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In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other over strips of land
- fijal 11y agoI like how the article start with making fun of ancient body measures, but then uses feet to compare.
- lostlogin 11y agoI'm currently working on a (very very basic) knitting app. Proof reading text is awful. Patterns use skeins, yards, metres, mm, cm, inches, gauge (arbitrary units) etc all interchangeably. It is kind of impressive how the units coexists. It pains me.
- mc32 11y agoOrwell would love the more rustic and humanistic imperial measures over the sterile metric system. http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml
- Phemist 11y agoI can see where the writer of that article is coming from, having been born in 1950, Canada would've started its "metrification" in his/her 20s. Arguably a very late time to switch your mode of thought from imperial to metric. However, the key point Orwell makes: "But I have never heard a Frenchman say, ‘He is a hundred and forty-two centimetres high’" is, quite simply, false. To my Dutch ears, hearing about a 1.42m high man does bring up a vivid image of a very short person who'd have problems grabbing anything from a kitchen counter. Thus, it seems more like a legacy problem, rather than the imperial system being intrinsically more relatable than the metric system. A better test would be to see how long it would take someone who is unfamiliar with either systems, to pick up either. Does it take kids longer to learn metric than imperial? I doubt that..
- jmnicolas 11y agoI'm French but I can make the conversions of feet, pounds etc in my head quite easily (divide by 3 and 2 respectively to get a good enough approximation). But I'm at loss with Fahrenheit though.
- Phemist 11y agoThe point is not really about the difficulty of conversion, but about having to do it at all. Whether hearing about a 1.42m high man brings up a vivid image immediately, or only after conversion to imperial measures. Not unlike how becoming fluent in a given second language means there are no longer any intermediates. Rather than having to think consciously of a certain sentence in your own native language and then converting that consciously to a sentence in the given second language, you can just immediately think of the sentence in the given second language. This happens gradually of course, there are a few length measurements in feet & inches that immediately give me a clear/rich image of the intended length: 6 feet, my own height in feet/inches, etc. However, the set of imperial length measures for which this happens is much, much smaller than that for metric length measures. For instance, I have absolutely no clue how long a yard is, let alone a hundred yards, and how that relates to a mile. Only after conversion, and doing the conversion enough times, will it become clear(er) to me.
- abandonliberty 11y agoOwell's complaint that it's hard to estimate sizes in cm is debatable. As a tourist in Europe, I had plenty of people quote cm for various things that I would measure in feet and inches. It didn't seem hard for them. His argument around literary value is interesting. There are many languages which may be superior in those respects. English excels at being precise and scientific.
- mc32 11y agoOf course. We can all get used to whatever measures one has to use in daily life. Still, I think because many of the imperial units did actually come from human physical bases, they are intrinsically humanistic, whereas the metric system simply took arbitrary measures and divided and multiplied in powers of ten --leaving very large gaps. Kind of the same thing in architecture, when they talk about human scale vs more modernist epic architecture which lacks human scale (Brasilia, for example)
- NetStrikeForce 11y agoThere are no gaps between metric measures, especially not "very large" ones. It happens that people used to the metric system take full advantage of it by using decimals, whereas people raised using the imperial system don't. In the metric system you have much bigger units than with imperial, much smaller too and all the needed ones in between. A good example is height. It is much more precise and easy to use the metric system to say I'm 1'87 meters than saying 5 feet 11 inches, which mixes units. If you want to be more precise you could say 1'871 in metric and 5 feet 11 inches and something like "a sixteenth of an inch" (sorry I'm not being accurate, I didn't even look up). Or human weight? Don't get me started with stone and pounds. A stone is something more than 6kg and a pound is about 400g or 0'4kg. Good luck with that. The imperial system might have an aura of romanticism for those of you raised on countries that still use it, but the metric system is one of the most elegant solutions civilisation has invented. It works in every case better than any other system and it is easy to teach to kids. 10/10 would measure again ;) I guess, after all there's a reason the international science community adopted the metric system.
- cubix 11y agoHe might have a point with other units, but when it comes to temperature, Celsius strikes me as more humanistic and intuitive. Zero as the freezing point of water, and 100 as the boiling point is easy for any human to relate to since we interact with water every day.
- nitrogen 11y agoFahrenheit is fairly humanistic as well: 0 is very roughly as cold as you'll ever see, and 100 is about as hot as you'll ever see.
- tdsamardzhiev 11y agoThat may be true where you live. Try explaining it to somebody from Kuwait or Yakutsk, though.
- spdionis 11y ago0 is about as cold as you'll ever see? Except in half of the world?
- lostlogin 11y agoI'm not generally interested in the temperature when it is 'normal'. However when it is unusually hot or cold I might check.
- mc32 11y agoOne the one hand, yes, (freezing and boiling) but on the other hand, 1 degree C is not always fine enough to describe a temperature. I know, one could use fractions. Basically, the jump from 37C to 38C is noticeable, whereas something similar like a jump from 98F to 99F, feels more graduated.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoFahrenheit originally had the freezing point of water at 30 degrees, and body temperature at 90 degrees (can't get much more humanistic than that :-)). Then he fudged the scale to 32 and 96, so there would be 64 intervals between the two. Probably no one here needs to have it explained why 64 equal intervals was a convenient number for the task of marking the thermometer (compass and straight edge would be enough). Unfortunately it turned out that his number for the average body temperature was a little bit off. So it goes...
- fsloth 11y agoConsidering I respect Orwell's insights about lot of things this passage is especially dim: "There is, for instance, effectively no unit between the metre, which is more than a yard, and the centimetre, which is less than half an inch" Between the metre (100 centimetres) and the centimetre there is the "ten centimetres" - which we use extensively. Human hand is pretty good even in metric system. My thumb is 2 cm wide, and if I extend my hand the distance between the tops of my thumb and pinky is roughly 20 cm.
- mc32 11y agoThe imperial system is better positioned for those who are not exposed to maths. These systems developed before literacy and don't require literacy for its fundamentals. Of course it's a moot point these days, but this is why it's a more humanist system of weights and measures. The imperial system gives you more humanist whole units. Inches, yards, furlongs, miles, leagues, not to mention the less usual (today) digit, finger, palm, barleycorn, etc. Pounds, stone, hundredweight, woolsack, tonne, etc.
- tdsamardzhiev 11y agoThe 10cm unit actually even has a name - a decimetre :)
- fsloth 11y agoYes, but that's not what we use in vernacular (in finnish, that is) :)
- moonchrome 11y ago>He had been sitting on the river bank across from his house, just at the spot where a favourite cousin of his had died years before, accidentally electrocuted when illegally electrofishing in the river. That sounds like something out of Borat.
- greglindahl 11y agoDid you know that the Kazakhstan scenes in Borat were actually shot in Romania? The villagers are speaking Romanian, the car drawn by oxen is the Communist-era Romanian car, etc.
- dsfyu404ed 11y agoAll the ghetto stuff the first world scoffs at is pretty commonplace. here's a summary of a conversation about fishing my friend had with a group of school children when he went to India friend: so how do you guys catch fish? kid: (indicating order of preference) explosives, electricity, bleaching powder and nets friend: beaching powder?!?! kid: yup At face value it sounds like bleaching powder would contaminate the meat but my friend and I figure that the bleaching powder chemically burns their gills causing them to suffocate. He said he saw some fish markets disturbingly far from water considering the lack of refrigeration. The electrical grid was beyond horrible and there was tons of smog in the city. He saw two guys welding hand rails in a stairwell by jumper cabling the welder to the railing at the bottom and attaching the leads to the railing at the top. To change between which rail they were working on they'd yell down and have someone flip the cables. Technically safe but not OSHA approved. Now that I think about it, I really gotta try fishing with my stick welder...
- moonchrome 11y agoI know but it's still (morbidly) hilarious. Also are you sure bleaching powder is used for burning gills ? When I was a kid my grandfather took me fishing for eels after tides were high enough that they could get from sea to small ponds on the shore. We would drop this plant that secreted white liquid and supposedly blind them then they would swim a shore and you could just pick them up in the morning - I'm thinking maybe bleaching powder is for the same purpose ? IIRC it was illegal because it killed tadpoles and tiny fish that would eat mosquitoes eggs (the entire village used to do it regularly before).
- andrewbalitsky 11y agoWouldn't be the first time a different land made a different people in modern times. The Pirahã in the Amazon killed a sick infant with alcohol. Why? I'd let Daniel Everett explain... http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120 http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386...
- andreiv 11y agoI really don't like the Hollywood-style of describing the work on the fields: "But then, in another light, you see the tools of violence being carried into the fields: the steel crowbar, the ranga, for making holes in the earth, the axe with its bright and burnished edge, the cleft oak posts, the hoes, the hedge slashers – all the instruments with which management can be imposed. Cutting, controlling, slicing, hacking, killing: these are aspects of everyday existence". This is hardly a "Texas chainsaw massacre" pre/sequel. Most of the people lack proper education. Everything "higher" as 4 school years is a "gift". The majority were children when WW2 broke out and saw their parents being striped of possession, such as lands. After the war came the communists, which did the same thing, again. These are people which have a deeply rooted passion for their ancestral land. The have, unfortunately, never learned to solve their problems in a civilized manner, because they haven't seen that in practice. They've mostly seen abuse and react the same way...
- buro9 11y ago> never learned to solve their problems in a civilized manner, because they haven't seen that in practice Oh they have. They've observed that the people with the most power (legal or otherwise), force, or money get what they want. They've observed that the only way to not lose their land is to stand on it with weapons and physically confront those who would take it away from them.
- andreiv 11y agoIt really depends on how far the physical confrontation goes. You can't farm the land from prison. That's the "best case", when they go to prison. If they're wounded, for example, and can't move, they become a burden for the remaining family members. I do agree that they are filled with hopelessness with regards to the legal process of solving problems. This falls into the same abuse category of loosing their lands, with the exception that it's not by force, but by law...
- jacquesm 11y agoThe biggest thief of land in that region (and in most of the rest of Romania) is the Romanian state itself. Land that was confiscated under communist rule is only given back or compensated for after many years of lawsuits against the state (in some cases decades), which drags her heels in an attempt to outlive the bringers of these suits. The state has enormous resources compared to the people involved and so they tend to either lose or fail to collect if and when there finally is a judgment. During my time there I learned of two families in this situation and it is not as if I know a whole lot of Romanians. Quite possibly the land-grab under the communists is yet another (direct or indirect) factor in driving land-scarcity for extremely poor, small-time farmers like this. Unfortunately they are so poor that if that's the case they are not going to be able to get the state to give back any land. That's mostly reserved to those that are wealthy enough to see that whole process through and then wealthy enough to force the state to pay up or give back their possession. Quite a few people simply die waiting for a resolution of these cases.
- rdtsc 11y agoWell but palinca that was mentioned in passing doesn't help either... with killing, anger and then regret later next day.
- gloves 11y agoAll over the world, neighbours kill each other over strips of land
- luke1972 11y agoSo in the West we have kids shooting each other over the colours of the clothes they wear but in Romania you have adults killing each other over land rights.
- sebastianz 11y ago> In the poor and remote province of Maramureş in the northern Carpathians, cut off by bad mountain roads from the rest of Romania to the south... Sadly, even from the first sentence, this article is full of sensationalist, incorrect and exaggerated information. I lived 20 years of my life in Maramureș - albeit in the city - and it is neither a poor region, nor remote, nor cut off by mountain roads from anything [1]. It's very hard to take anything in this article seriously. It was a very sad and disappointing thing to read this morning about a beautiful region with friendly people and old traditions... [1] http://tinyurl.com/q98g9g5 http://tinyurl.com/q98g9g5 (google maps)
- Thimothy 11y agoIn the village I grew up, in a forested and mountainous area of western Europe, there were a pair of farmers who lived quite apart from the main part of the town. They were house-to-house neighbors, and were the only humans who lived in several km around. One of them had a vegetable garden as secondary means of sustenance, while the other had a herd of goats. A single month would not go by without the people of the town talking about their last argument, sometimes involving gunshots, maybe a dead goat and, in the right time of the year, viciously defended mushrooms. I regret not knowing what finally happened to them, but the point is that little towns will be little towns, everywhere. When the only human contact you have is the neighbor you don't get along with, and you are not precisely in the top percentile of cultural and social graces, the results are consistent in every small town I have ever seen.
- cafard 11y agoIn the Denver suburbs about 35 years ago, two neighbors had a dispute about a small strip of property. These were not subsistence farmers. They were not unschooled; one had a Ph.D. in the sciences. It got to the point that the Ph.D. was mowing his lawn with a firearm strapped to his hip. The local police were called repeatedly. I don't think that I ever heard how it was resolved, but it must have been.
- mci 11y agoThe real cause is geometry. They have narrow strips of land because they were divided this way when inherited. In Poland, the government has been joining farmland since 1919: they give you the same area you had scattered into strips or even a bit larger one, but in one squarish piece. Win-win.
- elros 11y agoI wonder how this plays out when the consolidated land you get sits on less farmable earth than the fragmented one you had.
- supergirl 11y agoso hn is just reddit now?