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Here in the UK, our currency is to all intents and purposes now decimalised. There is, however, one tiny exception: Maundy Money. The coins given by the monarch to the poor on the last Thursday in Lent are still LSD, except that they are only in denominations up to a groat. On Decimal Day, they were
revalued so that the old value immediately went up two point four times. If there were such a thing as a Maundy shilling or a Maundy pound, they would be worth respectively twelve and two hundred and forty pence today. Now, whereas this tradition gives me a nicely alliterative title, it isn't exactly what i propose. What i am proposing, however, is to bring back the shilling but make it worth twelve new pence, and revalue the pound to twelve shillings. This has the following advantages: * Nostalgia, to some extent, though the pound was never worth twelve of anything directly before. * It makes the pound bigger and amounts to revaluing the currency, so things which previously cost a hundred quid will now cost less than seventy quid. Of course, they won't really be cheaper but the psychological benefit might kick-start the economy because things will _look_ quite a bit cheaper. * This is the biggest advantage: it's duodecimal currency, making calculations, particularly division, easier. This will speed things up and help people with numeracy. * This is another big plus: it will pave the way for the introduction of the duodecimal system instead of metric, and ultimately even in the arithmetic and the English language itself.
Once it's been done here in the UK, other countries may choose to follow, and we'll be on our way to a duodecimal system for the whole world.
By the way, i'm completely aware there are twenty shillings to the pound. I propose there be fewer.
Guess what?
http://uk.news.yaho...essing-3fd0ae9.html
This just in... [nineteenthly, Feb 04 2009]
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Annotation:
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psycological effects of playing with people's money don't wear off. I think it will certainly boost the number of stockboys required to put new pricetags on everything until the market levels off and we can see where we stand. Great way to combine the broken window fallacy with inflation deflation tricks. |
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Wealth comes from getting work done that people want done. You can improve the lot of an individual at everyones expense. You can perform this operation on everyone and everyone will be worse off. Market disruptions don't make anyone's life better they just make more work to get the work that people want done to the people who want it. |
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The market is the end all and be all of providing people with what they want. |
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Are you a person who sets their clock ahead to get to appointments ontime? |
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No, i'm a person who is obsessively punctual. I do set clocks fast, but for other people. However, the economic side is not something i'm particularly attached to. Maybe it would be better for me if i could understand economics. |
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I would also be happy to sacrifice that bit just by defining a shilling as slightly smaller, i.e. a twelfth of a pound, and a penny as a twelfth of that. I see what i suggest as a bit like changing the English inscription on a coin to something like "Wun penee" to kick off spelling reform rather than as a straightforward economic measure. On the other hand, that would make literacy in English easier to achieve, and this could reduce innumeracy in a similar way. Those would have economic consequences. |
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OK, so the entire population will have to undergo painful and dangerous plastic surgery, but apart from that it's a great idea. |
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Actually i think there should be a breeding programme!
Seriously though, you can finger count duodecimally by using each finger bone as if it's a digit, and tallying the dozens with the fingers of the other hand. There are twelve finger bones on each hand. You point to them with your thumb Use both hands in the same way and you can count to a gross (a dozen dozens) on two hands, so it's actually easier to count in duodecimal on your fingers than decimal because with decimal you can only go to ten. |
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The other thing is, there are actually more polydactyls out there than you might think. About one in seven dozen of my patients was born with extra digits, but they usually have them amputated. That may be an unrepresentative sample, since my patients are not usually in perfect health. |
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//seven dozen// sp. Seventy Shirley if we taken this system to its logical conclusion. Bun because I like the duodecicmal system and played around with it a bit a few years ago. I reckoned that you could take advantage of the switch to simplify the names of some of the numbers (I went for seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, onety, onety-one ... onety nine, onety ten onety eleven twenty etc etc) |
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//coins given by the monarch to the poor on the last Thursday in Lent//
She missed me.
Didn't the Mamas and Papas do a song about this stuff? |
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//Didn't the Mamas and Papas do a song about this stuff?// |
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Nah. You're thinking of the Boomtown Rats. They wouldn't like this idea. |
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No, it was Cream and Jethro Tull. |
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It is actually seven dozen. It isn't as many as one in five dozen and ten. I've even got someone with two thumbs on each hand, which is very rare. |
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I can't get a nice nomenclature. I just end up going "ten dozen and one" or whatever, but then French doesn't seem to worry about the cumbersomeness of its number terms. There's also a neat word, "zagier", which is the cube of a dozen, because it turns up in some number theory equation which i don't get. Also, we already have the word "eleven", and for that matter the term "baker's dozen". |
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//they didn't like maundy?// |
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Yeah -but they didn't tell me why. |
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If you're going to count in 12s then don't forget the 'gross', which is 144. So a zagier is 12 gross. |
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//Yeah -but they didn't tell me why// probably saw no reason... |
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Maybe there was no reason. |
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nothing for it but to shoot it down. |
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Sorry, i thought i said "gross" earlier. I was counting syllables, and if you miss out the "ands", it doesn't really make so much difference. You could also say "doz" for "dozen". |
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//gross// .. //said earlier//
Oh, yes. You did. As you were... |
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Not travellers exactly, but i may have more Roma and Celts than average. That might be connected. The other thing is there are quite a few South Asians. |
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I've long advocated a return to civilised measurements for everything, including money. I refuse to measure anything except in feet, inches, gallons, pints, stones, pounds, etc, etc.
I'm convinced that making all financial calculations take place in multiples of twelves, twenties etc would solve the global credit crunch. Bring back the guinea! |
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I have more sympathy for that approach than before. One interesting thing about that is that England had a decimal system of weights and measures before the Norman Conquest, which means the Imperial and metric systems were both invented by someone French. Concerning the guinea, i also have a lot of sympathy for it. It was the going rate for a herbal consultation at some point, after it went up from the noble in the fifteenth century. I also think guineas are a little bit like the "nine <currency units> ninety-nine" business, but in reverse - you think you're buying a bed for fifty quid because it costs fifty guineas, but you're actually paying fifty-two pounds and ten shillings. |
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[UB], you've made me think now. I seem to get a lot of people with rare diseases. I've always thought this is because rare diseases taken together are common, but i'm now wondering about the founder effect with those too. |
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No, because i don't see enough patients for it to be statistically significant. I suppose i might be able to get all the rare genetic diseases together and do something with them, for instance dermatomyositis and cystinuria, but even there the explanation may be just that people are more likely to get desperate and seek help elsewhere. There's also the long tail. How common are rare diseases? Is it log-normal again? There probably _is_ some research to do there, actually. Yes, thanks and mmmm...
There may also be a way of cooperating with orthodox medical research through it, since i've got all these people with diagnosed weird diseases. Why do they come to me? Does it represent some kind of inevitable dissatisfaction with doctors which is not actually connected to their competence, bedside manner or anything else? Maybe people just get frustrated and look elsewhere. |
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You'd have to perform the crossover slowly, if you implemented this in a hurry, there'd be a distinct danger that it'd be just another manic Maundy. |
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It is just another //Manic Maundy//, I wish it were sundry, ... |
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If the money were to be produced in notes and coins coloured Blue, then it might be the start for currency to give the world a New Order. |
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Storks read the Halfbakery. See link. |
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