HOORAH FOR DOZENAL!

Just now I am building a model of "portadam" water retention struts. The height of the strut in question is 12'-0" (a nice height). The strut is canted at 45 degrees. What handy-dandy (pray tell) dimension is so awfully close to an even number of feet that it makes you leap out of your Aeron and shout in glee that the neighboring biz thinks you are insane? (and, yes, you might very well be, but only the near insane truly invent anything, the rest simply watch television to their deaths)? In other words, what is the square root of two times one dozen? (Yes y'all know it)...

Two weeks ago my girl scout daughter had to sell cookies. My wife handled distribution for the troop. Of course, all the packages are boxed by the ..... (fill in the blank!). So how did we tally the boxes? yes... we used dozenal! And made no mistakes, everyone got their cookies. *56 dozen boxes of cookies in the front room! What's even more delighful was dividing the boxes among the *11 girls in the troop: the very flexible dozen, easily and discernably broken into pairs, 3s, 4s, and half dozens, handling the odd fives and sevens nicely too. Some boxes packed 2 x 6 thin mints, 3 x 4 trefoils, etc. Hooray for the indefatiguable DOZEN!

Maybe I said it earlier, but I again had to divide a 1000'-0" square parcel of land into thirds. Well it's dreadful to think you'd get a sea of repeating threes. Nope... it's 333'-4" Hey, partial dozenal is better than none at all! Cut it in half and you get 166'-8", no mess, no fuss.

btw it is weird, how in this supposedly decimal world, how most folks accept it when you say "48, what a nice round number." No one flinches. In the board meeting two weeks ago, this suit says "Make it 48, nice round number". Here here. Why didn't he say fifty? Fifty may be "easy" to manipulate in standard reckoning (i.e., decimal), but we all know somehow that 48 is easier to work with physically.

God willing we never convert to decimal metric.