American measures are shit

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Chive Turkey said:
How many cases in cooking can you imagine where you need a seperate standard instrument to measure the volume of ingredients, as opposed to using the container it came in on the fly, using weight or just using common sense? There are limited cirumstances in which knowing the exact volume is specifically required, whilst using volume as your standard baseline is generally going to be more inexact and counterproductive than just reading the weight which is fucking plastered on everything you buy at the store anyway.


>buy 500g pack of flour
>use half
It seems a bit redundant to use some tool to eyeball measurements when you've got fucking eyeballs.
Click to expand...

Yes, but you guys seem to have a problem with the actual measurement of Cups and I find it ridiculous. It's a perfectly good measurement. I'm sorry if you're too autistic to level out a cup.
 
Keeping using imperial to enrage the rest of the world is the most American thing ever, its one of those things that makes me proud to be an American
 
Metric is Stupid said:
Metric is for NPC baby brained simpletons who need everything hand fed to them. Imperial measurements are for intelligent alpha males with basic critical thinking skills.

And I feel the need to remind you what @JULAY said:

View attachment 1236556
Click to expand...
Don't most scientists/engineers use metric or are at least learned in it?

Tour of Italy said:
I think what you lose in precision you make up for in speed. For staple ingredients that have consistent density it really doesn’t matter whether you use volume or mass except for the fact that filling a cup with flour and scraping the top is always going to go quicker than trying to hit the mark on a scale.

If you’re a professional you’re either measuring by weight or have developed the judgement to make up the difference. If you’re a novice you just wants chocolate chip cookies, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a choice between quick and dirty or busting out the scale.

There are virtues to both approaches, it’s just what you’re familiar with.
Click to expand...
This is actually a nice way of explaining the literal difference between precision and accuracy.
 
Last edited:
haurchefant said:
Keeping using imperial to enrage the rest of the world is the most American thing ever, its one of those things that makes me proud to be an American
Click to expand...
^ This.
I think the imperial system is ridiculous, but I'm consistently impressed with the new and inventive ways people come up with to defend something that seems so objectively bad to me.
Gotta respect it.
 
Last edited:
Fuck gallons and fuck horsepower, that's all I can say about it. Cubic feet and foot-pounds per second are where it's at.
 
Aside from cooking, metric seems reasonable. But when you consider just how embedded Imperial is in cooking culture, it doesn't make sense to change.

I know it's easy to look up a recipe online and convert between units, but the books about cooking that really matter - the non-novice stuff - are all in Imperial. For instance, if you want to learn the French system - not the nuveau modern techniques that pass for it - you really need to pull books from the 20s and 30s. That's when meaningful translations were happening for English-speaking markets.

Unit conversion is not easy in those books because ingredients are different. A cup of sugar is not the same as a cup of granulated white sugar, which is more potent and saccharine. You really need to think about what the author was intending for things to turn out right, especially when it comes to baking and sauces. Super-precise measures with decimal points make it a lot harder to follow the train of thought, it's better to stick with the original units.

Additionally, rounding metric measures yields slightly more that Imperial measures. It becomes an issue for certain types of cookware common in the US and Europe, especially when you are cooking for large groups. I might want to make a sauce in a black iron skillet using 1.5 quarts of stock. A metric recipe is going to translate that as 1.5 liters because they always round up. That 1.5 liters is not going to fit standard cookware, you won't be able to stir properly. So I'm going to need a pot instead and that changes the character of the sauce. That creates a completely different flavor, using a properly seasoned skillet and reducing in a pot are very different things.

So don't treat it as a math problem. Imperial versus Metric is a cultural problem, there is a lot to lose by switching over. Pretty sure the Sorbone still teaches in Imperial.
 
Someone once told me that imperial is much more forgiving than Metric. For example 1/8" is pretty much as accurate as the average person can eyeball, 3mm on a rule isn't so useful.

Also making the change from imperial to metric is not some small thing. Everything needs to be retooled. It only started to happen in the UK after the 1970's and the collapse of British manufacturing. It makes no sense for the US to change now.

As for cooking, well a single measurement of volume such as the cup, allows someone to commit a recipe to memory in a way metric can't. You can also scale up and scale down easily.
 
Radioactive Man said:
^ This.
I think the imperial system is ridiculous, but I'm consistently impressed with the new and inventive ways people come up with to defend something that seems so objectively bad to me.
Gotta respect it.
Click to expand...
Here's one: The Imperial system makes it really fucking hard to reverse engineer shit- Back when the B29 was the only pressurized cabin bomber we wouldn't give one to the Soviets under lend-lease so the fuckers stole one. Simple shit like industries not sharing sheet metal thickness really motherfucked the project and put them years behind on it.
 
SocialDislocationAuto said:
Here's one: The Imperial system makes it really fucking hard to reverse engineer shit- Back when the B29 was the only pressurized cabin bomber we wouldn't give one to the Soviets under lend-lease so the fuckers stole one. Simple shit like industries not sharing sheet metal thickness really motherfucked the project and put them years behind on it.
Click to expand...
The Russian defector Victor Suvorov said the Russians found a tiny recess in one of the wings , and they couldn't figure out what it was for.

Rather than take chances they included it in every single one of the first production TU-4's. It was only when they captured other B 29's that they figured out it was just a quirk of that particular plane.
 
Metric is Stupid said:
Yes, but you guys seem to have a problem with the actual measurement of Cups and I find it ridiculous. It's a perfectly good measurement. I'm sorry if you're too autistic to level out a cup.
Click to expand...

I’m not a professional baker, but this lady is. Here’s an excellent demonstration of why measuring by weight is superior to measuring by volume when you’re baking and need precise measurements.

 
SocialDislocationAuto said:
Here's one: The Imperial system makes it really fucking hard to reverse engineer shit- Back when the B29 was the only pressurized cabin bomber we wouldn't give one to the Soviets under lend-lease so the fuckers stole one. Simple shit like industries not sharing sheet metal thickness really motherfucked the project and put them years behind on it.
Click to expand...
I'm sure the Soviets with their abacuses, communist math and 1940s technology did have a hard time of cloning the B-29. It is, however, current year. With modern computers, precise measuring and computer modeling I doubt that the conversion is going to seriously throw off a decent engineer.
 
longtimelurkerfirsttimepo said:
I'm sure the Soviets with their abacuses, communist math and 1940s technology did have a hard time of cloning the B-29. It is, however, current year. With modern computers, precise measuring and computer modeling I doubt that the conversion is going to seriously throw off a decent engineer.
Click to expand...
It's not that the conversions are difficult, tolerances get a bit fun but if you're experienced then you know where and when shit matters- When you go to build shit things get more interesting or pull tooling and what was once a .032" internal rad that could be made easily with a form tool is a bit harder for Dieter Austwurst left scratching his head at a .8128mm rad. Or shit, if you're an euro have you ever tried to get 1.78593751 mm thick sheet metal exactly? It might seem like small differences but that same decent engineer can also tell you about something called "tolerance stackup."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom