The n-Category Café

Actually, I think most people who have even the most casual acquaintance with American currency will have at least seen the name of this guy. That’s another pretty big hint I guess.

(Man, I even missed the biggest clue at first! Now I feel like somebody should just delete my last two comments, since they detract from the cleverness of yours.)

That’s not ONE unit of currency
but I think that describes a single coin
whose name I’ll probably get wrong: a sovereign?

and has everyone figured out why 1/9 was reasonable?

At this point 1/9 of a dollar starts sounding like a reasonable amount of money!

I imagine anything sounds reasonable after you spend enough time on L.s.d.

I was told, and didn’t follow-up to check, that a 16.5 foot rod (or perch) was the standard length of an implement carried to urge on a team of two oxen.

Back in the good old days of the above currency and the notorious 11s test (for 11 year olds) there was an IQ type question: name the next term in the sequence:

1/4 1/2 1 3 6 12 24 …

I delighted in posing it to my classes when ever I had an excuse for discussing what IQ tests measure (of course the measure IQ and do it quite well -= any relation to intelligence is purely coincidental or at least culturally determined)

I would lead them on supplying an additional terms
and then`berate’ them that it was a standard question for 11 year olds.

Of course, they didn’t do much better with 1 5 10 25

Wikipedia is your friend:

• Used internationally in some contexts as the ISO 8601 standard
• Albania (more references indicate use of dd/mm/yyyy)
• Canada (yyyy-mm-dd, government all-numeric standard)
• China, People’s Republic of (yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy年m月d日 with no leading zeroes)
• China, Republic of; same as China, P.R. except year might be represented using ROC era system: 民國95年12月30日.
• Denmark (The format dd-mm-yy(yy) is the traditional Danish date format. The international format yyyy-mm-dd or yyyymmdd is also accepted. There are no preferences, although the traditional format is the most widely used. The formats dd.’monthname’ yyyy and in handwriting d/m/yy are also acceptable.)
• Europe
• Hong Kong (yyyy年m月d日 with no leading zeroes; and dd/mm/yyyy for English)
• Hungary (yyyy.mm.dd and traditionally the number of the month is sometimes written in Roman numerals)
• Iran (yyyy/mm/dd in Persian Calendar system (“yy/m/d” is a common alternative), yyyy-mm-dd in Gregorian Calendar system)
• Japan, often in the form yyyy年mm月dd日; sometimes Japanese era year is used, e.g. 平成18年12月30日.
• Korea (yyyy년 mm월 dd일; yyyy/mm/dd also used)
• Latvia (But often dd.mm.yyyy. is used)
• Lithuania (yyyy-mm-dd)
• Macau (same as Hong Kong)
• Mongolia (yyyy.mm.dd)
• Nepal (also see Nepal Sambat which is also in use)
• Norway
• Singapore (Chinese representation: yyyy年m月d日, no leading zeroes)
• Slovenia
• South Africa (yyyy/mm/dd; “d/m/yy” is a common alternative)
• Spain (Basque: yyyy.mm.dd)
• Sweden (national standard format)

As John's comment shows, year-month-day is the legal standard in many places, including the world as a whole. But I think that it's used commonly only in Asia.

I do use it myself, however, and I helped to establish it on the nLab's page of latest changes.

I don’t get it.

I don’t get it.

Today is 2009-05-08, so she is 9 years, 5 months, and 8 days old.

I’ve been using Zimbabwean inflation to create problems for my college algebra classes about working with exponentials and logarithms. They’ve finally surpassed the record set by the Hungarian pengő.

Since no one could ever steal and spend a 10^6 pound note, they might as well send them via the post.

Since no one could ever steal and spend a 10^6 pound note, […]

That's the premise behind a short story by Mark Twain.

I was having fun imagining a children’s cartoon where some criminal mastermind breaks into the lorry, steals a £1,000,000 note, and then runs down the street waving it gleefully while chased by a crowd of bobbies.

There’s two separate issues there I think. My understanding is that from the point of its creation the Bank of England engaged in fractional reserve lending without sufficient reserves for the money not to be “fictitious to some degree”, it’s only the degree that has changed. Then there’s the issue that the pieces of paper called banknotes have special legal status (different from, say, a contract or other form of accounting). British banknotes still have the wording “I promise to pay the bearer on the sum of” whereas I don’t find that on American banknotes only that it is valid for payment of all debts (this being law in the UK but not printed on the note anywhere), so I’m not sure if there’s a theoretical difference in what the pieces of paper might signify. Of course, in practice I’m sure that the circumstances in which any difference mattered would be so extreme that laws would be unreliable anyway. But the British legal position still currently accords different recognition to a banknote than to a ledger entry for the same amount.

Incidentally, this issue that having the actual piece of paper which has legal status is different from being able to show that you own that piece of paper is apparently turning up in the area of US mortgage foreclosures: apparently some companies which bought parcels of mortgage debt either don’t have or can’t in practice actually find the original mortgage papers for individual mortgages and judges are refusing to begin foreclosure proceedings without them.

Toby wrote:

I feel like that ought to be a joke, but I’m not sure.

Apparently it’s not a joke: the million-pound note is called a “Giant”, while the 100-million-pound note is called a “Titan”.

There were quite a number of competing gauges on early British railways. Carriage makers and cartwrights were perfectly capable of making vehicles of different widths. Moreover, it’s rather unlikely that ruts in the road would force axle widths to an accuracy of less than half an inch. Also, roads need to be maintained, and if you can fill in potholes, you can fill in ruts.

It is true that it is quite likely not a coincidence that the standard gauge of railways is somewhat related to the width of a carthorse, since steam railways were preceded by horse-drawn railways in mines. But of course this only settles the gauge approximately (horse rail gauges varied from 4 to 5 feet), and still fails to deal with some widespread broad gauges (over 7 ft in the case of Brunel’s GWR) and narrow gauges (sometimes little more than 3 ft—or even 2 ft in a mining railway mentioned in Agricola’s De Re Metallica, although obviously this is not suitable for passenger transport).

It’s also perhaps worth mentioning that by the late Middle Ages, carthorses were already considerably larger than Roman chariot horses, and they continued to grow.

Lots of useful information in Wikipedia s.v. Rail Gauge, from which I gleaned some of this info; also discussed in Snopes.