Seriously. Many ingredients are different depending on if theyâre packed, scooped, or sifted. 1 cup of brown sugar can be very different than another cup.
I tried this with cocoa powder before, as I've seen some people in cooking videos shake the cocoa in the cup, and shake the cup to flatten it. And others scoop the cocoa with a spoonand flatten it with the spoon to fill the cup.
The second method yielded over 1.6 times the amount of cocoa powder!
I do find cooking easier in grams. Just put the bowl on the scale and add ingredients until it hits the number. No measuring cups to wash. But it would life changing if woodworking switched to metric. Doing any sort of exact math is annoying as hell. What is 12â7â divided by 4? How many 1/8â is 0.55 inches?? It is my own personal hell.
It's also a lot easier to multiply and divide recipes if you switch it over to metric. This is particularly useful if you don't have enough of one ingredient and need to reduce the others by that ratio.
Then there's the ability to measure the ingredient directly out of the container, using any scoop you can find, rather than needing multiple sets of measuring spoons.
I do find cooking easier in grams. Just put the bowl on the scale and add ingredients until it hits the number. No measuring cups to wash.
Uh, you know metric has volume measurements as well, and Imperial has weight measurements? Measuring cup vs scales is not really a difference in metric and imperial.
Directions and nutrition information and other stuff like that tend to use mass for metric and volume for imperial. Yeah, you can convert stuff, but it's annoying.
I get around it by just working in inches entirely. If some guy needs the foot-and-inch measurement I'll convert but generally calling for something to be 97 5/8" is sufficient, without needing to add feet into the equation.
I do agree that metric would be interesting. I have a metric tape measure I use when I am practicing botany so I can work on familiarizing myself with common metric distances like 10/100cm
Fun probably-already-known fact: NASA accidentally destroyed a $200 million Mars orbiter from of a missed imperial->metric conversion, because NASA does generally work in metric, and some Lockheed-Martin software provided numbers in imperial (while claiming to be metric)
Didn't you see the meme: "There are 2 types of countries, those that ise the metric system and those that landed on the moon."?
It's also usually shared by the same idiots that don't realise that barley corn is an actual measurement in their beloved imperial system.
Ask any of these smart arses how barley corns are in a foot or how many feet are in a mile and suddenly you hear excuses.
Not to forget that the inch defined by the meter.
TBF in practice a lot of countries use the imperial system, from Canada to the UK to Jamaica to the Philippines. They just âuse metricâ on paper.
Also, here in the Netherlands we use inches for screen sizes and cups for some cooking recipes. I will insist that my monitor is 55cm and even tech people ask me how much that is with full sincerity.
I'd heard of that before so after a quick google America passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975 then in 1982 the Metric Board was abolished by President Ronald Reagan...
So like the harbinger of doom for American progress he was Regan killed it...
I was born in the US and have switched by myself. My brother thought I was weird until one day we went to the hardware store.
I needed to buy a 15/64 in drill bit, but they didn't have it. So then we thought, fine, maybe we can use the next closest size...
...
Except WTF is the next size up or down from 15/64??!!! Neither of us could figure it out. Internet wasn't great. Sales people didn't know. We left because we weren't sure what to buy.
In metric, it's trivial. 5mm drill bit, 4mm is smaller, 6mm is bigger.
After this, he stopped thinking I was a weirdo for using metric measurements. But he still uses imperial because murica.
Also, interesting, I learned that he thinks imperial units were invented by the US. I told him they were British units and I stopped caring about British units in 1776, but he didn't seem to believe me.
16/64 is 1/4. Your next size up is a quarter inch. Is it intuitive? Maybe not. Is it really that hard? Only if your educational institutions have also failed you.
Everyone has trouble with something that's basic for someone else - we just have different skills. If these fractions are too confusing for a significant minority of people, then that's a good reason to switch from fractional to decimal.
You technically only need kosher salt if the recipe involves some of kind of fermentation or yeast rise, because the iodine in non-kosher salt will kill the yeast before it can rise.
You can teaspoon the shit out of everything. 3tsp to a table. 5ml to 15ml. Cut recipes by turning everything into a tablespoon. Need to make 1/2 of something that is already 1/4 cup? That's 16 tbsp to a cup, so you were at 4, now half a 1/4 cup is simply 2 tbsp
For dry shit, get a gram scale and welcome to consistency city
Super selfish reason but as an architect in the US, I deal with nice round imperial numbers all day. Door frames, typically 2â. Standard commercial door, 3âx7â. All the codes are based around imperial too. ADA door width, 3â. Masonry Dimension, every 8 inches. At this point, it would be hard to remember that ADA turning radius is 1525 mm (not the easy 5ââŠ. And yes, I know thatâs changing to 67â soon). There are literally hundreds of dimensions I would have to relearn. I suppose itâs probably for the best to switch over and rip that bandaid off, but damn, it would be a headache and take me much longer to review drawings in metric (in the short term).
I assume you would also introduce a new standard with rounded numbers, metric doors are also 200x80 cm for example, and sizes of everything gets rounded in the rest of the world, too. Timber sizes differ a little between north america and the rest of the world, it is a different framework, you'd get used to it.
All I think about is how much current tooling in manufacturing is made to use those round imperial measurements, and how much it would cost to convert/change them over. That's possibly the #1 reason why the US will never go metric.
True, would just have to get accepted by the ICC and all the state legislatures who approve state wide code. I have a feeling it will be difficult to convince some of the less forward thinking states to accept metric codes that take into account the roundingâŠ. Who knows though. I donât know a ton about that side of things
I also do because it is ISO standard. I also do 24 hours for time. I wish scheduling application would do that. I don't know how many times I have scheduled a meeting for 8PM the following day instead of 8AM.
The imperial system (of length at least) has a very human basis. An inch is the first joint of your thumb, the foot is your foot, the yard is one step, a stride is two (step left, step right), a mile is 1000 strides. Normal walking speed is about 100 steps a minute, so a mile is about 20 mins of walking
The problem is when they generalized these distances, they apparently used the biggest guy they could find... It still makes sense for rough measurements, but I already use metric for anything small or precise. Or fast - I don't even know what gravity is in imperial units. Kmph isn't natural for me, but I think I could get there...I like 60mph being a mile a minute, it helps me estimate, but i could get over it
Weight and volume? I already use metric for everything but my own weight, because screw that nonsense.
Temperature? I'd like something more human scaled for daily use, I've tried getting used to it but metric just doesn't click the same way. I like how Fahrenheit is roughly the livable range - below 0 is intense even with proper attire, and above 100 is dangerous even if you're adapted to it. It's not perfect, but maybe something like Celsius*2 for easy translation?
Anything not coming into contact with you, like cooking or cpu temp, would be better in Celsius though - things change around 100C
At the end of the day, I think it just makes sense to have more than one unit of measurement for certain things - one for human scale that is easy to grasp based on our bodies, and one for measurement.
It would be nice to say "I need like 10 feet of hose" and they give you 3.5 meters because it's understood it's an estimate, or you say "I need these boards cut to 2.75m" and they know it's a measurement and give it to you exactly that.
And I would not miss it if volume and weights were metric only - i can't tell you how many times I've converted teaspoons to ml or ounces to grams, maybe it's because I learned chemistry before cooking but holy crap is that so much more helpful
Whose foot? Chances are yours isn't even a good approximation.
Jokes aside, there isn't even such a thing as foot anymore. All these idiotic measurement units like feet and elbows have thankfully been deprecated and are now simply a name for a certain amount of civilized units. Foot is exactly 0.3048 meters since 1959.
+/- 20% is good enough for e6 and covers the overwhelming majority of menâs foot lengths.
For making a measurement without a tool +/-20% should be fine.
Itâs all fun and games, but I take issue with calling metric âcivilized unitsâ. Human civilization developed all kinds of units appropriate to the work being done and calling the ones defined almost in defiance of everyday use the civilized ones is absurd.
Actually that's a modern measurement concept based on the original meter. By using this concept, the size of a meter is tied to absolute terms in physics that "anyone" could measure with the right tools, while the original concept was based on a physical object called the meter, which is subject to many things such as heat dilation for example making it not accurate, and if the original object was lost we would not have a way to tell what is a meter (conceptually speaking of course).
The foot on the other hand (lol) is traditionally based on the king's foot size. This of course depends on which country (or realm?), and to make matters worst, who's the king at the time, because yes the official measure would change based on that too.
Of course that's not how it is today, but we can say the original foot was lost long ago.
Ditto for the original meter. We sure are lucky that an approximation of the measurement is built into the name of the foot. Itâs frighteningly European to have a measurement name that roughly translates to âmeasureâ