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Dublin Whiskey Fire

en.wikipedia.org

71–80 of 108 posts

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#71
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd prefer it in (checks internets) Pounds, Shillings and Pence? OK, but not very useful to the rest of us.

Pre-decimal pounds, shillings and pence ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/£sd ), with a few guineas (21 shillings, while a pound was 20 shillings) thrown in for fun. That would make sure nobody alive would understand it.

I read somewhere that internationally-oriented auction houses ask & take bids in guineas so that bidders based in _all_ currencies are equally inconvenienced, and none is favored.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#72
post #30
post #27

> None of the fatalities suffered during the fire were due to smoke inhalation, burns, or any other form of direct contact with the fire itself; all of them were attributed to alcohol poisoning. As an Irish person myself I've always felt the stereotype was a little overblown.. It seems I'm completely wrong. We will literally drink until we die if there is a literal river of whiskey. I don't know whether to laugh or c…

They most likely breathed in the vapor.

Whisky from the barrel is considerably stronger than the stuff that’s bottled (which is diluted). Add to that the shorter drinking period too (the urgency of drinking it while the river is still flowing). So I can fully believe people literally drank themselves to death. In fact I’d be surprised if the same fatalities didn’t occur in most cities had they encountered this kind of scenario too.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#73
post #27

> None of the fatalities suffered during the fire were due to smoke inhalation, burns, or any other form of direct contact with the fire itself; all of them were attributed to alcohol poisoning. As an Irish person myself I've always felt the stereotype was a little overblown.. It seems I'm completely wrong. We will literally drink until we die if there is a literal river of whiskey. I don't know whether to laugh or c…

Saying a river of whiskey sounds interesting but it was more likely that they drank pure alcohol or it was simply contaminated from the journey through the city.

Yeah that was my thought. They were drinking whiskey and everything else washed into it.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#75
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I witnessed a watered-down version of an incident like this a few months ago on the road between Campos dos Goytecazes and Rio de Janeiro - traffic slows down, then stops, and as we look ahead, trying to see what causes the jam, we find that several people walk along the roadside carrying beer cans and kegs, laughing and being in an excellent mood. Just our luck, driving right into some festivities, we think. Then, m…

This unfortunately happens with gasoline as well (from trucks or pipelines), sometimes with fatal consequences.

Yeah, it comes up in the news more frequently than you'd expect.

1. Gas truck tips over. Usually with 0 fatalities

2. Locals go over to collect free gas

3. Truck explodes. 30+ fatalities

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#76

> The fire is believed to have started in Laurence Malone's bonded storehouse on the corner of Ardee Street, where 5,000 hogsheads (262,500 imperial gallons or 1,193,000 litres or 315,200 US gallons) of whiskey were being stored... Hogsheads sound like a fictional unit of measure made up to mock the imperial system.

I am going to defend imperial (and other ancient) units of measurement.

The metric system is unintuitive but standardized.

The imperial system is intuitive but (traditionally) non-standardized.

A standardized but unintuitive system is useful in modern science and engineering, where reliability and precision are of utmost importance.

An intuitive but non-standardized system is useful for day-to-day communication and conceptualization, where a standard deviation away from the average of the unit's reference does not have a meaningful effect.

Before standardization, many old units of measurement could be immediately related to everyday things, making conceptualization simple and intuitive.

Examples:

Imperial pound of mass: A pound of wheat berries is more or less how many wheatberries I can fit in my hand. I deal with wheat berries and my hands every single day - I can quite concretely conceptualize a pound and more or less relate that pound (of wheat berries) to other things: a pound of meat, a pound of wool, etc.

Imperial acre: An acre is more or less the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day. In our old little village, oxen and farm fields are something we observe every single day, and so an acre is conceptually intuitive to us.

Ancient cubit: This is more or less the length of my forearm, which again serves as a very useful reference point for measuring and conceptualizing things. Say I go to build a cabinet. I may measure in cubits. Then, when I go to cut lumber, I just measure it with my forearm, cut, and that's it.

Imperial hogshead: I speculate this barrel size is more or less either the size of an ox's head, or can tightly fit one inside it. Again, this is an animal I might observe daily, making conceptualization simple.

Note that a standard deviation of the size of an average man's hand or forearm, or of the amount of land a given pair of oxen can plow on a given day, does not have a meaningful impact on how I use and relate these units of measurement to everyday life - I'm not precision engineering a space telescope here. I'm just buying wheat berries, plowing fields, and building cabinets.

Contrast these origins with metric's.

Metric meter: "one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris" - whoa get me outta here! I can't relate that to anything I encounter in my day-to-day life.

Metric gram: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water", or "the mass of one cubic 'one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris' of water"

Of course we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions.

This is why imperial is a more useful system for relaying measurements colloquially, for everyday life.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#77

> The fire is believed to have started in Laurence Malone's bonded storehouse on the corner of Ardee Street, where 5,000 hogsheads (262,500 imperial gallons or 1,193,000 litres or 315,200 US gallons) of whiskey were being stored... Hogsheads sound like a fictional unit of measure made up to mock the imperial system.

From the Gaelic word for Barrel 'tocsaid'.

According to Wikipedia and Wiktionary its etymology is English. I also checked with A Pronouncing and Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language by Malcolm McLennan, which has "tocsaid, n. f. a hogshead ; fr. the Eng." Gaelic for barrel is "baraille".

The Irish for hogshead and barrel can be found at https://www.focloir.ie

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#78

> The fire is believed to have started in Laurence Malone's bonded storehouse on the corner of Ardee Street, where 5,000 hogsheads (262,500 imperial gallons or 1,193,000 litres or 315,200 US gallons) of whiskey were being stored... Hogsheads sound like a fictional unit of measure made up to mock the imperial system.

I am going to defend imperial (and other ancient) units of measurement. The metric system is unintuitive but standardized. The imperial system is intuitive but (traditionally) non-standardized. A standardized but unintuitive system is useful in modern science and engineering, where reliability and precision are of utmost importance. An intuitive but non-standardized system is useful for day-to-day communication and c…

This is complete balderdash; I'll go first:

1. What is a "wheatberry"? 2. What is an "oxen"? 3. How long is "a day"?

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#79
There's a PG version at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwood_%26_Company_shipping_... – ‘Waverley Avenue [was] coated in butter and chocolate. […] an ocean of fudge ... flooding the street ... like lava, sufficiently deep to float a rowboat for two blocks along Flushing Avenue. The flood attracted "a thousand and one" local children, keen to taste the mixture. The police initially made no attempt to stop them but around an hour after their arrival truant officers began collecting the children to take them to their schools.’

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irish also, but different perspective. (Have lived away for past 5 years & reflected from afar on our relationship to alcohol) - Strongly dislike the cultural glorification of getting excessively drunk, but can't deny it's there - the stereotype is not based on fiction. - Also strongly like the international reputation we have as being hospitable, fun, and friendly (as evidenced by the comment above), which is essent…

Maybe, but maybe rapport based on “I don’t know you but I’ve heard your kind are a harmless lot who are always up for a drinking party after work”, is useful in a very limited set of circumstances, such as meeting a new team of peers, maybe. I’d still argue not, since the point of rapport building is to get to know the person in front of you, not how well they fit your preconception / stereotype. In a large majority…

> the UK still has astronomical alcohol consumption, but they don’t get labelled the same way as the Irish

It shows how sticky stereotypes are and how they allow people to point at others without really thinking about themselves. I've got an example too. Within the UK Scotland gets a bad rap for being a nation of overweight people who eat deep fried food every other meal, when in reality the rate of obesity within the country are within a couple of percentage points (something like 27.5% in Scotland, 25% in England). I have literally had overweight English people trying to crack wise with me (Scottish, 83kg/190cm - basically in shape) about Scottish people being fat which is kinda funny. I thought it would be a bit rude to turn it round on them - there's a line between banter and direct insults after all :D

Ireland gets it a bit worse though. So many people love to try to mirror the accent or joke about the potato famine or the troubles (not excluding Scotland from this, this stuff occurs across the English speaking world) wee bit edgy for my liking.

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