I caught Lorraine Pascale in passing on the TV a week or so ago and was pleased to hear her say “100 mill” (or whatever the volume was) when she was referring to adding in some liquid to a recipe.

Quite often when reading out or quoting a measurement others – particularly medics – will say instead, “mills” – which really grates on me.

I would have no argument if they spoke out the unit in full and said millilitres but mills is just innumerate (and illiterate.)

A unit’s abbreviation subsumes the plural – it is singular or plural depending on the measurement’s value and is always written as singular.

For instance ⁰C stands for degrees Celsius whether or not the temperature is 1⁰C (1 degree Celsius,) 25⁰C (25 degrees Celsius,) 450⁰C (450 degrees Celsius,) or even 0⁰C (0 degrees Celsius.) Note the plural in that last one. Only values of 1 or -1 have the unit pronounced in the singular when read out or written in full.

Hence 1 ml (one millilitre) but 20 ml (20 millilitres) etc.

100 ml ought to be pronounced 100 mill as Pascale did; not 100 mills.

Mills are where wheat is ground into flour, or else factories of one sort or another (but checkout the Wiki page for a full list!).

I have temporarily stopped reading Looking For Jake by China Miéville about halfway through to concentrate on my latest Interzone review (of Empty Space by M John Harrison) in order to have plenty of time to get the review done.

I’ll be getting back to Looking For Jake in due course.

This is what a blue moon looks like. Maybe.

(Picture of yesterday’s full Moon from Astronomy Picture of the Day 1/9/12.)

Blue moons are popularly held to be rare events but, astronomically, they occur reasonably regularly.

A blue moon is nowadays often referred to as the second full Moon in a calendar month.

The link above (to Sky and Telescope) has the original definition as being the fourth full Moon in a season (winter, spring, summer or autumn) with seasons based on the tropical rather than calendar year.

According to that definition yesterday’s full Moon wasn’t blue but there will be one in August next year. See the graph below (taken from the Sky and Telescope article, where they take the blame for the confusion):-

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This is the home of Livingston FC. One of those pretty characterless modern stadiums (a group to which the Rock would belong if it didn’t lie directly below Dumbarton Castle.)

This is the main entrance (West Stand.) A stitch of two photos to get the whole length in.

The South Stand:-

The East Stand (again a stitch):-

You can see that unlike most lower Division Scottish football grounds the corners are filled in.

The North Stand:-

It’s tidy and compact inside certainly but I wonder how many times this has been full; except when Livi were playing in the SPL. (And not very often even then.)

A couple more photos of Almondvale are on my flickr.

*I know it’s sponsored as the Braidwood Motors Stadium but who can be bothered?