"Wizard of OS" wrote on 2002-08-20 17:19 UTC: > > For 'draught' beer: > > Serving sizes must be imperial-only. Metric servings are forbidden. The > > mandatory price indication in the bar must have an imperial indication. > > It can be imperial-only or dual. Metric-only price indications are > > forbidden. > > this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard! > typical british!
I actually disagree. The "pint" and "half-pint" simply are the very traditional British pub serving sizes, and if you ever get to Cambridge, I'd be happy to invite you for a pint. This is very much like the "Ma�" and "Halbe" in Bavaria, where only few drinkers actually know or care that these two common serving sizes are actually 1 l and 0.5 l. The word "pint" is in Britain an essential vocabulary, very tightly tied in the mind of the population to the process or ordering beer. What you could do in Britain is to metricate the pint by changing its official definition from 570 ml to 500 ml, such that the English "pint" would really become a translation of the German "Halbe" beer quantity. Considering that this is a reduction in volume, I am sceptical whether it would go down well with the pub population, even if the migration cost (glasses would have to be replaced) would be relatively minor as pub glasses are a fairly low-cost consumable and don't last that long anyway. Metricating the pint would be easier in the US, where it is 473 ml, but they don't have a pub culture like Britain, so the size of the US pint probabaly doesn't matter much to the population there anyway (is my semi-informed guess). Cider is sold in the UK in the same way (same pint and half-pint glasses) as beer, so the same argument applies. For milk on the other hand, I don't see any compelling reason to keep the pint, as milk is rarely ordered like beer in pubs, but comes instead mostly in plastic packages of 1, 2, 4, or 6 pints, which can equally nicely be sold in packages of 0.5, 1, 2, or 3 liters. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
