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The Metro is free and a perfect excuse for a 20 minute walk each morning to the station and back. Plus it has a cryptic and an easy (too easy, usually) crossword and 3x sudoku. Herself likes the "lifestyle" pages and we use half of them to light the fire each evening and the other half under the cat tray.
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I wonder if it's the same Metro we can get here in the UK - that had three Sudokus of varying difficulty - it wasn't bad for a freebie and kept me amused on my daily 40 minute commute to London - I would try and complete all of the Sudokus and at least one of the crosswords before I got to Waterloo ( small victories  )
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Yes, that's the one I mean - I'm in the UK 
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Oh I thought you were in Australia - must stay in more
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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50 years ago today, the UK went decimal and the phrase "How much is that in real money?" entered our vocabulary. Us youngsters became the walking calculators for our parents - providing a translation service between the "old" (12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound), and the "new" 100p to the pound.
Yes, LSD was a crazy set of monetary units, but I'm pretty sure mental arithmetic skills went downhill after we went decimal. But if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you... 
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I think that problem will be solved by Bitcoins:
Here is the money ...
Poefffff ...
And now it's gone !
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I don't think it was currency that did it, I think it was calculators.
When I was at school, right up to my sixth form calculators were expensive - we used slide rules and log tables, long multiplication and division - you know the sort of thing. Only one kid in my year had a calculator, and that was a Sinclair LED thing than came as a kit you built yourself. Even then, it was a lot of money: £25 for the kit!
Given that I got about 10 shillings a week* for my 7 days a week paper round (if I was lucky!) it would have taken me a year or more to save enough to buy one ...
So we had to use mental arithmetic: no real choice.
And for years - until barcodes took over from sticky price labels in supermarkets - I'd stand in the queue and add up my basket so I could hand over the right change ... 
* Might have been less, and probably was - notes of the realm didn't play a large part in my life in those days!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I'm rather inclined to agree with you there. I too went through school doing all mathematical calculations (at which in truth I wasn't particularly good) in my head or with the use of either a slide rule or log tables. Computers of course were non existent except for the odd class where we would add holes to punch cards, have them submitted to the local university, wait for two months and then discover that two plus two did indeed equal five.
Now decades down the road having found myself writing more and more code for what were once these new fangled computer things I find myself revisiting the maths of my schooldays and being curious once again to use slide rules and log tables and see just how much you could actually do with them.
Slide rules I have been able to locate via the dreaded ebay and one or two other specialist sites, but log tables have proved to be more of a problem. It's almost as if they've disappeared of the face of the earth, that or I've been looking in entirely the wrong place.
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I still have the two slide rules I used in school, somewhere - though the big one has lost it's cursor - and I think I could still use one. They gave you a better "sense" of the answer than an calculator, I think: you could look at it and go "that can't be right, what did I do wrong?" instead of blindly accepting a result as gospel.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I still have my school log tables and slide rules (not stolen - we had to buy them as the school had no money), but mostly use pen and paper. I'm one of those sad people who remember logs of common numbers, sines / cosines / tans for common angles etc so I don't often have to use the tables.
And, yes, I still remember pre-decimal coinage.
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Seriously, what's with this worship for mental arithmetic?
Growing up I always felt oppressed by my inability to do mental math. Specially in elementary school when my parents would point out to other kids that could multiply two or 3 digit numbers while I was still struggling with multiplication table. Relief came latter on, when I discovered geometry, algebra and all the other fine parts of math. I've managed to be gainfully employed and build fairly sophisticated things while still maintaining my hesitations about 7 times 8.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the value of having a large array of information and concepts at your disposal in your brain can help you solve complicated problems. It's just that I don't see where multiplications table fits in this picture.
Griff mentioned the slide rule; that's one thing I liked while growing up. It would give a rough idea what the answer was, without having to be too accurate.
If the world went downhill in the last 50 years, which I'm not sure it did, I don't think mental math skills are the root cause.
Mircea
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Well, I'm betting this is a first for the Lounge. Getting trolled for a (light-hearted) post about decimilisation!
Mircea Neacsu wrote: Seriously, what's with this worship for mental arithmetic?
I didn't notice any "worship".
Mircea Neacsu wrote: Growing up I always felt oppressed by my inability to do mental math.
Pick ANY subject in the world, and someone out there is going to be not very good at it. So, (on that basis), should we stop posting about anything?! That's a rhetorical question, BTW. No answer needed. I've never been very good at fighting, drinking, telling jokes or picking up women - and I'm colour-blind. So, in future, if someone mentions one of those, should I go on a rant? Yep, rhetorical again!
Mircea Neacsu wrote: If the world went downhill in the last 50 years
Nope! I've double checked. I didn't mention the world going downhill.
Chill.... 
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I thoroughly apologize if my short rant rubbed you the wrong way. It wasn't my intention at all. I was chill and intend to stay that way (specially with the -12 degrees outside )
Mircea
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Very true, we learnt LSD at home and school and it became second nature to repeat to oneself the 'table'
12 pence one shilling
20 pence one and eight
30 pence two and six
40 pence three and four
...
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: 20 pence one and eight
Well, sort of; except that pre-1971 (in my part of the UK at least) if you used the word "pence" in any context other than "thruppence" or "sixpence" (or in relation to shillings, as in 1/8 = one shilling and eight pence, though normally vocalised just as "one and eight") people would think you were mad. 1/8 is 20 pennies.
[I think I've recalled on here before my colleagues astonished looks when in a business meeting in 2009, which was dealing with small monetary values, I referred to 3p as "thruppence"... Yes, I was the oldest person in the room at the time.]
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I don't know where you were brought up, but in that context we would always say pence. No one that I ever knew recited, "twenty pennies one and eight". The post decimal time was where it got confused because the new 1p coin was inscribed "One new pence", so people started saying pence all the time even where it was incorrect.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: Very true, we learnt LSD at home and school
I knew that the 60ies were pretty relaxed with the (ab)use of drugs, but giving LSD in a school... that could explain some things  
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Yeah, but I went to school in the 50s. I missed the drug scene by doing other things.
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Had the UK not decimalised its currency, it would today be in the good company of Madagascar and Mauritania.
The US shares the dubious distinction of non-metric standards with Liberia and Myanmar. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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About that, when are you going to go back in time properly?
Not this brexit nonsense, I bet the kids of today can't wait to start counting their money on both their hands and their feet.
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: counting their money on both their hands and their feet.
Knowing today's kids, you don't want to go back to using guineas. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Not enough of them having six toes on one foot?
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Canada hasn't had real money since 1967, the last full year of silver coinage. If you do the conversion between Imperial and metric, a dime bought a liter of gas then. It still does, though you'd have to take it to a coin shop first.
The last year for the US was 1964, but I don't know the last year for the UK.
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