Whilst texting Violet Towne from Los Angeles airport last week, my iPhone’s auto-correct decided to add a word to my vocabulary:



I assumed, of course, that it wasn’t just pulling the word ‘poundal’ out of its digital ass, so I looked it up. Wikipedia defines a poundal ‘as the force necessary to accelerate 1 pound to 1 foot per second, per second. 1 pdl = 0.138254954376 N exactly.’

It goes on to give some mathematical examples and further introduces the concept of the ‘slug’: ‘one pound-force will accelerate one pound-mass at 32 feet per second squared; we can scale up the unit of mass to compensate, which will be accelerated by 1 ft/s2 (rather than 32 ft/s2) given the application of one pound force; this gives us a unit of mass called the slug, which is about 32 pounds mass.’

But one should take heed:

Note: Slugs (32.174 049) and poundals (1/32.174 049) are never used in the same system, since each exists to solve the same problem and will cancel each other out; both should not be used together.

Got that? Don’t mix up yer poundals and yer slugs. They will cancel one another out and we’d be back exactly were we started.

In the lounge.