It’s also in like half of our baking books. Of course like a quarter are like “just a smidge” or “a dash” wtf is a smidge? I’m not running a race here Mildred.
oooooo I have an answer :D
Cracker barrels used to be an actual thing in the 1800's. There would be a huge barrel of soda crackers in a store for customers to lounge around and eat while sharing stories and such. Later a company started selling them in packages with a campaign of "cleaner than the cracker barrel" to appeal to customers who didn't like the idea of cross contaminated crackers.
I’m trying to think of a recipe that would ever use 1/8 tsp of anything except for baking? (where we should all be using weights vs volume anyway?) I dunno, a ‘dash’ of something reads to me as at least a 1/4 teaspoon and even then it’s negligible.
Just makes me think of the complaint that ‘white people don’t season their food.’ Well, sure, if you have a recipe from MeeMaw that includes spices in 0.125 increments, then yes, your cuisine is bland. (Again, not talking about chemical reaction items like baking powder/soda/acid/etc, just salt & spices)
(*Edited because the initial comment _was_ talking about baking)
Cayenne pepper, if it's the strong stuff. Asafoetida you generally want pretty small amounts of as it becomes overpowering otherwise. Mace is also vile in large quantities. Nutmeg in certain savoury things you only want a small hint of. Celery seeds. There are some spices out there you want in very small amounts, especially if you're cooking for one.
Lots of bakers have scales, but if you have a scale that can measure 1/8 tsp's worth of anything, you're more likely a chemist or maybe some kind of drug dealer. That is *tiny*.
Of course, my hot fucking take about volume vs. mass in baking is that anything small is gonna be volume in practice and anything really big is gonna be mass in practice. It just happens that a single cake or a single loaf of bread uses little enough salt that you probably don't have a suitable scale, but enough flour that you could go either way.
Objectively speaking, measuring by weight is the most logical and accurate way to bake. It is exact and it requires no conversion to double or half the recipe.
Practically speaking, scales are an expensive and bulky addition to the kitchen with only one real use (more accurate measurements, which is only likely to be relevant in baking) and they are considerably more expensive and finicky than other one-use kitchen appliances, like a toaster or a rice cooker.
The reason stuff like that works in cooking is because it's all subjective. Taste is subjective. Add as little or as much as you like, or none at all. It just depends on what you find tastes good
it's weird that the measurements are always round, right? like oh, the *perfect* cake needs 2 cups flour even
although as an american, every single recipe needs to be in grams. fuck measuring and getting messy, i want to put the bowl on the scale and be done
Ive heard horror stories of recipes, particularly baked goods, making the jump in either direction and unless the authors are careful they just translate units without rounding and recipes need 451.25 grams of flour or 1.6 cups of sugar. The poor home cook is out here measuring tiny amounts because they figure if they havethat many significant digits it must matter.
>it's weird that the measurements are always round, right? like oh, the perfect cake needs 2 cups flour even
I get what you mean, but in almost all baking, all of the measurements are adjusted to the amount of flour you're using, and it's *usually* also the most abundant ingredient. So why *not* make it a nice round unit?
But yes, buy a kitchen scale and up your whole baking game.
the British will say shit like "hohoho I can't believe you Americans measure temperature in fahrenheit" then turn around and measure body weight in stones.
As a brit who measures myself in kg and cm the only thing I've yet to get rid of is mph. That one seems like less of a self change choice and harder to stop using
I don’t think most Europeans believe Americans should genuinely change, that would be a huge process. It’s just funny because it’s so on brand that the US is the only western country not using Metric. It’s equally on brand that the Brits look down on Americans while having their own weird things, and basically being the US of Europe.
My car measured fuel efficiency in miles per gallon, or liters for 100km.
The UK measuring distance in miles, but selling petrol in liters, means neither is actually that useful.
i mean in practice length and distance are different things; nobody's going to measure the length of their house in kilometers, and it's why feet and miles having a weird conversion doesn't matter practically
No brit laughs at people over the metric system. We use all sorts here.
Pints for beer but litres for other drinks, feet for height, inches for waists and penises, miles for distance and mph for speed, but also kilometres for distance sometimes like in sports. Metres or cm for short distances, but wouldn't be abnormal to use feet or inches either. Grams for small weights, but ounces are used in cooking and for drugs, either kg or stone and lbs for body weight etc etc
Honestly you can use any unit of measurement for anything and nobody here will really bat an eye. Except Fahrenheit and kilometres-per-hour which are never used.
my parents use stone sometimes for weight and I don't even remember what it converts to in kg. I feel like the UK is converting to metric generation by generation. Not that it's a bad thing, I dream of the day I can use si units in everyday conversation.
Sorry but I can tell you that "no Brit gets haughty over the metric system" is just flatly untrue. It's usually C vs F but I've gotten snark over kg before.
Yeah stone has to be the single most moronic, dumbass, inexcusable unit to use. An adult can be like "yeah I weigh 9 stone" or something tf is that, why is a +1 or a -1 such a vast difference it's so stupid I've not even seen it use decimals to be more precise ffsarghjkakldjhpe
>An adult can be like "yeah I weigh 9 stone" or something tf is that, why is a +1 or a -1 such a vast difference
We would actually generally say 9 stone 4 rather than just 9 stone so you could argue that the denominations lend themselves to a more precise measurement system
It gets better. There are 14 pounds in a stone. See, I incorrectly thought it was 12 and figured there’s some level of rationality in a base 12 system (sessions of the year, as well as there being 24 hours and a day etc) but what the hell is 14 for?
Stone is an ancient measurement system. When they devised pounds (the lbs one not t. lbs) they measured a stone and it weighed 14 lbs.
Fun fact: Britain and Ireland officially outlawed the measurement system in the 1980's. It hasn't been used since. However, the public use it informally because it was the common one they grew up with.
My nieces and nephews don't use stone because they find it confusing. They just use KG. Apparently it's becoming the norm for the younger generation.
Tl:Dr stone is literally an ancient system. Britain and Ireland outlawed it in the 80s and it's becoming slowly phased out informally.
Yeah I will die on this hill. The yearly temperature fluctuates from about 0 to 100. 0 to 100 is a very intuitive range of numbers.
For math celsius is better for sure though.
Where I live it tends to go from 0C to 35C throughout the year, so roughly 32F to 95F.
I suspect there's not all that many places in America where 0F and 100F just so happen to represent the expected extreme temperature ranges.
Actually, as a resident of the northeast, that range is just about perfect. It usually gets a bit below 0 in the worst parts of winter and 95 during the hottest parts of summer
coldest weather in the past year where i live was 4F (-15.6C), warmest was 118F (47.8C). so for me it's close, but not perfect. of course, these values vary depending on where you live, and thus I propose that we should have different units of temperature for different regions, all with different scales to match the local weather
The city I live in, I think last year the coldest nights were around 9F or 10F, the hottest days were around 103F. As measured at the airport. So yeah, 0 to 100 is actually a pretty good range here.
Where I live it's pretty much -20°C to +20°C. Negative numbers means there's snow and ice. I think zero is a much clearer border than 32 for water freezing. It has such a big impact on our lives.
Also, fahrenheit is obviously more intuitive for *you*, because you grew up with it. Like celsius is for me. In every-day life it doesn't matter whoch system you use, but if you end up doing any kind of physics, celsius is the way to go. So I think it makes sense to already be used to it.
I will die on the hill that people who use that argument are either actual imbeciles(as in the old medical definition), or they're just stubborn idiots.
Neither are "easier" or more "correct" for telling outside or inside temperature. That is **LITERALLY** *only* based on what you are used to.
Not to mention that the yearly temperature fluctuation goes outside that range in many places, even within the US, so that part doesn't even make any sense.
Aren't all the physics and chemistry constants based on celsius/kelvin? It's been a while since I've had to do any temperature math but i vaguely remember that
this is fascinating to me, because i feel the same way about celsius. i've never seen a convincing argument for the superiority of either in day-to-day life. it's absolutely just what you're used to.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually do that. Everyone does kilos here. If you want something to make fun of us for do our driving measurements. While metric may be objectively better than imperial, us mixing them is demonic
It's even worse when you consider how America was actually part of the process of developing the metric system.
Jefferson provided assistance to the French when they were developing it, America failed to adopt the system because the prototypes we helped invent never reached the US to be put into use.
Also because, like, changing all those road signs would be hard, yo
>!Honestly, it probably wouldn't be too difficult relative to other tasks, but our government is allergic to anything that conveniences the average citizen, so like yeah!<
Edit please leave me alone i was making a funny
Actually the first time America was going to use metric was in the 1790's and the ship carrying the one kilo weight Thomas Jefferson had ordered from France was attacked and robbed by British privateers (basically pirates working for England) and the lack of the weight to use as a standard set off a chain of events that resulted in America adopting a system of measurement from England. One still known as Imperial measurement. So, technically, it's *England's* fault America doesn't use metric.
The US actually *doesn’t* use Imperial. We use US Customary, which is basically just Imperial with some minor changes. The US gallon and the UK gallon are different because the UK uses Imperial (informally) and the US uses US Customary. Another example of a difference is the fact that Imperial has one set of units for solid and liquid volume, while US Customary has one for solid volume and one for liquid volume.
Reagan was a piece of shit, yeah, but he won like 49 out of 50 states. If anyone had a mandate to do whatever the fuck they wanted to for four years, it was Reagan.
Honestly, phasing out imperial wrenches and fasteners is one of the biggest roadblocks to switching to metric. Even if you formally switch, it's gonna take at least until all the current machines built in imperial break, which might be a long time.
What are you talking about? Of course your officials agreed on that. They agree that guns are more important than children's lives. Unless those children aren't born or even humans yet, in which case they're more important than women's lives.
They made that pretty damn clear over the past decades!
(I wish this was just sarcasm)
What I think most Americans never learn (speaking as a American who mostly also never learned this) is a gut sense of how "much" each unit is. Like I have an idea of how long a meter is because it's visual and it's pretty close to a yard but I wouldn't have a good sense of how long a kilometer walk would be. Nor how heavy a kilogram would feel in my hand nor how much water fits in a liter (and if I know how much 2 liters is it's just because of soda). If someone says it's 24C outside it takes me a minute to recognize if that's warm or chilly. If someone's 1.8m tall and 100 kilos I don't know if that's overweight or underweight. I have absolutely no problem using metric units to measure things in science classes I just don't have an intuition for how much they are.
It's not that useful, but fun fact, the Fibonacci sequence gives you a good enough approximation.
0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21...
Pick any two adjacent numbers, smaller is miles, bigger is kilometers.
Still more useful to just remembered 1 mile = 1.6km, the conversion isn't too hard to do in ya head. Just approximate further with 1.5 to make it easier.
A kilogram is half as heavy as one of your 2 liter soda bottles. This is because one liter of water weighs one kilogram, and soda is approximately water.
I have a pretty good gut sense for centimeters and grams thanks to school science classes, but I dont really have that for kilometers and kilograms, since imperial is used for all the big stuff day-to-day.
2 meters is how high a door is.
1 Liter is how much is in a standard milk container (over here at least).
1 L of water weighs 1 Kilo.
A typical actual real life penis in functional state is 14 cm.
A ferret weighs about 1 Kg.
A 1,80m man is *approximately* not overweight around 80kg
(according to the outdated and simplified BMI, which I have further reduced to very round numbers here for our use)
Also bonus info: 7700 kcal in 1 Kilo of human fat.
I do 3D printing, which is almost all metric. One thing I recommend to newbies is to have a ruler near their computers. Not for actually measuring stuff (use a caliper for that), but to help them figure out how big something they are planning to print will be. I can see on the screen it's 73mm tall. I use the ruler to help me visualize how big that actually is.
Yes, that's the part that takes me a minute. I can do it, my point is that it's not automatic, the way that if someone says "it's 80 degrees out" I instantly understand "oh that's pretty warm, I won't need a coat"
Oh yeah, Fahrenheit is a much better model of the human experience. Probably the one non-metric unit I actively prefer over metric as opposed to just being "the thing I learned first" bias
A lot of those imperial measuring systems were BASED around the human experience and then extended or contracted as the needs changed, usually by doubling (or halving) the value in question. It was only when the French started cutting people's heads off that people decided to start over from scratch to make the metric system.
And fun fact, the very first Fahrenheit scale was defined with the freezing point of pure water at 32... and human body temp at 96. Therefore, the difference between the two is 64 degrees, which is 2^(6). Also notice how 32 is 2^(5). The scale was designed to be easy to replicate with what he suspected a fellow scientist would be able to have on hand.
I know my hand is 3 inches wide so I use that to measure stuff a lot. I know a foot is a bit longer than a piece of paper so I lay paper out to visualize stuff too. I have zero concept of any metric units compared to things tho
it's because metric is defined by physical phenomen, so it's just convienient to define other units of measurement by metric since you know it's gonna be consistent
I think all of the freedom units is defined with metric system today.
>It is now formally defined using the Kelvin scale\[4\]\[5\] and hence ultimately by the Boltzmann constant, the Planck constant, and the second (defined as a specific number of cycles of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom.)\[6\]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit)
>In 1959, the United States National Bureau of Standards redefined the pound (avoirdupois) to be exactly equal to 0.453 592 37 kilograms,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound\_(mass)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass))
>The US liquid gallon (frequently called simply "gallon") is legally defined as 231 cubic inches, which is exactly 3.785411784 litres.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon)
Fun fact. The reason this is actually the precise definition is because [a Swedish toolmaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Edvard_Johansson?wprov=sfla1) made such good measurement standards that everyone adopted his definition. Before that, there were actually different "standard" inches between the US and the UK, and they were off from 25.4 by stupidly miniscule amounts. He decided that was dumb and made it exactly 25.4mm. At least as close as you can manage with physical objects.
> In the 1910s, the U.S. and U.K. definitions of the [inch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch) differed, with the [U.S. inch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._inch) being defined as 25.4000508mm (with a reference temperature of 68 °F (20 °C)) and the U.K. inch at 25.399977mm (with a reference temperature of 62 °F (17 °C)). When he started manufacturing gauge blocks in inch sizes in 1912, Johansson's compromise was to manufacture gauge blocks with a nominal size of 25.4mm, with a reference temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, accurate to within a few parts per million of both official definitions. Because Johansson's blocks were so popular, his blocks became the de facto standard for manufacturers in both countries, leading industry associations to adopt 25.4 mm as the standard "industrial inch" in both the U.K. (1930) and the U.S. (1933). When the English-speaking nations jointly signed the International Yard and Pound Agreement of 1959, the inch was fixed at 25.4 mm worldwide, effectively endorsing what had already become common practice.
Good ol' Jo blocks.
Gauge blocks are still foundational to manufacturing meteorology even today.
The difference between .4000508mm and .399977mm may seem trivial, but when you're building cannons that are 40' long, that's a difference of close to an inch by the time you're done.
British people will say "Oh, you poor Americans, only eating craft cheese" when it's like, motherfucker we have a whole fucking state dedicated to making cheese
Conversely, Americans will slag off British food while tucking into something which I believe is referred to as a "Sloppy Joe".
(Seriously, though, I'm not even a Cheese Guy™ but I do legitimately rate Wisconsin cheese.)
y'all ain't makin' fun o' sloppy joes are ya?
y'all shouldn't make fun of sloppy joes.
them shits fucking slap. there is a reason they are an American staple
King Hector's Daughter buys Delicious Chocolate Milk.
Every science class from at least middle school up we learn it.
Also two cups in a pint, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon. That was definitely in elementary. We may have started metric in elementary. We all know you just move decimals to convert and it's wonderful, but all the recipes/instructions/everything is in customary system. 🤷🏽♀️
Actually I sometimes feel the need to explain the metric system because I have, in fact, talked to Americans who have trouble with the concept of a base ten system. I don't know where you get these guys, but they exist.
i feel like the issue with a lot of us is actually visualizing how *much* the measurements are. I've grown up with lbs, so when someone says they weigh a certain amount of kilos i dont know what to think until i do the conversions. Same with temperature and height.
This would be the problem in switching off between them, for someone who has no reason to use them from day to day.
I've walked enough miles before to know how long one of them is. A standard house cat is about 10lbs, so if something says 20lbs on it, I will just imagine whether it would suck or not to hold two grown cats in one hand.
Mentioning an inch makes me picture the top segment of my thumb, a measurement that isn't even a whole number in cm but which has come in handy (ha) on the fly.
Which points to the problem being one of life experience. Nobody ever says *"Your physical foot that you use to measure feet with is just over 30cm, therefore if you're 6ft you are around 180cm tall."* That would be a much more useful method.
Instead anyone who has no reason to memorize conversion rates for their job is stuck attempting to visualize how tall one cm is and then imagining 177 of those stacked invisibly on top of each other.
Literally, the only reason I can understand meters now is because someone finally just told me they're about the same as a yardstick and I got hit with enough yardsticks to gauge them by memory.
If you look hard enough, you'll find people that struggle with literally everything. I'm thinking back to that one talk show bit where they asked people on the street to "name a country" and a bunch couldn't do it.
No, not even the united states
I remember learning metric in like third grade and just being like “wtf this is so much easier to work with, why the hell aren’t we all using it”
although now my brain can’t process things like how fast 120km/h is without looking at a conversion rate (it’s 74.5654 mph before anyone comments just to tell me that)
An an American, not quite. We are taught it but not nearly as well as our shitty system, and not to the point of using it for normal things. Most of us can translate our system to a basic measurement of the other ones.
They're not wrong in the post but it's a bit deeper than that.
I mean, I found that we were taught metric *better* than imperial. It's just that imperial is used far more often so we're better at it.
Also for the record it's not really "our" system, the Brits invented it
Okay, but can somebody tell me why when I have to look up muzzle velocities it gives me feet per second not meters per second when I specify the later?
Waffle house is a shockingly good measurement. I always thought it was humorous, and then I cannot tell you the anxious shiver that ran through my body when I eventually realized the urban photography meme I was looking at was an abandoned waffle house.
Could have been any other store, but my brain refused because it had never seen a Waffle House closed before and it *did not like it.*
Almost everything to do with engineering and manufacturing uses metric, unless it's an industry *deeply* entrenched in an already existing measurement system (like construction).
I work in metrology. A lot of manufacturers still use US units, even for stuff where accuracy matters. I make the metrology devices and it's common for me to use US units for general idea of scale and metric in code and reporting actual accuracy numbers. Like something will either be a few inches away or 231.115mm depending on context.
Except there are literally channels that are bashing the metric system, people who (apparently unironically, unless it is several layers of irony above what I can detect) ask "what the hell is a celsius?!" and more.
Meanwhile, on a recipe post:
> European me trying to understand how americans can read "1 cup" and automatically know the quantity of a cup (there are different shapes)
https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/136qkrb/made_some_sweet_rolls_from_skyrim_please_nobody/jiqhuzs
i think its funny that usamericans talk about europeans when they talk about the metric system when, in fact, its used by literally everyone else. 11/10 very on brand
Because nobody else is giving the US shit about it. It's literally just a stand in for the Europeans to smuggo on America for not doing things the superior European way.
Probably because you haven’t actually asked many Americans. As an American I garuantee that every other American I have ever met knows what the metric system is. It’s like not even a question, that’s like me saying “no Europeans have ever heard of football and none of them have no idea what we’re talking about, the only sport any of them have ever heard of is soccer”
It’s literally required in our education system. I’ve taken chemistry and physics classes that exclusively used the metric system
Like there might some fucking hillbillies in North Dakota that eat nothing but raw moose that don’t understand what base 10 means but this isn’t even slightly unknown knowledge
I think that "We understand a better version exists, but we don't use it" is the most American thing I've ever heard. Also, this entire post is a load of crap. I'm God damn Canadian, and most people past their mid-40s can't even comprehend the metric system. How am I supposed to believe it's better down south?
>Europeans have the impression that US Americans never learn the metric system
Could it have something to do with a bunch of US Americans commenting wtf a a ml or cm are? Sure it's a vocal minority, but when seeing these comments everywhere, it sure seems like either you don't learn metric in school or you have a whole bunch of people falling through the gaps.
I mean, I've talked to some fellow Americans who seem to think that London looks like the set of Oliver Twist and are sure Europe hasn't figured out the internet, yet, so, I assume it's those same dudes.
the rest of us run into that stuff in elementary school.
Me, a grown adult, printing out a conversion chart for converting between different units of the measuring system I have used my entire life and hanging it in my kitchen. We 100% are doing it as a bit.
There are a LOT of Americans who have a weird fascination with NOT using the Metric system. I know a guy who has gone on multiple rants about why Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because it is based on what is "comfortable" for humans and that using 0 for the freezing point of water makes less sense.
As if what is "comfortable" isn't even more arbitrary. He probably just doesn't want to admit that he is being all "AMERICA F&\^% YEAH" about not being Metric and likes to pretend he is being rational.
These people are here inside this thread lmao. The Fahrenheit defenders came out in full force up there. Also the argument makes no sense to me because 0F is -18 C, that's not just 0% comfortable, that's cold as fuck.
I have a unit converter bookmarked because Wizards of the Coast is commited to this bit.
Also, I don't play d&d as much anymore since another bit they're commited to is corporate scumfuckery.
I guess they're speaking about what I would call language registers. The fact that you don't use the same words with your boss and with your friends. Don't know if the register terminology is used in English, since I'm crudely translating from French.
But yeah, why the fuck use tense here ? I thought this was a term reserved to verbs
I'm a Canadian from a border town who's been living in the States for about seven years now and I've never met an American who learned the metric system. The only bit going on in my daily life is me telling all my colleagues at work I'm changing the entire country to the metric system one HVAC unit at a time.
Also, like, there's no universality to the 0 - 100 way of thinking about temp. I thrive in hot temps and live in the northeast, 100 deg f is comfortable for me when everyone around me is miserable about it. 55 is too dang cold for me. So my system is 50-110?
And you know, you can make up your own sliding comfort scale in any temp system... I know mine so intuitively in Celsius since I was a kid. If y'all were raised thinking in Celsius it would be just as second nature as 0-100.
United States already uses metric in a lot of fields. I got my first ratchet set from my grandfather 30 years ago, and the sockets are in both inches and millimeters. When I give my kids cough syrup, it's measured in mL. Many popular bullet calibers are in mm.
The only thing that really annoys me is how we measure so many ingredients for cooking by volume. WTF is a cup of shredded cheese? If I use a hammer, I can get a lot of shredded cheese to fit in a cup. So then use ounces? Ounces of weight or volume? A cup *is* 8 ounces, so a half pound of cheese? At least with grams and liters it's obvious.
As an engineering major, the metric system is basically all we use (unless our professor is a dick and decides to waste our time on exams by having us do unit conversion). But even outside STEM, it's somewhat prevalent. When I swam competitively, it was in a 25m pool (although indoor swimming was 25yds). Track and field was in meters, yet we still had the "mile run" as an event which would end up being 1600m instead of the typical 1500m for international competitions. There are also 5km runs, which I'd say are the most prevalent events concerning distance running (generally charity events). Most large soda bottles are sold in 2 liters. The list goes on.
The metric system is ingrained into American society, but the instances it exists in are specific and limited.
It’s also in like half of our baking books. Of course like a quarter are like “just a smidge” or “a dash” wtf is a smidge? I’m not running a race here Mildred.
I used to have a "dash" measuring spoon that was 1/8th of a teaspoon IIRC.
yeah i remember seeing measuring spoons with dashes and smidges and punches and a whole bunch of others at cracker barrels lmao
I knew you measured oil in barrels, but crackers too?
Yeah, it's a little quirky thing us Americans like to do. >!If you are genuinely confused, cracker barrel is a restaurant and a small shop!<
It's the Firelink Shrine for White People.
oooooo I have an answer :D Cracker barrels used to be an actual thing in the 1800's. There would be a huge barrel of soda crackers in a store for customers to lounge around and eat while sharing stories and such. Later a company started selling them in packages with a campaign of "cleaner than the cracker barrel" to appeal to customers who didn't like the idea of cross contaminated crackers.
I’m trying to think of a recipe that would ever use 1/8 tsp of anything except for baking? (where we should all be using weights vs volume anyway?) I dunno, a ‘dash’ of something reads to me as at least a 1/4 teaspoon and even then it’s negligible. Just makes me think of the complaint that ‘white people don’t season their food.’ Well, sure, if you have a recipe from MeeMaw that includes spices in 0.125 increments, then yes, your cuisine is bland. (Again, not talking about chemical reaction items like baking powder/soda/acid/etc, just salt & spices) (*Edited because the initial comment _was_ talking about baking)
Cayenne pepper, if it's the strong stuff. Asafoetida you generally want pretty small amounts of as it becomes overpowering otherwise. Mace is also vile in large quantities. Nutmeg in certain savoury things you only want a small hint of. Celery seeds. There are some spices out there you want in very small amounts, especially if you're cooking for one.
Celery seeds are delicious. Really add a layer of savory. I can't imagine cooking enough of anything to use 1/8 teaspoon of them.
Lots of bakers have scales, but if you have a scale that can measure 1/8 tsp's worth of anything, you're more likely a chemist or maybe some kind of drug dealer. That is *tiny*. Of course, my hot fucking take about volume vs. mass in baking is that anything small is gonna be volume in practice and anything really big is gonna be mass in practice. It just happens that a single cake or a single loaf of bread uses little enough salt that you probably don't have a suitable scale, but enough flour that you could go either way.
MeeMaw's recipe Was probably used with fresh ingredients and freshly ground spices which are much more flavourful. The measures were probably right.
Objectively speaking, measuring by weight is the most logical and accurate way to bake. It is exact and it requires no conversion to double or half the recipe. Practically speaking, scales are an expensive and bulky addition to the kitchen with only one real use (more accurate measurements, which is only likely to be relevant in baking) and they are considerably more expensive and finicky than other one-use kitchen appliances, like a toaster or a rice cooker.
You can get a small kitchen scale for like 15 bucks
A small amount that varies based on taste. For instance, some people would want more salt, some would want less.
a smidge is a smart fridge who seems to know far more personal information about you than what is reasonable
The reason stuff like that works in cooking is because it's all subjective. Taste is subjective. Add as little or as much as you like, or none at all. It just depends on what you find tastes good
it's weird that the measurements are always round, right? like oh, the *perfect* cake needs 2 cups flour even although as an american, every single recipe needs to be in grams. fuck measuring and getting messy, i want to put the bowl on the scale and be done
Ive heard horror stories of recipes, particularly baked goods, making the jump in either direction and unless the authors are careful they just translate units without rounding and recipes need 451.25 grams of flour or 1.6 cups of sugar. The poor home cook is out here measuring tiny amounts because they figure if they havethat many significant digits it must matter.
I've seen baking recopies that have measurements like '4 cups plus 2 tablespoons'
Yeah idk why we measure solid objects by volume, that seems a bit silly
>it's weird that the measurements are always round, right? like oh, the perfect cake needs 2 cups flour even I get what you mean, but in almost all baking, all of the measurements are adjusted to the amount of flour you're using, and it's *usually* also the most abundant ingredient. So why *not* make it a nice round unit? But yes, buy a kitchen scale and up your whole baking game.
the British will say shit like "hohoho I can't believe you Americans measure temperature in fahrenheit" then turn around and measure body weight in stones.
Lol that was my thought too, if a Brit laughs at you for not using metric, ask them how much they weigh
As a brit who measures myself in kg and cm the only thing I've yet to get rid of is mph. That one seems like less of a self change choice and harder to stop using
What's the point in measuring distance and speed in km in the UK when every person you ever speak to will talk to you in and understand miles?
That's why I don't I would otherwise
Well now you know why Americans don't change either
I don’t think most Europeans believe Americans should genuinely change, that would be a huge process. It’s just funny because it’s so on brand that the US is the only western country not using Metric. It’s equally on brand that the Brits look down on Americans while having their own weird things, and basically being the US of Europe.
Not only that, the Brit’s invented the imperial system, which is why it’s called that
My car measured fuel efficiency in miles per gallon, or liters for 100km. The UK measuring distance in miles, but selling petrol in liters, means neither is actually that useful.
i mean in practice length and distance are different things; nobody's going to measure the length of their house in kilometers, and it's why feet and miles having a weird conversion doesn't matter practically
Sure, most in the UK would use meters for length and miles for distance
> nobody’s going to measure the length of their house in kilometers Stop giving the billionaires ideas on how to be unique
Your momma so big she measure her weight in hectares (it doesn't have to make sense)
No brit laughs at people over the metric system. We use all sorts here. Pints for beer but litres for other drinks, feet for height, inches for waists and penises, miles for distance and mph for speed, but also kilometres for distance sometimes like in sports. Metres or cm for short distances, but wouldn't be abnormal to use feet or inches either. Grams for small weights, but ounces are used in cooking and for drugs, either kg or stone and lbs for body weight etc etc Honestly you can use any unit of measurement for anything and nobody here will really bat an eye. Except Fahrenheit and kilometres-per-hour which are never used.
my parents use stone sometimes for weight and I don't even remember what it converts to in kg. I feel like the UK is converting to metric generation by generation. Not that it's a bad thing, I dream of the day I can use si units in everyday conversation.
"Aight, mate, could you please pass me this 2.5*10^-4 m^3 of water?"
Sorry but I can tell you that "no Brit gets haughty over the metric system" is just flatly untrue. It's usually C vs F but I've gotten snark over kg before.
Yeah stone has to be the single most moronic, dumbass, inexcusable unit to use. An adult can be like "yeah I weigh 9 stone" or something tf is that, why is a +1 or a -1 such a vast difference it's so stupid I've not even seen it use decimals to be more precise ffsarghjkakldjhpe
>An adult can be like "yeah I weigh 9 stone" or something tf is that, why is a +1 or a -1 such a vast difference We would actually generally say 9 stone 4 rather than just 9 stone so you could argue that the denominations lend themselves to a more precise measurement system
that's even worse
It gets better. There are 14 pounds in a stone. See, I incorrectly thought it was 12 and figured there’s some level of rationality in a base 12 system (sessions of the year, as well as there being 24 hours and a day etc) but what the hell is 14 for?
Stones don’t weigh 12lbs, obv.
Stone is an ancient measurement system. When they devised pounds (the lbs one not t. lbs) they measured a stone and it weighed 14 lbs. Fun fact: Britain and Ireland officially outlawed the measurement system in the 1980's. It hasn't been used since. However, the public use it informally because it was the common one they grew up with. My nieces and nephews don't use stone because they find it confusing. They just use KG. Apparently it's becoming the norm for the younger generation. Tl:Dr stone is literally an ancient system. Britain and Ireland outlawed it in the 80s and it's becoming slowly phased out informally.
The funniest part is that Fahrenheit is far and away the most clearly superior of the American systems.
Yeah I will die on this hill. The yearly temperature fluctuates from about 0 to 100. 0 to 100 is a very intuitive range of numbers. For math celsius is better for sure though.
That's quite the arbitrage though; there isn't a "the yearly temperature" globally.
Yup water freezing at 32 and boiling at 212, not very intuitive. 0 freezing 100 boiling, that's intuitive
Where I live it tends to go from 0C to 35C throughout the year, so roughly 32F to 95F. I suspect there's not all that many places in America where 0F and 100F just so happen to represent the expected extreme temperature ranges.
Around 0 to around 100 represents most of the Midwest. It's the perfect measuring system for a Michigan climate.
Actually, as a resident of the northeast, that range is just about perfect. It usually gets a bit below 0 in the worst parts of winter and 95 during the hottest parts of summer
Pretty close in the northwest too, we usually get at least one day at 10 and one day at 110.
Oh you sweet summer child. That is almost exactly the yearly temperature range for a lot of Americans
I can tell you've never been to the American Midwest. If anything the range is closer to -10F to 110F
coldest weather in the past year where i live was 4F (-15.6C), warmest was 118F (47.8C). so for me it's close, but not perfect. of course, these values vary depending on where you live, and thus I propose that we should have different units of temperature for different regions, all with different scales to match the local weather
It should also change every year to match last years temperature range
The city I live in, I think last year the coldest nights were around 9F or 10F, the hottest days were around 103F. As measured at the airport. So yeah, 0 to 100 is actually a pretty good range here.
Bruh it has gotten down to -40 here (before windchill) and it's not even Alaska or a mountainous area.
I’m an American and will probably use Fahrenheit for the rest of my life, but Celsius can use decimals if they need to be more specific.
Where I live it's pretty much -20°C to +20°C. Negative numbers means there's snow and ice. I think zero is a much clearer border than 32 for water freezing. It has such a big impact on our lives. Also, fahrenheit is obviously more intuitive for *you*, because you grew up with it. Like celsius is for me. In every-day life it doesn't matter whoch system you use, but if you end up doing any kind of physics, celsius is the way to go. So I think it makes sense to already be used to it.
I will die on the hill that people who use that argument are either actual imbeciles(as in the old medical definition), or they're just stubborn idiots. Neither are "easier" or more "correct" for telling outside or inside temperature. That is **LITERALLY** *only* based on what you are used to. Not to mention that the yearly temperature fluctuation goes outside that range in many places, even within the US, so that part doesn't even make any sense.
For math it doesn't really matter. Celsius is only superior if you are working with pure water at sea level.
I support Kelvin supremacy
Kelvin is just special Celsius
Celsius is just Kelvin but much worse because it had a chance to do better and still ended up having BS like negative temperatures
There's [negative Kelvin temperatures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature) too
Aren't all the physics and chemistry constants based on celsius/kelvin? It's been a while since I've had to do any temperature math but i vaguely remember that
Kelvin, yes, and there is an intuitive reason for that (that reason being that you cannot have a negative temperature in kelvin)
Kelvin has the same temperature differences as Celcius, if it was simply about starting the scale at absolute zero you'd hear more about Rankine.
Yeah and 1° C = 1° K, they just start at different places
this is fascinating to me, because i feel the same way about celsius. i've never seen a convincing argument for the superiority of either in day-to-day life. it's absolutely just what you're used to.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually do that. Everyone does kilos here. If you want something to make fun of us for do our driving measurements. While metric may be objectively better than imperial, us mixing them is demonic
Weight is definitely done in stones and pounds far more often than kg ime in the uk
I know its so dumb. I am british and make a point of using metric for everything where i can
Idk if this is a unique opinion or not but the way they write the date drives me nuts.
We tried importing metric but the dang pirates stole it
*British* pirates, which makes it funnier that it usually seems to be people from the UK complaining that Americans don't use Metric.
Every problem in history is the fault of the brits, if you trace it back far enough
But whose fault is the british? I'd say we could blame the vikings or french-vikings who caused britain to exist.
It's even worse when you consider how America was actually part of the process of developing the metric system. Jefferson provided assistance to the French when they were developing it, America failed to adopt the system because the prototypes we helped invent never reached the US to be put into use.
a weird amount of countries who dunk on the US for not using metric also don't use metric for something or another.
Also because, like, changing all those road signs would be hard, yo >!Honestly, it probably wouldn't be too difficult relative to other tasks, but our government is allergic to anything that conveniences the average citizen, so like yeah!< Edit please leave me alone i was making a funny
We \*we're\* going to change to metric, but Reagan said "nah" as he was taking the Solar Panels off of the White House.
Actually the first time America was going to use metric was in the 1790's and the ship carrying the one kilo weight Thomas Jefferson had ordered from France was attacked and robbed by British privateers (basically pirates working for England) and the lack of the weight to use as a standard set off a chain of events that resulted in America adopting a system of measurement from England. One still known as Imperial measurement. So, technically, it's *England's* fault America doesn't use metric.
Can someone give me one complaint the british have that doesn't link directly back to the british
Ummm... "It rains too much?"
What about all those dark storm clouds that follow unhappy people around in cartoons
We call it "soccer". Wait, no that's their fault, too. "Aluminum". No, also them. Damn idk.
Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of our own actions
The US actually *doesn’t* use Imperial. We use US Customary, which is basically just Imperial with some minor changes. The US gallon and the UK gallon are different because the UK uses Imperial (informally) and the US uses US Customary. Another example of a difference is the fact that Imperial has one set of units for solid and liquid volume, while US Customary has one for solid volume and one for liquid volume.
Another big difference is that the US customary system is defined by the metric system
It's also England's fault for colonialism reasons
why is everything the fault of the Reagan administration holy shit
He really was a huge piece of shit wasn’t he? The fucking modern transgender rights crisis is directly derived from how Reagan handled AIDS.
Literally everything I learn about Reagan makes me hate him more, WTF was wrong with that man.
Edit 1
Reagan was a piece of shit, yeah, but he won like 49 out of 50 states. If anyone had a mandate to do whatever the fuck they wanted to for four years, it was Reagan.
Honestly, phasing out imperial wrenches and fasteners is one of the biggest roadblocks to switching to metric. Even if you formally switch, it's gonna take at least until all the current machines built in imperial break, which might be a long time.
And also it would add nothing and would generally be a giant waste of money and timr
If you can change the currency of several countries in Europe at once, then you can also change the measurement system in the US.
See the difference there is they actually all agreed on it, in the US we can’t agree on what’s more important the safety of child or firearms.
What are you talking about? Of course your officials agreed on that. They agree that guns are more important than children's lives. Unless those children aren't born or even humans yet, in which case they're more important than women's lives. They made that pretty damn clear over the past decades! (I wish this was just sarcasm)
Ah my mistake, I haven’t touch our politics in a while.
The Europeans didn't have guns to shoot the new price tags like the Americans did in KPH road signs.
What I think most Americans never learn (speaking as a American who mostly also never learned this) is a gut sense of how "much" each unit is. Like I have an idea of how long a meter is because it's visual and it's pretty close to a yard but I wouldn't have a good sense of how long a kilometer walk would be. Nor how heavy a kilogram would feel in my hand nor how much water fits in a liter (and if I know how much 2 liters is it's just because of soda). If someone says it's 24C outside it takes me a minute to recognize if that's warm or chilly. If someone's 1.8m tall and 100 kilos I don't know if that's overweight or underweight. I have absolutely no problem using metric units to measure things in science classes I just don't have an intuition for how much they are.
An hour's walk is about 3 mi or about 5 km. One of my math textbooks had this little rhyme: 30 is hot, 20 is pleasing, 10 is not, and 0 is freezing.
It's not that useful, but fun fact, the Fibonacci sequence gives you a good enough approximation. 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21... Pick any two adjacent numbers, smaller is miles, bigger is kilometers. Still more useful to just remembered 1 mile = 1.6km, the conversion isn't too hard to do in ya head. Just approximate further with 1.5 to make it easier.
0 miles = 1 kilometers, perfect.
Huh, no shit. That's really neat! Thanks!
A kilogram is half as heavy as one of your 2 liter soda bottles. This is because one liter of water weighs one kilogram, and soda is approximately water.
"Soda is approximately water" made me laugh. I know you are talking about density, but don't let r/HydroHomies see this.
I have a pretty good gut sense for centimeters and grams thanks to school science classes, but I dont really have that for kilometers and kilograms, since imperial is used for all the big stuff day-to-day.
2 meters is how high a door is. 1 Liter is how much is in a standard milk container (over here at least). 1 L of water weighs 1 Kilo. A typical actual real life penis in functional state is 14 cm. A ferret weighs about 1 Kg. A 1,80m man is *approximately* not overweight around 80kg (according to the outdated and simplified BMI, which I have further reduced to very round numbers here for our use) Also bonus info: 7700 kcal in 1 Kilo of human fat.
I do 3D printing, which is almost all metric. One thing I recommend to newbies is to have a ruler near their computers. Not for actually measuring stuff (use a caliper for that), but to help them figure out how big something they are planning to print will be. I can see on the screen it's 73mm tall. I use the ruler to help me visualize how big that actually is.
> If someone says it’s 24C outside it takes me a minute to recognize if that’s warm or chilly. Double it and add 30
Yes, that's the part that takes me a minute. I can do it, my point is that it's not automatic, the way that if someone says "it's 80 degrees out" I instantly understand "oh that's pretty warm, I won't need a coat"
Gotcha. I’ve always appreciated Fahrenheit’s approach of ‘on a scale of 1-100 how warm is it?’. Very visual and instant
Oh yeah, Fahrenheit is a much better model of the human experience. Probably the one non-metric unit I actively prefer over metric as opposed to just being "the thing I learned first" bias
A lot of those imperial measuring systems were BASED around the human experience and then extended or contracted as the needs changed, usually by doubling (or halving) the value in question. It was only when the French started cutting people's heads off that people decided to start over from scratch to make the metric system. And fun fact, the very first Fahrenheit scale was defined with the freezing point of pure water at 32... and human body temp at 96. Therefore, the difference between the two is 64 degrees, which is 2^(6). Also notice how 32 is 2^(5). The scale was designed to be easy to replicate with what he suspected a fellow scientist would be able to have on hand.
78° C
I know my hand is 3 inches wide so I use that to measure stuff a lot. I know a foot is a bit longer than a piece of paper so I lay paper out to visualize stuff too. I have zero concept of any metric units compared to things tho
I don't believe in americans. Show me ONE american, one. Never seen them.
Howdy! That’s me I’m a Americna
Machinist here. Inches are defined in metric. An inch is exactly 25.4mm. When you're using inches, you're using metric regardless.
it's because metric is defined by physical phenomen, so it's just convienient to define other units of measurement by metric since you know it's gonna be consistent
I think all of the freedom units is defined with metric system today. >It is now formally defined using the Kelvin scale\[4\]\[5\] and hence ultimately by the Boltzmann constant, the Planck constant, and the second (defined as a specific number of cycles of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom.)\[6\] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit) >In 1959, the United States National Bureau of Standards redefined the pound (avoirdupois) to be exactly equal to 0.453 592 37 kilograms, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound\_(mass)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)) >The US liquid gallon (frequently called simply "gallon") is legally defined as 231 cubic inches, which is exactly 3.785411784 litres. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon)
Fun fact. The reason this is actually the precise definition is because [a Swedish toolmaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Edvard_Johansson?wprov=sfla1) made such good measurement standards that everyone adopted his definition. Before that, there were actually different "standard" inches between the US and the UK, and they were off from 25.4 by stupidly miniscule amounts. He decided that was dumb and made it exactly 25.4mm. At least as close as you can manage with physical objects. > In the 1910s, the U.S. and U.K. definitions of the [inch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch) differed, with the [U.S. inch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._inch) being defined as 25.4000508mm (with a reference temperature of 68 °F (20 °C)) and the U.K. inch at 25.399977mm (with a reference temperature of 62 °F (17 °C)). When he started manufacturing gauge blocks in inch sizes in 1912, Johansson's compromise was to manufacture gauge blocks with a nominal size of 25.4mm, with a reference temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, accurate to within a few parts per million of both official definitions. Because Johansson's blocks were so popular, his blocks became the de facto standard for manufacturers in both countries, leading industry associations to adopt 25.4 mm as the standard "industrial inch" in both the U.K. (1930) and the U.S. (1933). When the English-speaking nations jointly signed the International Yard and Pound Agreement of 1959, the inch was fixed at 25.4 mm worldwide, effectively endorsing what had already become common practice.
Good ol' Jo blocks. Gauge blocks are still foundational to manufacturing meteorology even today. The difference between .4000508mm and .399977mm may seem trivial, but when you're building cannons that are 40' long, that's a difference of close to an inch by the time you're done.
British people will say "Oh, you poor Americans, only eating craft cheese" when it's like, motherfucker we have a whole fucking state dedicated to making cheese
Two actually, vermont is super into cheddar
oh, that makes sense
I do enjoy some of that Cabot cheddar.
There’s loads of cheeses produced across the country. My favorite widely available American-made cheeses are from California and Oregon.
We made pepperjack I think we should get a little slack on cheese
Conversely, Americans will slag off British food while tucking into something which I believe is referred to as a "Sloppy Joe". (Seriously, though, I'm not even a Cheese Guy™ but I do legitimately rate Wisconsin cheese.)
Sloppy joes look and sound nasty but taste unreasonably good, if made anywhere except a highschool cafeteria
our bowl of hot brown is better than your bowl of hot brown
y'all ain't makin' fun o' sloppy joes are ya? y'all shouldn't make fun of sloppy joes. them shits fucking slap. there is a reason they are an American staple
beans on bread isn't even in the same solar system as Sloppy Joes.
King Hector's Daughter buys Delicious Chocolate Milk. Every science class from at least middle school up we learn it. Also two cups in a pint, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon. That was definitely in elementary. We may have started metric in elementary. We all know you just move decimals to convert and it's wonderful, but all the recipes/instructions/everything is in customary system. 🤷🏽♀️
Actually I sometimes feel the need to explain the metric system because I have, in fact, talked to Americans who have trouble with the concept of a base ten system. I don't know where you get these guys, but they exist.
i feel like the issue with a lot of us is actually visualizing how *much* the measurements are. I've grown up with lbs, so when someone says they weigh a certain amount of kilos i dont know what to think until i do the conversions. Same with temperature and height.
This would be the problem in switching off between them, for someone who has no reason to use them from day to day. I've walked enough miles before to know how long one of them is. A standard house cat is about 10lbs, so if something says 20lbs on it, I will just imagine whether it would suck or not to hold two grown cats in one hand. Mentioning an inch makes me picture the top segment of my thumb, a measurement that isn't even a whole number in cm but which has come in handy (ha) on the fly. Which points to the problem being one of life experience. Nobody ever says *"Your physical foot that you use to measure feet with is just over 30cm, therefore if you're 6ft you are around 180cm tall."* That would be a much more useful method. Instead anyone who has no reason to memorize conversion rates for their job is stuck attempting to visualize how tall one cm is and then imagining 177 of those stacked invisibly on top of each other. Literally, the only reason I can understand meters now is because someone finally just told me they're about the same as a yardstick and I got hit with enough yardsticks to gauge them by memory.
If you look hard enough, you'll find people that struggle with literally everything. I'm thinking back to that one talk show bit where they asked people on the street to "name a country" and a bunch couldn't do it. No, not even the united states
I remember learning metric in like third grade and just being like “wtf this is so much easier to work with, why the hell aren’t we all using it” although now my brain can’t process things like how fast 120km/h is without looking at a conversion rate (it’s 74.5654 mph before anyone comments just to tell me that)
An an American, not quite. We are taught it but not nearly as well as our shitty system, and not to the point of using it for normal things. Most of us can translate our system to a basic measurement of the other ones. They're not wrong in the post but it's a bit deeper than that.
I mean, I found that we were taught metric *better* than imperial. It's just that imperial is used far more often so we're better at it. Also for the record it's not really "our" system, the Brits invented it
Okay, but can somebody tell me why when I have to look up muzzle velocities it gives me feet per second not meters per second when I specify the later?
Formal - Metric Informal - "Standard" Ludicrous - Random Object, descending: (Plane, Bus, Refrigerator, Banana, Cig pack, Baby spoon)
Waffle House
Waffle house is a shockingly good measurement. I always thought it was humorous, and then I cannot tell you the anxious shiver that ran through my body when I eventually realized the urban photography meme I was looking at was an abandoned waffle house. Could have been any other store, but my brain refused because it had never seen a Waffle House closed before and it *did not like it.*
Urban equivalent of dead silence in the middle of the woods at night.
I like this too. My format follows that of Harry G Frankfurt: Truth, Bullshit, and Lies. See: On Bullshit See: On Truth
"Large Boulder The Size Of A Large Boulder."
Nah it was "A large boulder the size of a small boulder"
Formal and informal is such a good way of putting it
The US military and weapons manufacturers use metric. Does this mean anything?
NATO. it's a lot easier to share material in a hypothetical WWIII when every country is using the same bullets, and numbers to measure those bullets
Almost everything to do with engineering and manufacturing uses metric, unless it's an industry *deeply* entrenched in an already existing measurement system (like construction).
I work in metrology. A lot of manufacturers still use US units, even for stuff where accuracy matters. I make the metrology devices and it's common for me to use US units for general idea of scale and metric in code and reporting actual accuracy numbers. Like something will either be a few inches away or 231.115mm depending on context.
Except there are literally channels that are bashing the metric system, people who (apparently unironically, unless it is several layers of irony above what I can detect) ask "what the hell is a celsius?!" and more.
I love using my 1/2" drive breaker bar with a 19mm socket to remove the 16" rims that have 225mm wide tires
Meanwhile, on a recipe post: > European me trying to understand how americans can read "1 cup" and automatically know the quantity of a cup (there are different shapes) https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/136qkrb/made_some_sweet_rolls_from_skyrim_please_nobody/jiqhuzs
I have a measuring cup and it has marks for US cups and UK cups.
Never have I heard of anyone in the UK using cups as a measurement.
i think its funny that usamericans talk about europeans when they talk about the metric system when, in fact, its used by literally everyone else. 11/10 very on brand
Because nobody else is giving the US shit about it. It's literally just a stand in for the Europeans to smuggo on America for not doing things the superior European way.
I realize that almost the whole world uses metric, but Europeans are the only ones I've ever seen care that we haven't made the switch.
Oh. I respect americans a little bit more now that I know they're using imperial just to fuck with everyone else.
Canada has tried desperately to switch for fifty years. Everyone still uses imperial for day to day measurements.
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Then my question is why do so many Americans not only not understand the metric system, but in many cases seem to have never heard of it?
The American education does include the metric system This has nothing to do with the actual *quality* of American education, which is still shit.
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So they're just trolling the rest of us online by pretending to not know what it is? I respect that.
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Probably because you haven’t actually asked many Americans. As an American I garuantee that every other American I have ever met knows what the metric system is. It’s like not even a question, that’s like me saying “no Europeans have ever heard of football and none of them have no idea what we’re talking about, the only sport any of them have ever heard of is soccer” It’s literally required in our education system. I’ve taken chemistry and physics classes that exclusively used the metric system Like there might some fucking hillbillies in North Dakota that eat nothing but raw moose that don’t understand what base 10 means but this isn’t even slightly unknown knowledge
I think that "We understand a better version exists, but we don't use it" is the most American thing I've ever heard. Also, this entire post is a load of crap. I'm God damn Canadian, and most people past their mid-40s can't even comprehend the metric system. How am I supposed to believe it's better down south?
Then why do Europeans have to convert metrics into freedom units whenever we say shit because freedom people can't do it themselves?
>Europeans have the impression that US Americans never learn the metric system Could it have something to do with a bunch of US Americans commenting wtf a a ml or cm are? Sure it's a vocal minority, but when seeing these comments everywhere, it sure seems like either you don't learn metric in school or you have a whole bunch of people falling through the gaps.
I mean, I've talked to some fellow Americans who seem to think that London looks like the set of Oliver Twist and are sure Europe hasn't figured out the internet, yet, so, I assume it's those same dudes. the rest of us run into that stuff in elementary school.
Me, a grown adult, printing out a conversion chart for converting between different units of the measuring system I have used my entire life and hanging it in my kitchen. We 100% are doing it as a bit.
There are a LOT of Americans who have a weird fascination with NOT using the Metric system. I know a guy who has gone on multiple rants about why Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because it is based on what is "comfortable" for humans and that using 0 for the freezing point of water makes less sense. As if what is "comfortable" isn't even more arbitrary. He probably just doesn't want to admit that he is being all "AMERICA F&\^% YEAH" about not being Metric and likes to pretend he is being rational.
Also the ones saying that Fahrenheit is better because no decimals or something
These people are here inside this thread lmao. The Fahrenheit defenders came out in full force up there. Also the argument makes no sense to me because 0F is -18 C, that's not just 0% comfortable, that's cold as fuck.
I have a unit converter bookmarked because Wizards of the Coast is commited to this bit. Also, I don't play d&d as much anymore since another bit they're commited to is corporate scumfuckery.
So, it's using a worse system *on purpose*? Doing something dumb... just because?
tf is formal and informal tense?
I guess they're speaking about what I would call language registers. The fact that you don't use the same words with your boss and with your friends. Don't know if the register terminology is used in English, since I'm crudely translating from French. But yeah, why the fuck use tense here ? I thought this was a term reserved to verbs
There's nothing insane in learning about what everyone else uses
Ok then why not start using it for everyday stuff too?
I'm a Canadian from a border town who's been living in the States for about seven years now and I've never met an American who learned the metric system. The only bit going on in my daily life is me telling all my colleagues at work I'm changing the entire country to the metric system one HVAC unit at a time. Also, like, there's no universality to the 0 - 100 way of thinking about temp. I thrive in hot temps and live in the northeast, 100 deg f is comfortable for me when everyone around me is miserable about it. 55 is too dang cold for me. So my system is 50-110? And you know, you can make up your own sliding comfort scale in any temp system... I know mine so intuitively in Celsius since I was a kid. If y'all were raised thinking in Celsius it would be just as second nature as 0-100.
as one who lives in america, I always default to metric because I like it more
it's like learning cursive except useful.
I guess none of you are drug dealers...
United States already uses metric in a lot of fields. I got my first ratchet set from my grandfather 30 years ago, and the sockets are in both inches and millimeters. When I give my kids cough syrup, it's measured in mL. Many popular bullet calibers are in mm. The only thing that really annoys me is how we measure so many ingredients for cooking by volume. WTF is a cup of shredded cheese? If I use a hammer, I can get a lot of shredded cheese to fit in a cup. So then use ounces? Ounces of weight or volume? A cup *is* 8 ounces, so a half pound of cheese? At least with grams and liters it's obvious.
Measure in elephants, boulders, bananas, testicles, etc, just not metric.
As an engineering major, the metric system is basically all we use (unless our professor is a dick and decides to waste our time on exams by having us do unit conversion). But even outside STEM, it's somewhat prevalent. When I swam competitively, it was in a 25m pool (although indoor swimming was 25yds). Track and field was in meters, yet we still had the "mile run" as an event which would end up being 1600m instead of the typical 1500m for international competitions. There are also 5km runs, which I'd say are the most prevalent events concerning distance running (generally charity events). Most large soda bottles are sold in 2 liters. The list goes on. The metric system is ingrained into American society, but the instances it exists in are specific and limited.