I got this British 1985 Proof set really dirt cheap as the seller couldn't care less how cheap it would go for.

The coins are really perfect and I really like it except for the certificate which I saw a glaring error. Now spot the error and notice why I am pretty amused.



(Sorry for the crappy picture but yes, I can indeed see the awful glaring mistake there)

Actually in reference to Britannia, it may have been in use for over three hundred years, but in fact it was also used in Roman British coinage, which they allude to, but do not describe.

I'm still looking at an error that's a lot worse than that

Hint: read the description of the 50 pence coin.

I am thinking that there had to be 7 sided coins in one of the developing countries before Britain, ie I think Yemen may have had them

Do we get a wheelbarrow with the set?

Wow, that would sure beat plate money in terms of heft!

The largest plate money was 10 Kg, lot smaller than 13.50 Kg.

Yes, that's sure one horrible error!!!

Whoa

Kg rather than g i presume?

If you measure a persons weight in stones
I can understand you do not know the difference between kg and g
and I suppose the printer was the culprit

Yes i'm a pounds, stones, hundredweight man myself.

I'm passible in metric but i struggle sometimes. I presume a Kg is 1000 times more than a g?

Same with mm, cm and m, i can visualise them (which is more than i can do for g and kg), km totally baffle me.

What throws me the most though (and i know this is stupid) is the fact that no one used decimetres (or is it dekametres?), i.e a tenth of a metre. 10mm in a cm, and then i get tempted to say 10cm in a metre... figuring it goes up in tens, i know subconciously that dm is missing but when i'm thinking real fast i sometimes omit it and get it completely wrong! Of course there's 100 cm in a m being that the clue is centi...

If you think i get baffled in metric then wait till you see the mess i make of Imperial. 1760 yards in a mile right? (i just remember it's George III's year)

well, here in The Netherlands we certainly use decimeter (= 10 cm = 0.1 m) in spoken language.

Decameter (10 m) is hardly ever used, but hectometer (100 m) is used, but not as often as kilometer (1000 m)

The dm is never used in Britain, i wish it was as it would make things much easier. The main problem with metric is i have an aversion to large numbers, to think 30cm is only 3dm, looks much nicer.

Hmm i'd always wondered what an hectometre was! It's another unit we never use.

The main problem in the UK is we are stuck in a bilingual no man's land, we're half way between the two. Officially and legally everything is in metric, (except roads which are in imperial). Whilst everyday stuff around the house is left to the system you're comfortable with, so naturally people use both.

Number juggling game everyday. I'm as guilty as the next man because i used mm/cm interchangably with inches and feet. With weight it's grams, ozs, lbs and stone all the way. I never use kg. If it's too small to use oz (i.e coins) then i'll use grams rather than drams or troy weight. So you not only have to know the divisions of the metric and imperial systems separately but also the conversions between the two.

HEAVY COIN!!

I know what a troy ounce looks like
But in the old days when I went in Birmingham in a sweets shop I had not the slightest idea what an ounce was in sugar sweets and I wanted one hundred grams of five different sweets
I ended up by saying enough when I thought I had like 100 grams
( I had a girlfriend once working for Cadburry )

I worked in an international engineering team and at one time a british engineer tried to put an agitator in an american 10 000 gallon reactor
It did not fit because the british gallon is 4.5 liter and the american gallon only 3.8 liter so the agitator was way to big

Yeah the difference between the US/UK systems is pretty telling. Not only is the measure of capacity different, but also the measure of weights are different. UK tons are not the same as US tons. A British ton is 2240 pounds.

Metric definately makes more sense, i'll not argue there.

It is not only metric but the standardisation of the whole measurement universe

I learned to work with BTU's British termal units and knew what it meand in
Kilocalories

But when I went to Univ we still used horsepower for a car and now it is kilowatt
and a lot of standard measurements changed like the new gigajoule they insist on etc

Sorry i didn't mention it out explicity, i wasn't just referring to metyric being more sensible on the grounds of it working in 10s, i also meant it was more sensible because it standardised things across the board.

Although it does have to be said that Metric is not a 'fun' as Imperial. By that i mean doing calculations... i like the archaic nature of imperial it's as fun to work with as pounds, shillings and pence.

I know what you mean
I still quote my car as having 150 horsepower instead of 110 kilowat
And I still quote my centralheating has having 21 000 kilocalories and my
airconditioning as having 15000 kilofrigories

Units can be flabbergating
I still remember a professor at univ in 1970 saying that the coil I had calculated would be big enough to fill a train with 5 wagons
The coil I calculated was in Gauss i think

Same with TVs, apparently in Germany screen widths are still described in 'inches'. Is this true?

I dunno about germany, but TV screens here are measured in cm diagonal, but computer monitirs in inches....

Strangest thinhs happen in Canada, where my cousin uses temp in centigrade when it's the environment tempertaure and Fahrenheit when she's talking about the water temperature in the hot tub they have

"it's +3 outside and the tub is 80 degrees"

Ah Fahrenheit is something i've never used, i was on Celsius from day one.

I have a converter for when I talk to my american friend
I do not have any feel for Fahrenheit and he has no feel for Celsius
He did not even remember at how many Fahrenheit water boils