Re: OT: My wedding pictures

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 01:10:04PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> By "7.5l" he means, indeed, 7.5 liters.  The U.S. customary gallon is
> 3.79 liters,
Which I can never remember.  Fortunately, I can remember that
U.S. gallon (which is the same as the old English "wine gallon")
is defined to be exactly 231 cubic inches, and that one inch is
defined to be exactly 2.54 cm.  So a gallon is exactly 231 * 2.54 *
2.54 * 2.54 = 3785.411784 cubic centimeters = 3.785411784 liters.
Simple, n'est-ce pas? :)

> the Imperial gallon is 4.55 liters.
And was originally defined in terms not of some other measure of
volume, but of weight - under precisely controlled conditions of
temperature and pressure, one Imperial gallon of distilled water
weighs exactly 10 lbs.  This yields messy numbers for conversion
factors, even though, like the inch, the Imperial gallon has been
officially redefined in metric terms, and is now defined to be
exactly 4.54609 liters.  (That one I had to look up.)

> > "My dad is a drunk and my mother a whore, no wonder we're so devastatingly
> > poor."
>
> This actually rhymes in some varieties of American English, those that
> make the keywords [hu@\r] and [pu\@r].
Actually, it rhymes in my 'lect going the other way;  I pronounce
"poor" as [pO`r\], that is, as an exact homophone of "pore".
And this seems to be the case for most folks around me as
well.

-Mark

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