Is that the cost of marble In U.K. ?

Actually; I was reading this story about a 14 stone boy in London.
Now there is a LOT I can comment about this story, but my reason for posting is the units. The mother says he is 14 stone and has lost 1.5 stone. Good thing they mention pounds and kilos. My question is, how common is using stones in the UK?

And, how tall is this kid? In hands?

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

I thought a stone was 20 lbs.

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

My Handbook says a stone is 14 pounds.

And I guess it could rightly said that the kid has stones.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Completely standard.
Most people in the UK, if asked their weight, will give it in stones and pounds. As a medic who works in kg, I'm constantly having to make the conversion: "Just under ten stone" or "Twelve-and-a-half to thirteen stone" would be typical replies.
Although goods are sold in kilograms, people still seem to like their bathroom scales to work in imperial units: mine is double-calibrated in stones (with fourteen subdivisions for the pounds) and tens of kilograms (with twenty subdivisions for the half kilos).

Grant Hutchison

What annoys me in my hospital, is that even when patients are weighed on the ward by the ward staff their weight is recorded in stones and pounds. Ward scales are in Imperial, though it's easy to buy metric ones.
We haven't calculated drug dosages in milligrams/stone, ever!
And I'll bet you don't in the USA either!

John

In the USA, we use pounds, but most have never even heard of "stone(s)".

We don't use yard much either (except maybe golf), which is why I was wondering how much stones are used. Anyway I never realized it was so common.

And, here's my idea of a yardstick.

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

[Simpsons Kang and Kodos mode]Ssstupid earthlings, letting themselves being foolishly divided by using different measurement systems. They couldn't even get on one line when we dropped the metric system onto them. ahAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA! piowwwwwiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii[/Simpsons Kang and Kodos mode]

(that said, I have just proposed the not so metric unit of area called the "Texas" in another thread )

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

And someone already proposed the Australian conversion.

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Which was an excellent example of the politics behind measurement systems. My new, Universal measurement unit is minutes old, and somebody with an agenda already destroys its global scope.

It was not meant to be.

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Well, there is this little thing we call football.

__________________
SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

That's what you call thinking too quickly... hike

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Last time I was on the shooting range, everything was in yards

If you think that's bad, you should have seen the debates that almost broke out into fights when the people who established the modern S.I. units tried to decide whether a metric year should have 100 days or 1000...

If the stone is small 14 pounds might be enough, but to mine a mountain you will need more.

__________________
Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...

I'd no idea "stone" was still in common use.

Then there's the "hundredweight", which IIRC is 112 pounds, not 100 of anything.

__________________
Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

My dictionary says 100 pounds. And I don't see any type of conversion that is around 1.12*10^X

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

That's a uniquely North American hundredweight; elsewhere in the English-speaking world, it's 112 pounds, as Trebuchet says.
The 100-pound hundredweight is often called a "short" hundredweight, to contrast it with the (older) "long" hundredweight of 112 pounds. Twenty long hundredweight is one long ton, of 2240 pounds, whereas 20 short hundredweight make a short ton of 2000 pounds.
The old imperial long ton is comfortably close to a metric tonne of 1000kg; the North American short ton comes up short in that regard.

Grant Hutchison

"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it."

Abe Simpson

__________________
"I have a cunning plan that cannot fail."
S. Baldrick

Just heard something that no system can cure:

"people throw away 10% of their food. That boils down to 1 pot of yoghurt in 5."

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

...and has 3 hands of ground clearance, and about a stere of cargo space.

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)