Five-second Pints

An anonymous reader writes "Forget about gigahertz processors, faster pipes, quicker CD burners, etc. The BBC News is reporting on a truly important development: A tap that can pour a pint in just 5 seconds. Bottoms up!!"

Re:Guinness

[JimmyGulp]

The idea is *just* to increase speed. Its for the pubs (or more likely, "trendy bars"), as pointed out here [ananova.com], where queues become a problem. From the ananonva article, its been done by the people who do Carling, which is a beer for people who don't like their insides very much (personal preference, I hate the stuff), and have both a short attention span and no ability to wait it out patiently at a packed bar.

I want my beer served at 4degC, in 117.5 seconds (or whatever the advert claims), with a little shamrock on the top ;)

All thats left

[McAddress]

Now we just have to combine it with the wireless beer glass [slashdot.org] reported on Slashdot earlier.

Re:The Pint Forever!

[Pentagram]

I'm somewhat bemused to discover that British pubs are still dispensing pints.

There's special exemptions in the metric legislation for beer and milk to be sold in pints for cultural reasons.

Re:All thats left

[Anonymous Coward]

and the peltier cooled mug [slashdot.org] as well..

Re:The Pint Forever!

[fm6]

Hardly a troll -- you ask some important questions. Do wish you hadn't posted as an AC though.

Just after the big AT&T breakup, my company hired away a Big Name from Bell Labs. Way out of my league, but my office was next door, our jobs overlapped, and we became friends. He had a lot of AT&T manuals in five-ring binders. I asked him why AT&T didn't didn't use three-ring binders like everybody else. He pointed out that AT&T was so big (before the breakup they were the second largest private entity on the planet) that they could set their own standards.

Current parallels to that include Microsoft's ability to resist using w3C and ISO standards, and the U.S. resistence to the metric system. Though they actually did try during the 70s, when you saw road signs that gave distances in both miles and klicks. But consumer resistence rolled that effort back.

Before you sneer at the stupidity of ordinary Americans, consider the difference between Europoe and the U.S. Before the metric system, Europe had a really painful hodgpodge of measuring system. Which varied not just between countries, but between professions. Apothecary measure, troy weight (used by goldsmiths and jewelers), various kinds of freight ... The metric system won out not because it was more "logical" but because it was something everybody could agree on. But when you have a couple hundred-million people all using the same traditional system, it's less of an issue.

Which is not an excuse for those NASA contractors who refuse to change over. The scientific and engineering community has been metric for decades. The fact that NASA is unable to enforce standardization on its contractors is a really painful sign of their political feebleness and bureaucratic inertia.

I have to nitpick your claim that we "can't even get the old Imperial measurements right". Here's the history: when the U.S. broke off from British rule, the measurement systems were actually identical. Unfortunately that "system" was a really nasty hodpodge of traditional measures. In 1822, Britain tried to rationalize measurement, not by going metric (evil French-Jacobin invention!) but by inventing a new set of measurements that was easy to verify and close enough to traditional measures to be accepted. Thus the Imperial Gallon was defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water at normal temperature and pressure.

The U.S. continued to use traditional English measure, but finally started to eliminate some of the marginal systems. For volume, we're currently down to two: the English Wine Gallon and Corn Gallon, though we currently call them the Liquid Gallon and Dry Gallon. I supposed it would have made a little more sense to adopt the Imperial system -- but in 1822 that would have been politically impossible, for the same reasons the UK invented the Imperial system rather than going metric.

Re:The Pint Forever!

[SEE]

We do get the old Imperial measures right; we just don't use the new Imperial mesures. Your "Standard Imperial" wasn't invented until 1824, long after the U.S. gained its independence.

For example, there were (at least) two gallon sizes in the Empire in 1750 -- the 282 cubic inch beer gallon established by Elizabeth I, and the 231 cubic inch wine gallon established by Queen Anne.

The U.S. inherited both gallons, and eventually dropped the beer gallon entirely, keeping only the wine gallon.

On the other hand, the British, in 1824, dropped both, in favor of a new unit equal to ten pounds of water, which at 277.42 cubic inches was similar but not identical to the old beer gallon.

In any case, the U.S. has been legally metric for 110 years now. We merely have never tried to force people to stop using the old measures by arresting or fining them.