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Dublin Whiskey Fire

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Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#91

Post by adamsmith143 »

fsckboy wrote: post #6

the idea of Irishmen drinking themselves to death in a whisky flood is... something my wee dram of Irish blood is not qualified to comment on, but it only killed a dozen people. Near twice that number died in the molasses flood in Boston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood The density of molasses is about 1.4 tonnes per cubic metre, 40% more dense than water, resulting in the molasses having a great de…

> the idea of Irishmen drinking themselves to death in a whisky flood is... something my wee dram of Irish blood is not qualified to comment on, but it only killed a dozen people.

Kind of shocked by this. Why did the indulge like that? One could go to any college party in the US and find enough alcohol to kill themselves and yet it rarely happens. Were there that many people in Dublin that were hopeless alcoholics at the time?

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#92

Post by beloch »

1,193,000 L is just over 9 railway tanker cars.

I have a hard time picturing large numbers, so I use railway tanker cars the way some people use bananas for scale.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#94

Post by cafard »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #76
jasontdev wrote: post #5

> 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…

I would add that the league and the (ancient) parasang are right around three miles, about the distance the military thinks appropriate to walk between breaks.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#95

Post by jhugo »

lostlogin wrote: post #53
olddustytrail wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a grand total of 13 people out of an entire city population overdosed to death when given access to unlimited alcohol. I doubt any other city would do better. London sure as hell wouldn't.

I wonder how many alcohol related deaths per day a city the size of London has on a typical day.

In the entire UK, 8,974 deaths attributed directly to alcohol in the whole year of 2020 (18.6% higher than in 2019). Most are not acute "drinking yourself to death" but rather alcohol-related liver disease. Scotland and Northern Ireland fare worse than the other countries.

For London specifically, in 2020 it was ~800 deaths, or about 2.2 per day on average.

Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#97

Post by TwoHeadedBeast »

p1necone wrote: post #10
lock-the-spock wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's anachronistic about converting in a modern encyclopedia the currency of the time to the modern currency of that very country? It is also adjusted for inflation.

Yeah, you can't exactly adjust a no longer used currency for inflation - it makes sense to me.

The pound is still with us, however I agree using the Euro makes more sense.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#98

Post by VoodooJuJu »

zeagle wrote: post #89
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I certainly don't want to run afoul of the etiquette rules here but I would ask yourself if you are projecting your long-standing familiarity and the resulting intuition that you have with these units onto everyone else. Nobody who uses meters outside of setting the international standard or working in particle physics would have a working idea where they denoting meters in wavelengths of radioactive decay or hemisph…

>I certainly don't want to run afoul of the etiquette rules here but I would ask yourself if you are projecting your long-standing familiarity and the resulting intuition that you have with these units onto everyone else.

If you want to be rude, do it, but be direct about it and own it. Or rather, don't be rude. Please do not presume anything about the author of a comment nor attempt to make personal attacks against the author, as it's not only rude, it's irrelevant to the substance. I am not the substance of my comment, the origins and intuitiveness of units of measurement is the substance.

>Similarly just because it's convenient to me to think of (mile!) country roads, quarter sections, and acres from familiarity despite using metric elsewhere due to the grids from historical land allocations in Western Canada doesn't devalue other ways of measuring.

I agree.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#99

Post by BoxOfRain »

tdubhro1 wrote: post #69
tonyennis wrote: post #64

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

To be fair we certainly do have a reputation for drunkenness and general loutishness in parts of the Continent, apparently in anywhere with cheap holiday resorts the UK has a bad name.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#100

Post by VoodooJuJu »

LeanderK wrote: post #87
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know if it's sarcasm or not. For one, many units are actually defined using relatable things like your example: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water". Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries (I literally had half a unit kilo weight in my hand an hour ago). Or celsius, 100 is boiling point of water a…

>Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries

Metric units can certainly be adapted to be fractionally relatable, though their origins are certainly not, as I mentioned:

>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.

The grandparent comment mentioned how nonsensical or absurd "hogshead" is as a unit of measurement, and the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural.

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