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Dublin Whiskey Fire

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Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#101

Post by messe »

wirrbel wrote: post #43
messe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would lean toward the £ means sterling, as Ireland used that from 1868 - 1928, the period in question (and the punt was de-facto pegged to it until the 70s).

That would also have to be inflation adjusted and would be pretty meaningless to as a value to people in Dublin. And then it would more or less only be understood without further calculation by UK inhabitants. The Pound of today is pretty much a different currency to the 19th century

> would be pretty meaningless to as a value to people in Dublin

Utter horseshite, that's like saying a Canadian along the border would be clueless as to CAD-USD conversion rates. The UK is our next door neighbour. It's common enough to buy goods up north, online from the UK, and to travel there. We can generally do a rough conversion in our heads; the same goes for USD nowadays due to the prevalence of online shopping (and the fact that its now at near parity with EUR helps).

> The Pound of today is pretty much a different currency to the 19th century

True of any currency. You may as well argue that any measurement in an inflation adjusted currency is nonsense if you're going to go down that route.

Given that the Sterling was in use then and now, I'd argue that the most meaningful way to calculate value would be to adjust the value for the inflation of Pounds Sterling. That can then be converted as appropriate to euros for convenience (as it seems to have been in the first paragraph of this article).

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#102

Post by FooHentai »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #77
FooHentai wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/togsaid

Perhaps the Gaelic word for barrel somehow came from the English measurement hogshead, but more likely that it was spoken Gaelic for barrel overheard and adopted by English speaking stevedores.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#103

Post by _0ffh »

joker99 wrote: post #70
_0ffh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think whisky is usually stored at "cask strength", which implies a higher concentration of alcohol, and diluted with water at bottling time.

These effects are called Angels' Share [0] and sometimes additionally The Devils' Cut [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel#Angels'_share

No, that effect can affect the strength in both directions, and it's not the reason for the higher ABV in "cask strength" whisky.

After distillation the whisky is at "still strength" (typically ~70% ABV) and diluted to "cask strength" before maturation. Then after that, it's usually diluted further for bottling.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#104

Post by DonaldFisk »

FooHentai wrote: post #102
DonaldFisk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/togsaid Perhaps the Gaelic word for barrel somehow came from the English measurement hogshead, but more likely that it was spoken Gaelic for barrel overheard and adopted by English speaking stevedores.

The main problem with that is that the first recorded occurrence of the word was in Middle English in 1390: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti... i.e. before (Scottish) Gaelic diverged from Irish. If the word had a Middle Irish origin predating this, it would be shared by its descendants in both modern languages. But the Irish word is oigiséad (m), and the Gaelic word is tocsaid (f). Different genders, and Irish dropped the h sound, which (after lenition) Gaelic preserved. So the word must have arrived in Irish and Gaelic independently, presumably from Modern or Late Middle English after Gaelic and Irish diverged into separate languages.

The other problem is that there is no known Irish etymology for either tocsaid or oigiséad, or Malcolm McLennan would have included it in his faclair, but there is a plausible English one. Other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish) have variants of ox-head. Whether it originated in one of those languages or in English is disputed.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#105

Post by sangnoir »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #100
LeanderK wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

> the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural.

So, its an appeal to nature then? Somehow, I doubt it'd make a difference if meter was derived from the total lengths of bishops mitres at parish (everyone knows how tall those hats are - relatable!).

Units are only "intuitive" because that's what you've internalized - similar to how the the golden age of music was when one was a teenager or young adult.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#106

Post by sangnoir »

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…

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

Why then, haven't imperial analogs appeared for data storage?

"This hard drive is old, about 87 Shakespeare's"

"Oh, Twitter was ruined for me when they increased the character limit to a Poem"

"We are web-scale, we serve fourscore Libraries of congress worth of video per second"

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#107

Post by VoodooJuJu »

sangnoir wrote: post #105
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, th…

> the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural. So, its an appeal to nature then? Somehow, I doubt it'd make a difference if meter was derived from the total lengths of bishops mitres at parish (everyone knows how tall those hats are - relatable!). Units are only "intuitive" because that's what you've internalized - similar to how t…

If you want to try using bishops mitres as a unit of measurement, you're more than welcome, but the length of that hat was probably made using a more intuitive reference unit, you might want to use that instead, maybe it was cubits, I'm not sure.

>an appeal to nature then

No. It's an explanation that imperial & similar ancient measurement units were adopted with the goal of being simple and intuitive for people to quickly understand. This was accomplished by choosing immediately relatable reference points. In the case of a hogshead barrel, that reference point was the ox head.

A mile, that's 1000 paces, that's both simple to remember and intuitive.

A kilometer, that's 621.4 paces, that's neither simple to remember nor intuitive.

No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to, this is by definition of each unit in the system.

Re: Dublin Whiskey Fire

#108

Post by sangnoir »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #107
sangnoir wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural. So, its an appeal to nature then? Somehow, I doubt it'd make a difference if meter was derived from the total lengths of bishops mitres at parish (everyone knows how tall those hats are - relatable!). Units are only "intuitive" because that's what you've internalized - similar to how t…

If you want to try using bishops mitres as a unit of measurement, you're more than welcome, but the length of that hat was probably made using a more intuitive reference unit, you might want to use that instead, maybe it was cubits, I'm not sure. >an appeal to nature then No. It's an explanation that imperial & similar ancient measurement units were adopted with the goal of being simple and intuitive for people to qu…

> No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to

This "intuition" is not intrinsic, though, but is because of familiarity. If you've done track sports (or watched athletics), you can visualize 100m. If you've watched NFL, you can "intuit" 10 yards empirically - not because it equals to 30 feet and you look at your own feet. The same goes for 21"/27"/42"/60" (TVs).

The only scenario I can imagine where of human-relatibility would matter is when the unit is unknown to the listener, e.g. if someone introduced me to a carlength (or the notoriously unintuitive 'length of a football field'); however, this is now completely unnecessary with modern education and standardization

The origin of the measure is just lore, and counts for nothing; which is why being immersed into a system which you were previously unfamiliar with (metric or imperial) bestows the same "intuitiveness" - as anyone who joined the US army can tell you.

The argument that imperial units are somehow relatable as they are similar to naturally occurring things is a textbook appeal to nature.

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