the ludicrous idea of an achievable absolute zero. Come to that, similar applies to any other SI unit you care to mention.
[ wanders off muttering about the sort of pathological insecurity that requires absolutes and certainties in a Universe based on relativity and randomness ]
[ and we didn't have typos in HTML closing tags when I was a lad ]
My Puffin edition Narnia books cost 3 and 6. I forget exactly how to write it, not at home to check the covers. Had to work out the dollar conversions to order them, back in the day.
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The pre decimilation had 240 pennys to the pound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#Pre-decimal
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I sometimes wish we'd stuck with the old penny and decimalised the system by creating a new unit of currency with a thousand pennies, to be a bit over four old pounds. We could have called it the New Guinea.
We could have made the new currency in metal (the New Guinea Pig) or as notes (the Papuer New Guinea).
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I believe that's sort of what Australia and New Zealand did - their dollar was equivalent to 100 old pennies in value.
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:))
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And don't get me started on temperature: whoever thought that a linear scale was a good idea needs shooting; I'll grant that a logarithmic scale would retain the need for an arbitrary reference point, but it'd get rid of the ludicrous idea of an achievable absolute zero. Come to that, similar applies to any other SI unit you care to mention.
[ wanders off muttering about the sort of pathological insecurity that requires absolutes and certainties in a Universe based on relativity and randomness ]
[ and we didn't have typos in HTML closing tags when I was a lad ]
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My Puffin edition Narnia books cost 3 and 6. I forget exactly how to write it, not at home to check the covers. Had to work out the dollar conversions to order them, back in the day.
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