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.
Except WTF is the next size up or down from 15/64??!!!
There’s lots of great reasons to switch to metric. Inability to do basic fractions isn’t one of them…
For the record, it would be 16/64, or, 1/4
For the record, it would be 16/64, or, 1/4
Nope! It’d be 6mm, then B gauge (6.045mm), then 1/4" (6.350mm). And that’s not including things like over/under reamers and such.
(Sorry, I’ve been watching too much Blondihacks lately.)
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.
Except In this specific case, it’s about measurements for tools. Fractional is far more practical for construction than decimal for tooling.
What does he think “imperial” means? “federal”?
To be fair the modern USA is imperialist, we just don’t call it that because imperialism is no longer considered a good thing.
How old is he ? Little kids are hard to convince.
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 12’7” divided by 4? How many 1/8” 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.
Ah yes, I’ll have 0.8 metric eggs please.
Say you have a recipe that takes three eggs but you only have two. Do you wanna do the math on what 2/3 of one cup is actually?
Ummm… It’s 2/3 cup, and that is a standard measurement. But maybe that wasn’t the best example. Let’s say 2/3 of 1/4 cup. Well that’s 2/12 or 1/6 cup which is far from common. However a cup is 48 tsp, so 1/6 cup is 8 tsp.
I mean it’s dumb as hell but it does work.
The Metric system is easier though.
It’s like when the crazy guy says it’s easy and then pulls out a pinboard with pictures and string connecting them and proceeds to explain how it makes sense in his head and you have to admit that you sort of follow but also can’t believe what you’re hearing is reality.
The thing that drives me bonkers is that ounces is both a volume and mass measurement, and they aren’t the same for water.
You can just say you don’t know fractions.
It’s okay.
They used to give out a little conversion rotary slide rule at trade shows. Pretty nice tech, two circles of cardboard pop riveted together in the center, on the top one the units are written on a series of rings, smallest on the outside, biggest on the inside, there’s a cutout along the radius so you can see the numbers written on the bottom one. Spin the bottom one so the unit you know is showing and the one you want will be right there.
I bet they still make em.
As a previous hardware store employee in Australia I can confirm we were given these as well, as a lot of our tooling is still in imperial measurements - particularly bits, tools, fasteners and the like. I think my old one is still lying around in a box in the garage somewhere…
Sometimes I buy liquid eggs in a carton if I need a lot of eggs for one recipe and don’t feel like cracking a dozen eggs. One large egg is about 50g, so 0.8 metric eggs is about 40g.
Got to get the metric chickens for those.
Kek. 1.21 kilochickens
Interestingly chicken size is based on their weight… So a size 18 chicken is a 1.8kg chook
That’s a big mother Clucker for sure 🤣
Reminds me of the good old days when my dad raised free range fowl: the chickens were the size of turkeys and the turkeys were too big to even fit in the oven 😂
A metric egg is a little over 50 grams. You typically get a bit over 30 grams of white, 20 grams of yolk and 5-ish grams of shell.
This is a rounding error.
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.
A litre of water weighs a kilogram. When asked for 300ml of water, I can add 300g instead.
Only at sea level. Cooking with metric in the Himalayan mountains would not allow for this conversion.
+1 point to imperial /s
Okay now do oil.
It’s not often you get a recipe telling you to add 300ml of oil. But it sounds like a recipe I want to try.
That’s a good point, that does come in handy.
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
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Any baking recipe that doesn’t list all measurements by weight belongs in the trash.
mfw I finally find someone else who writes “250gr water” in their cooking notes
Fortunately water is the easiest thing to convert.
Seriously. Many ingredients are different depending on if they’re 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!
[email protected] feels this in their soul
That would only work for substances with a density of 1
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And eggs.
Yeah man, can’t believe some recipes go to 11.
Can’t they just make the 10 higher?
Yeah but these ones go to 11
Please, baking is such a pain in the ass because measurements are never consistent
And everything is measured by volume. Just tell me the amount of salt I need in grams and I don’t have to worry about if it’s kosher or not.
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.
But every recipe from the US uses kosher salt, which means their measurements don’t match for other salts, but if they gave the weight it wouldn’t be an issue. 5g of salt is 5g of salt no matter the size of the crystals, but one teaspoon can be totally different.
That’s why making a preferment like poolish is a superior method for any bread recipe. You only add salt once the poolish has finished the leavening process.
inconsistent flour hydration and packing density has entered the chat
Sure it is
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
I didn’t know the conversion for tbsp to cups, that’s super helpful!
Google assistant has gotten worse and worse but “Hey Google, how many tablespoons are in x” is pretty helpful
Or use DuckDuckGo
Or use the terminal app
qalc, which converts and calculates with everything!Does that plug into assistant speakers?
I’m not a massive fan of it but hands free cooking questions are nice. I use DDG for my browser search
I’m sure some open hardware hacker could get DuckDuckGo or
qalcto work through their home-soldered voice-controlled assistant.But other than that, no. For what it’s worth, I spend 2 to 3 seconds for each conversion through the terminal when preparing a recipe, or about 15 seconds unlocking my phone and looking it up in DDG on the spot
Right? Cooking is the single area where the American system makes sense. Much more intuitive and you don’t need a kitchen scale.
Using volume is imprecise no matter what units you’re using. Not a big deal for cooking, but for baking, you definitely should use a scale.
Cooking is an art. Baking is a science
I was with someone who eyeballed it. Worked out for a skillet. Then she tried to make bread one night. I warned her but it did not go well
And Celsius? And 24 hour time?
We use 24 h format here where I live but we speak in 12 h format because it’s less awkward. Not all that shines is gold, I guess
What’s awkward about it?
Computer, wake me up at zero six hundred hours!
That’s absurd, we just say “wake me up at six hours” and it understands us.
And “wake me up at 18 oʼclock” for the pm variant.
And “wake me up at 18 oʼclock” for the pm variant.
“At six” works in 24 hour time too.
I use 24h in speech, it trips up some people a little but they all understand and I’ve gotten a few to switch!
My native language is Dutch, but I to give an example I say “vijftien uur” for 15:00 / 3pm and “vijtien uur dertig” for 15:30 / 3:30pm. My closest English equivalents would be “fifteen oʼclocm” and “fifteen thirty”, really.
My point is, make the tiniest possible step, only replace the number of the hour with the 24h variant and drop the am/pm part.
Yes please
If we are doing this, shouldn’t we go straight to Kelvin? So we no longer have to deal with negative temperatures
So water freezes at 273 degrees and boils at 373? No thank you
It’s so nice the US and Liberia are the only two countries to share both Ebola AND the imperial system. They’re buddy buddy.
The US founded Liberia
So it did. TIL.
Myanmar uses imperial as well. At least partially. Or they did when I visited there a few years ago.
Oh I thought they converted. Or were converting. I don’t think they had Ebola though.
Must have, otherwise they wouldn’t use imperial. That’s what it’s for.
TBF in practice a lot of countries use the imperial system, from Canada to the UK to Jamaica to the Philippines. They just “use metric” 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.
Yes like I certainly measure flour in cups in Canada lol.
I noticed some Canadians seem to use metric exclusively, while others very much use imperial systems through and through. Android defaults to imperial systems when it’s set to Canadian English, which confuses me even more but I suppose imperial must be used a lot, then
I find stuff like cups and spoons and pounds and inches are used here more than metric, but we definitely use kilometers only.
Android lied to me
Maybe it’s a plot by the Australian government because it led me to set all my devices to Australian English; they’re always 100% metric
@lord_ryvan @BonesOfTheMoon, I don’t understand how it can be in the 21st century that a system as idiotic and archaic as the imperial one continues to be used. NASA has already caused millions of dollars in damage by crashing several probes due to miscalculations with these outdated and devoid of any logic measurements, based on parts of the body of a king, dead centuries ago instead of clear physical and mathematical units as in the rest of the world.
I also don’t get it and my country is slowly adapting it too (Netherlands)
I absolutely hate it and try to counter it actively
At least Raiden should’ve had no issues then
tespoons? That’s what tsp means?
Yeah what’d you think it meant, Eugene?
…ten square pounds?
Calzone explodes
Jazz music intensifies
WTF is a square pound!? You’ve ruined my day.
One pound times one pound, duh.
When you go at it harder than a trash compactor and your partner literally changes shape.
A square pound is when a guidance counselor who thinks he’s still cool goes in for a fist bump and says "pound it "
Mfs don’t realize we already fuckin use metric for all kinds of shit.
I bet the dang Nasa doesn’t measure their rockets by the barley corn.
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.
I’m not sure what your point is? Some people not knowing a certain obscure unit of measurement doesn’t discount an entire system of measurements. Also your mile example doesn’t make sense because most people do know how many feet are in a mile.
You’re proving my point exactly. The imperial system is so convoluted that even people that INSIST that EVERYONE should use it, don’t understand its units.
Just because most people don’t have to deal with a certain conversion, doesn’t mean that none do. There are enough engineers that design stuff which is related to problems on these variations in scale. They waste hours in productivity in needlessly complicated conversions (because fractions). Not to mention the mistakes that get introduced like the famous Mars lander that crashed because of imperial unit conversions.
Not only are the units incredibly inconsistent, you also have the issue that Brits and boat people use variation of some of the same units. US Gallons vs British Gallons, mile vs nautical mile. MPH, vs knots. That barley corn that Holzkohlen mentioned defines shoe sizes, unless of course, you don’t wear shoes.
You have no point to prove! You’re just ranting like a crazy person about stuff no one’s heard of that doesn’t even matter!
We went from posting Twitter screenshots as memes to posting reddit screenshots as memes
That’s called progress, imo
Excuse me, I think you mean X.com screenshots.
The A* paper standard and the metric system. A Pythagorean can dream.
When I was 6 in 1980, they told us we would be switching in a year or two.
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…
Any day now
Just like daylight savings time…
We actually got rid of that in Denmark recently, but in a pretty foolish way: our time is now locked in on daylight savings time rather than the original unmodified time.
Probably gonna mean some dark mornings when the times come and we don’t switch back, which’ll suck for those of us who have a hard time getting out of bed before the sun’s up…
That was pulled back because the way that was passed in the Senate would have set a bad precedent.
Yes and then they realized all the replacement parts for everything already built would still need to be imperial measures as a replacement fastner needs to be the same size. So we didn’t switch.
I personally fucking hate ounces. Recipes could mean volume or weight.
They could but let’s be realistic. Anyone who uses volume for recipes is a moron.
And now we’ll add a pound of milk
It’s so nice to measure fluid in milliliters and grams, it all works so well.
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Measuring anything in cups can fuck right off. Are we supposed to use expresso cup size? Or big gulp cup size?
- espresso
If you use the same cup for everything it doesn’t matter.
If you use the same cup for everything, I doubt that much matters to you at all, though 🤷
It does if not everything is measured in cups
Thats the whole point. It doesn’t matter, as long as you use the same cup for all the measurements. Imperial recipes are ratios that can be scaled to any cup size.
Or do what most people do and use a measuring cup, standardized size, cheap and available at basically any store.
fr baking needs precision
Weight is the only acceptable way to measure flour and water for baking.
Super selfish reason but as an architect in the US, I deal with nice round imperial numbers all day. Door frames, typically 2”. Standard commercial door, 3’x7’. All the codes are based around imperial too. ADA door width, 3’. Masonry Dimension, every 8 inches. At this point, it would be hard to remember that ADA turning radius is 1525 mm (not the easy 5’…. And yes, I know that’s changing to 67” soon). There are literally hundreds of dimensions I would have to relearn. I suppose it’s 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.
A change like that shouldn’t be done over night, you’d need to go double standard for a while, say 10-20 years depending on the sector. That way you can construct ‘ansi’ buildings while new development is slowly moving to ‘iso’, and machines get the new specs when replaced. Give a heading and industries will slowly adapt.
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 rounding…. Who knows though. I don’t know a ton about that side of things
What does the first letter in “ICC” stand for, again? One would think it ought to already have metric.
Just make your drawing in an imperial template and change the unit display when your done.
I’m a Canadian who started school when the change happened. Grade two, 1977: new rulers!
I think it’s fair to say that we all ended up hybridized. Some things I measure intuitively in metric, others in imperial.
People’s height? feet and inches.
Grocery weights? pounds. If it’s in Kilograms, I quickly convert it.
Grocery volumes (Milk, dairy products, shampoo, basically anything purchased in a container)? litres.
Gasoline? Gallons or litres. Either is fine. But fuel economy is mpg.
Temperature? Celsius outdoors, Fahrenheit indoors. We had an old thermostat when I was growing up.
Carpentry measurements? Inches.
Wrenches? whatever fits!
Distances? It took a long time, probably fifteen years, but at some point, I stopped converting kilometres to miles. Now I just think in kilometres.
Distances? These are measured in time
Fair. Regular hours, not French revolution decidays.
That being said, today is the 10th day of Thermidor.
Hello fellow midwesterner?
Grocery volumes (Milk, dairy products, shampoo, basically anything purchased in a container)? litres.
Meanwhile, here in the US, we’ve got soda in liters but milk in gallons. Udder madness!
Carpentry measurements? Inches.
It amuses me that in metric countries, construction materials like plywood are often standardized to strange non-rounded measurements like 1220 x 2440 x 13mm because it’s actually just 4’ x 8’ x 1/2" in disguise.
Wrenches? whatever fits!
Interestingly, I can’t remember the last time I needed SAE wrenches. Even my old '96 Ford Ranger is metric, I think.
Cars have been all metric since the mid-80s IIRC, to better standardise them for international sales. The Ranger was really a Mazda B-series, so it’s definitely metric.
