"Back when I was a Catholic-school kid in northern Wisconsin, my school lessons briefly focused on the metric system. This was in the late 1970s."
Man, the progressive school (Comanche Elementary in Overland Park, Kansas!) must have had a huge impact on my life. In addition to open classrooms (I was in Unit 5, not 4th Grade), team teaching, a focus on experimental science, a circular layout to the school with a sunken (architecturally) library in the center…
Yeah, we went over the Metric System that whole year. I can still sing the "Metric Family" song from the film on metric units ("Kilo", "Milli", etc.). And to my young and impressionable mind, the U.S. was joining the rest of the "Free World" in a kind of Star-Trek-like casting aside of the old things that divided us—joining each other with a focus on progress, science, space…
President Carter came along around the same time or shortly after. And I have a photo of a family road trip to South Dakota, Montana: the sign that indicates the altitude of a particular mountain pass has both feet and meters. I Google-mapped the same location recently and of course it's no longer in meters.
I feel like in my elementary school days (the 1970's) the U.S. was on the cusp of a future of optimism—no doubt buoyed by having put astronauts on the Moon, but I was wildly on board for it.
But then some kind of shit seemingly started to poison the country. I don't feel we have ever returned to that level of national optimism. Perhaps 1976, the Bicentennial, was the end of it. (Recently watching the film "Nashville" brought me back a bit of the vibe of the times.)
It was there again in the 90s after the wall fell. Fukuyama was boldly proclaiming the “end of history.” Newt started to kick at the edges with his combative policies but the inertia continued until the dotcom crash and 9/11 came along, and fully ended with the Great Recession.*
* (From my viewpoint as a millennial. Gen Z might think the golden years were during Obama, or just pre-COVID. To some extent every generation has a point in time that they see with rose tinted lenses.)
>> It was there again in the 90s after the wall fell.
Don't forget that connecting everyone to the internet was going to produce world peace, utopia, universal education and understanding. Instead of creating a conduit for memetic viruses to infect the world at unprecedented speed.
> (From my viewpoint as a millennial. Gen Z might think the golden years were during Obama, or just pre-COVID. To some extent every generation has a point in time that they see with rose tinted lenses.)
Of course they do. It's the formative years & youth. Roughly from the time you form a mature consciousness (12-14 yo) to roughly your late 20s or maybe early 30s when all your tastes, preferences etc. are formed.
The Daily Show did a segment on this. I can't find the clip but the title was "Even Better Than the Real Thing" and it was with John Oliver. Anyway the conclusion was "the good old days when life was simpler" are inevitably "when you were a child" -- it would be interesting to see how that holds up with others
> Yeah, we went over the Metric System that whole year. I can still sing the "Metric Family" song from the film on metric units ("Kilo", "Milli", etc.). And to my young an impressionable mind, the U.S. was joining the rest of the world "Free World" in a kind of Star-Trek-like casting aside of the old things that divided us—joining each other with a focus on progress, science, space…
I’ve always found this peculiar because at times I have felt the same, but reflecting over the years and I guess as my mind settling on lived experience and opinions I’ve come to appreciate the Imperial system far more precisely because of its absurdities but also because of its history and usefulness without instrument.
As someone who, well, finds say Renaissance or Impressionist art to so far be the peak of human artistry, I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity in contrast to Frank Lloyd Wright, Banksy, minimalism, and the cold calculation of the more “scientific” metric system.
Underneath that all is also this view that the United States at least needs to “join the world” and adopt Metric, and soccer, and such and I find myself increasingly rejecting both and other similar notions in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity.
I hope we never change sustems, and I don’t think we will anytime soon. If we do, however, we should not switch to Celsius because the useful scale of Fahrenheit is far superior 0-100 versus 0-32. Celsius isn’t very Metric-y.
> I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity
Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001.
> in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity
You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitely not the pinnacle of cultural uniqueness or non-conformity. Why not adopt a more esoteric and fun language for yourself such as, who knows, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.?
> in contrast to [...] the cold calculation of the more “scientific” metric system
Decimals are optimized for cold calculation, yes. Would you like to use a monetary system based on pounds, shillings, and pence - like the UK and Australia right into the 20th century? Did you know that the New York Stock Exchange traded in increments of $1/8 and later $1/16, before fully decimalizing?
> the useful scale of Fahrenheit is far superior 0-100 versus 0-32.
Well, first of all, I'm not sure why you're defining those scales as the "useful" ones. They don't even equate to each other. But why are you arbitrarily using 100 as the end of your Fahrenheit scale? Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'? If you read his paper, Fahrenheit's scale is actually 0-96.
As a hardware engineer I've been primarily using metric for over three decades, and like the machinist quoted in the article have had to deal with bullshit of converting back and forth. It's not just about inches and centimeters.
If you're working with small motors, the Ke (back-EMF constant) and Kt (torque constant) have different and crazy Reagan units (e.g. V/krpm, inch-ounces/A) but in SI they have units of V/(rd/s) and N-m/A, which if you crunch them down to kg, m, etc. are identical and so have the same numerical value (because they represent the same transformation from electric to mechanical or vice-versa). Power is the product of voltage and current or torque and speed - if you use the SI units no conversion required. Inertia was confusing as hell, some vendors specified it in MOISS, or milli-ounce-inches-seconds-squared, not only involving different unit but you can also get balled up in the mass vs force confusions.
Converting a drawing from one system to the other perfectly is practically impossible. Conversions can't always be exact and because tolerances are commonly specified in round numbers within a system.
In my garage I still have both metric and Reagan-unit tools. Even though my cars, even the American ones have been metric since the '80s, I have to have the other tools for other household things like the garage doors!
And then there's the tire size abomination - an unholy union - a 255R70-14 is 255 mm wide at the bulge, the sidewall height is 70% of that, and the rim diameter is 14 inches.
I agree that 1 °C is too big a step when dealing with thermostats but that's easily solved by using 0.5 °C resolution.
> I hope we never change sustems, and I don’t think we will anytime soon. If we do, however, we should not switch to Celsius because the useful scale of Fahrenheit is far superior 0-100 versus 0-32. Celsius isn’t very Metric-y.
Except that Fahrenheit's extra precision doesn't really matter. Unless you can tell the difference between 72°F and 73°F, or 34°F and 33°F.
If you think being tethered to gold was a good thing I wonder if you also believe wealth is a zero-sum proposal? I would think that the explosive growth of wealth since 1971 would cause most to rethink that.
You mean, cheap oil ran out. Also, the last remaining sort-of-gold-standard was abolished, so the money printer could go brrr without much restrain, as needed.
Im the other way around and think fractional math isn't used enough because it is so easy and useful. I think fractional maths biggest obstacle is everyone trying to avoid it and not learning it in contexts and methods where it excels.
That said, I still use tons of decimal math because sometimes it is more useful, but not always.
Even the existing-tool-holder is a weak excuse. My socket wrench set came with two near-identical sequences of wrenches, metric and imperial. I regularly the encounter metric variants in the US. Switching to metric, like the rest of the world, would make things simpler.
I keep trying to make myself think in terms of 32nds. For example think of a 9/16 wrench as "18", the 1/2 wrench is just "16", and so on. It's a slow process. I want to standardize on some color code for easy cross-brand identification of wrench sizes too, but I haven't come up with a compelling scheme.
The worst is the hardware. I inherited a full assortment of #2-#10 stainless SAE UNC hardware from a business move (already in nice parts drawers, too). It was pretty awesome for just having whatever I needed on hand to build things. But now as I maintain more and more things that are metric native, I've been building up the assortment of metric threads as well.
I suspect this is one of the real pain points of fabricators (plus taps/dies). And I'm guessing they're still still Imperial native due to existing tooling, making the conversions not clean (it's easy to convert 1/2 inch to 12.7mm and measure that, but it's not straightforward to convert 10mm to 0.3937 inches (25.2/64ths) and measure that.
>no doubt buoyed by having put astronauts on the Moon
NASA did this using customary units
>I've been missing it my entire life since
Surely you've learned by now that you're missing childhood, not an actual thing about the US? I'm asking this as someone who does think this era was peak Americana, but for totally different reasons than you present, and having not been alive then myself.
1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like.
2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there are awkward numbers baked into the system. e.g. 5280 feet in a mile. 128 ounces in a gallon.
3. "It's too much trouble to change." You're already using metric units. U.S. customary units have, metrologically, been defined in terms of metric units since the Mendenhall order of 1893[1]. i.e. A meter is defined in terms of how far light can travel in a period of time defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium. If you needed to know exactly how long a meter is for a very precise measurement, a reference meter could be produced in a lab by aliens who have no idea what a meter is by using this definition. No such definition exists for a foot or yard. Nobody maintains physical reference yards (the old-school method) anymore. If you want those aliens to measure out a yard precisely, you tell them how to measure out a meter and then tell them 1 yard = 0.9144 m.
Temperature is the worst metric unit to pick for this. Both the imperial and metric versions of temperature are completely arbitrary. It's really baffling to me that THIS is the one that most people talking about metric superiority cling to. Where metric shines is when you talk about subunits like mg vs g vs kg. You don't do that with temperature almost ever. So so what if water boils at 212F vs 100C? Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse.
Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.
>Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse.
I mean, every unit is arbiturary. But we need to pick something.
I don't have any love for either, but F is the easiest to pick fun at when none of the standard temperatures make any sense. 32 for freezing water, 212 for boiing, 98.6 for human temperature? The 0 and 100 scale were based on the freezing point of some particular saltwater mixture and 90 degrees for human body temperature (which was corrected and then the scale updated to get to the modern temperature).
I read a study many years ago, I haven't been able to find it for awhile. It took people who had grown up using each system, and asked them to estimate things just by guessing. For example, "How long is that wall?" or "How far is it from here to the post office?" or "How heavy is this paperweight?". People who'd grown up using customary were significantly more accurate in their guesses.
The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters.
Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats.
They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile".
Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.
It makes sense. Curling my finger it is pretty much dead on 1 inch from the tip to the first joint. My foot is a little shorter than 1 foot, but in shoes, pacing it out one foot after another, it is nearly dead on as well. A lot of people measure using anatomy with conventional units.
Counterpoint to #1, celsius increments are too large. I laugh every time I see a thermostat in a car or home that needs to have steps like 20, 20.5, 21, 21.5.. :)
How is that a counterpoint to #1? By that same logic, inches are too big an increment so it's hilarious every time fraction of one is used. 15/16ths? lololol!
Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C? I suspect even the heating element is not that precise, let alone the actual room temperature.
They only case in daily practice where 1°C is too large is the difference between normal body temperature (36.5°C) and mild fever (37.0°C), but thermometers have to be graduated in much smaller subdivisions anyway.
I mean, it's arbitrary. I've lived in a Fahrenheit country and a Celsius country and both systems work fine. Resolution issues exist for both systems (you can still benefit from decimals in Fahrenheit for coffee and tea brewing)
I prefer Fahrenheit because it's based around the human, but it really doesn't matter, and it's probably better long term to have measurements that are not based around the human condition, but we're talking about benefits to society tens of thousands of years from now, rather than today.
In many cases we are, though. A ton of machined things use metric units (and thus need metric tools), and that’s spreading into a lot of other areas like medicine and food packaging. It’s nowhere near absolute but the trend is noticeable.
A slightly more esoteric Imperial unit is "mils", for thousandths of an inch. 1 mil = 0.001 inch. Which means 1 mil = 25.4 micrometers if we also want to use a non-traditional meter measurement.
The inch-foot-yard-mile scale are not uniform, and not easy to calculate. Their only convenience is easy divisibility by 3. The practical example of uniform scale of this kind is seconds-minutes-hours, which, I suppose, go all the way down to the Sumerian 60-based scale. The mm-cm-m-km are much easier in practice.
Sub-inch units are an honest binary system, and as such is pretty practical. The fact that it's written as a ratio of decimal numbers is sometimes unhelpful though, comparing 7/16" and 1/2" takes either mental gymnastics or memorization. Millimeters are somehow more convenient here, but not by such a large margin as with inch-foot-yard scale.
The Fahrenheit scale is uselessly arbitrary; 0°F does not match anything useful, and 100°F is not that useful either.
The only mile that makes sense is the nautical mile, 1 nm matches 1" of arc on the map / globe, the same way as 1 km is 1/40,000th of the arc.
0F is useful in areas where they salt roads because thats the temperature many salts stop being effective and previously good road might turn to ice sheets.
I'd part with cups and teaspoons/tablespoons and the like, but you'll pry inches/feet/yards and fahrenheit from my cold, dead hands. They're both more convenient for daily use. I think I'd prefer to keep miles as well but I don't have a good reason for that one.
Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally experience 5 degrees F - 100 degrees F at different points of the year. That's 95 degrees of precision with no decimal. In C, that's -15 to 37.8, a mere 52.8 degrees. The difference between 75 (usually a beautiful day) and 85 (hot) is 23.8C to 29.4C. Everything packed into this tight range.
Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
AS someone that grew up with metric that feels fairly natural and not tight at all?
>Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
I used ruler tapes with both metric and imperial on either side and i always wondered how one could use the inches since they're so big and didn't always have the same minute subdivisions. Also doing my math in decimals seemed easier than calculating with quarter or 1/8th inches or smaller.
>For science, sure, I'll use metric.
Surely it would feel more natural to use the same for everything and all measurements.
I want to know how much rainwater my IBC roughly holds. I take out my measuring tape real quick. I'm not even sure how I'd get started in imperial without some strong intuition build up over years?
I mean it's mathematically a tighter range. I think part of this comes down to the more mild and less variable European climate. There is just less emphasis on air temperature so you don't see the drawbacks.
Your tape measure didn't have 1/3, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 subdivisions? Sounds like a bad tape measure (or really just one where US Customary was an afterthought).
As for science, well, most people don't do it. Those that do can use different things in different contexts, it's not that hard.
They might have measured precisely at the weather station, but local variation in temperature makes that extra precision meaningless unless you are located exactly where the measurement happened.
Even in a climate controlled room, there will be a degree or two of variation between different parts of the room.
for another example of this: a lot of people "know" that the average human body temperature is 98.6 degF.
that extra decimal point gives people false confidence about the measurement being more precise than it is.
because so much science (even in the US) happens using the metric system, the actual measured average [0] is 37 degC, and 37.0 degC == 98.6 degF. the nuance of the average being more of a confidence interval (37 +/- 0.5 degC, possibly larger) gets lost as well.
What you're ignoring is that a hundred plus or minus is a good range for average humans to grapple with and Fahrenheit splits the temperature swings in a given region across an approximately 100deg range.
So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures.
If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees you could go higher resolution and it'd be fine because rounding would occur like we do with vehicle speeds. Or we could go lower resolution and just make the degrees bigger, which is basically what celsius is.
The difference between a yard and a meter adds up quickly. Already a 25 yard swimming pool yields significantly different times to cross it than a 25 meter one.
Right. It's like when countries switched to the Euro or decimalized. There's a period when everything feels really janky and everyone complains and then a couple of years later everything is just fine and they forget what the old system was even like.
Not switching to metric for time is reasonable, because there are already two existing 'natural' units for time (the day and the year), and they don't align on each other in metric (a year of exactly 1000 days would be so much easier, but we'll have to deal with reality as it is... or accelerate the rotation speed of the planet I suppose).
So long as we live on earth, metric time won't make much sense.
The French did try to switch time to decimal after the Revolution. It was probably the most hated change they made by the local population, and didn't last long.
The problem was that it messed with the week, having a "day of worship / rest" every 7 days, which was then every 10 days
That’s funny because when I work with Fahrenheit I just work with 5°F ranges to compensate for the approximate mental math required. Eg very quick mentally, 100°F = 37.778 °C (thanks autocorrect) = (100-32)/2 = 34.
But if it was closer to freezing say 42°F =5.556 °C (again) so 5°C. So arbitrarily we could say 57°F was 12°C =53.6 °F actually.
But a true Canuck knows knowing the temp is barely half the battle, what’s the wind speed and humidity? 29°C can be a lovely day if it’s dry or completely unbearable if it’s humid.
We hardly ever use decimals for weather-related measurements, the other factors above being more relevant.
Contrast that with measurements where I would say if you need to know a precise one you should be using decimal; ie what do you do if it doesn’t precisely third or fourth? If you’re talking about tool sizes then any system works as long as your froodle matches the grommlet.
> The difference between 75 (usually a beautiful day) and 85 (hot) is 23.8C to 29.4C.
If you convert a nice, round number from one system to the other, you'll end up with a more precise, less nice number, which will give the impression that Celsius is harder to use.
In reality, people from metric countries just think in 5-degree increments: 25 is a beautiful day, 30 is hot. It doesn't feel any harder to read than Fahrenheit.
I wonder if there are people that moved to the U.S., switched to Fahrenheit and now find it more intuitive than Celsius. If one is easier than the other, I assume it still doesn't make up for the hurdle of learning a new system.
> I wonder if there are people that moved to the U.S., switched to Fahrenheit and now find it more intuitive than Celsius.
I've done the move twice in each direction. Neither is more intuitive.
When I moved back to C after 22 years in F, I had to adjust again. It took a few months. The other times were after fewer years, but still took (re)adjusting.
Even in construction, feet/inches/yards kinda sucks. 1:10 scale drawings are painful to do manually, division by 2 is a bit erratic, and bolt sizing is a horrible mess. Metric bolts are nice and consistent.
My wife was a surveyor in a past carreer. We have a tape measure in the garage that measures to the nearest hundredth of a foot. It is just so weird to see. Forcing decimal on a measurement that does not normally have it just makes me uncomfortable.
Miles didn't click for me until I learned that it's defined by how far you'll travel in 1,000 paces (where a pace is an L+R step). Now I find it very useful to convert steps<>distance traveled, which is actually quite useful if you walk a lot!
> Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
all of the math normal people use in everyday life happens in base 10.
"it's easy because it's base 12" is an absolutely ludicrous idea.
what's 7'5" divided by 3? divided by 4?
what happens if you need to divide by 5?
and sure, there are various mental math tricks you can learn to make this easier...or you could just use the metric system.
7'5" is 226cm. that's a normal, boring, everyday, base 10 integer.
you don't need to learn a special set of "mental math for base 12" tricks. instead you can re-use the same mental math tricks you use for every other base 10 number.
Interesting. As an European living in the US. The only US units that I find useful are cups, teaspoons and tablespoons. And that's only for cooking. It's way faster to measure volume than weight (although less accurate)
As a pretty experienced American home baker I don't understand how you can assert that it's faster to measure volume with cups or etc. than to put a bowl on a scale and simply pour stuff in, measuring everything in grams. It's not even close in terms of speed, convenience, _and_ accuracy.
It used to be based on relative size, so if you have a set of spoons and cups and use the same for all measurements they are ballpark right for your recipe (and some minor difference accounting for user error). These day's it's defined anyway in both metric and imperial. As soon as you start weighing something from the recipe it goes out of the window as that defines the rest of the relative measurements. For that reason I really dislike the recipes telling you to measure teaspoons of spices but grams or ounces of flour. I don't have two sets of measurement cups available. These days most cooking sites mention both though.
On a sidenote: an ounce is 100g here and a pound 500g. Mainly by being in common usage and translated to common used weights. "An ounce more okay?" is an easy way to sell more without mentioning how much it actually is in numbers.
I wonder if there's a place on the internet where I can find more of this sort of seemingly strong and well-thought out arguments for something that is so clearly subjective (if not just inferior).
I've lived with deg C my whole life it is what I'm used to, the way I experience weather is in 5 degree increments - I live on East Coast of Australia. My Internal rule of thumb is:
Below 10 deg C - it is cold, Heavy jacket weather
10-15 Typical winter weather (at least where I live) light jacket
15-20 Spring/Autumn weather long sleeves no jacket required
>Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals
Meanwhile, I'm fine at 98.6 degrees, but everyone freaks out over 100 degrees. it's a more precise unit, right?
feet/inches make more sense to be attached to. they are based on your body parts (roughly), and we spend a lot of time looking at humans. inches divide our fingers, feet are... well, feet. And yards are steps. We intuitively know what all those feel like through everyday life compared to the scientific way we derive a centimeter. inches and feet being base 12 is more a coincidence than anything else (or maybe not. Maybe there's some golden ratio shenanigans at play).
The UK uses miles and miles per (UK) gallon. We talk in feet, inchs lbs and stone for weight. But when it comes to engineering works it is ALL now in metric aside from the older builder, all of my schoolwork was in metric, and we never dealt with the hellish conversions it was all SI units, and we just had to know maybe one or two magic constants in physics and chemistry (molar and something else to do with joules in bond enthalpy)
I worked as an engineer and the only drawings specified in imperial were pre 1970s and all the CNC controls are programed in mm feed rates in mm/rev or mm/min
What's the problem with decimals? They're all numbers. -4.5 degrees C is fine, isn't it? (The actual temperature right here right now). Where's the problem?
You don't even need decimals. Nobody who uses celsius gives a shit about the decimals. It's -4 or it's -5 and even that distinction is irrelevant.
Unless you're doing some kind of scientific calculaton there's no need to think about decimals of celsius at all. Just like Fahrenheit users surely don't care whether it's 50 or 53 or whatever. It's around 50, that's all you need to know.
If you want to get even more divisive, try converting people to metric baking measurements. Baking bread and cakes is much more repeatable if you use mass rather than volume to measure ingredients.
The results from this recipe were never consistent when I used volume measurements. I converted to mass in metric and now I get consistent results.
- 227 g unsalted butter (2 US sticks) unsalted butter (The better the butter, the better the results. In the U.S. market, Kerrygold yields the best results, followed by Cabot, and "well, it's still brownies" Market Basket house brand.)
- 400 g dark brown sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 5-10 ml vanilla extract
- 150 g mashed bananas (about 2-3 large, brown bananas)
- 156 g all-purpose flour (I prefer King Arthur All Purpose Unbleached Flour)
- 60-70 g cocoa powder
- 2-3g teaspoon salt
- 280(ish) g chocolate chips (I prefer Ghirardelli Bittersweet 60% Cacao Baking Chips, use 1 bag) )
### Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350F degrees (180C or 170C fan forced). Line a 9x13 inch (23x33 cm) pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil leaving an overhang around the sides. Alternatively, lightly grease the pan.
- Melt the butter in a double boiler. Add in the brown sugar, stir, and let it sit in the double boiler, stirring occasionally until the mixture has a nice caramelly flavor.
- While the butter-sugar mixture is cooking in the double boiler, combine the dry ingredients.
- Sometimes cocoa powder is lumpy, and you may need to sift it. The alternative I use is combined flour, cocoa powder, and salt, and use a whisk to mix it all together and break up any lumps if there are any.
- Take the brown sugar butter mixture off of the double boiler and mix in the mashed bananas and vanilla.
- The bananas usually cool the mixture enough that the eggs won't cook when you put them in, but if the mixture is hot, add some flour, add some of the dry ingredients, and that will cool it down enough to add the eggs safely.
- Stir in the chocolate chips.
- Pour/spoon the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 35 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean or with a few damp crumbs.
- Cool fully (about 4 hours), then slice. Store brownies in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 4 days. (Never last that long in my house)
I use volume measurements for baking and I get consistent results all the time. Perhaps your recipe is especially gnarly, but that isn't true of all recipes.
we do. being a machinist in the US means being able to convert between decimal inches, mm, fractional inches, and things like feet all the time. not to mention other completely arbitrary units like sheet gauge, fastener number and inverse thread spacing. there are also decimal feet for carpenters.
this for me is the real appeal of metric, not that somehow a meter is magical, but at least there is one system, with a consistent set of rules, that allows us to do some magic things like tell the approximate volume of water given a weight.
edit: omg I forgot about nominal wood sizes. the underlying system actually has different units based on the material and the usage. copper gauge is not the same as steel gauge. thats pretty hopeless. for precious metals we also have the pennyweight
That would be negating 90% of the usefulness of using a fractional system though. It is barely a step up from using a prime number like 7 or 11 as a number base or divisor.
I see this argument repeated every single time someone tries to defend Fahrenheit.
if "room temperature" was smack in the middle, at 50 degF, you might have a point.
but no, it's pure post-hoc rationalization.
being naked at 0 degF will kill you. being naked at 100 degF will (usually) not. they're not remotely equivalent.
instead, think of it this way - human beings are mostly water, and 0 to 100 degC is "percentage of the way from water's freezing point to boiling point".
room temperature is "about 20% of the way to boiling". 40% or higher starts to cause our bodies to overheat. a typical sauna will be somewhere between 50 and 70% of the way.
> U.S. customary (the more accurate name for what’s sometimes the called the British Imperial system)
For those wondering why there is this distinction, the British Imperial units were created by the Weights and Measures Act 1824; US customary units follow the Winchester Standard of 1588.
As someone who generally uses metric units, but grew up around English Imperial units - if an American says that a person weighs a certain number of pounds, I need to convert to stone and pounds in my head in order to get a meaningful mental model of how much that person weighs.
The US being stuck in imperial is such a meme nowadays with "freedum units" and the like. It's yet another odd thing that makes it easy for the rest of the world to laugh at the US. In these isolationist times I doubt this will change soon though, but it'd definitely help international collaboration.
Everyone who wants to collaborate internationally is already doing it. Science in the US is entirely metric. Construction and domestic measurements are the two biggest holdouts and honestly they’re both negligible. Given the proliferation of global manufacturing, most businesses are converting at the end before retail for US customers.
If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would adapt within a year or two, but we need to wait at least 3 years for that to even begin to become a possibility again.
Honestly, I don't think anyone would raise much of a fuss over changing distance measurements to metric. Both centimeters and inches are easy enough to eyeball or rule-of-thumb, meters and yards are basically the same, and larger units are only relevant for speed limits and travel planning. Metric lacks a good "foot", but I guess people would get used to eyeballing things in ~50cm increments instead.
Weights are even easier as pretty much everyone uses grams as the smallest daily unit and most people can convert to and from metric on the fly for ounces, lbs, kgs. Liters aren't uncommon, and ml<->gram equivalence for water is well-known. Traditional kitchen volumes probably wouldn't be displaced because metric has no answer for those in first place.
Temperature is where metric will fail to gain adoption because Celsius totally sucks unless your daily life consists only of boiling or freezing water at sea level. No advantages over Fahrenheit except maybe arguably for science, because it's Kelvin with an offset.
The unit itself doesn't actually matter. Even industries with the least precision set their stuff up with so much precision that the unit you use basically doesn't matter.
Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.
Most likely the current administration will pass executive orders banning the use of metric system, and then force other countries to switch to imperial or face heavy tariffs.
>They specify dimensions in feet, inches, and fractions of an inch. But not all of them do.
There are many more fun and exciting non-metric measurements you might encounter than plain old fractional inches.
A fabricator might encounter sheet metal thickness in "gauge". Wire sizes, ammunition, and machine screws also come in "gauge" sizes but all four are different scales. US drills come not only in fractional inch sizes, but letters and numbers as well. Furnace efficiency is often specified in percent, but air conditioner efficiency comes in SEER. Water softener capacity is in "grains". Pipe threads come in "inch sizes", but that usually means NPT.
Metal hardness and rubber durometer measurements have their own scale which doesn't really belong to either camp.
To be fair, a lot of these are categorical units. Screws come in #2 or #6 or #4, but you'll never need to worry about #3.7.
A wise professor once told me "All these different units will not be going away within your lifetime, so you better get used to working with them."
Gauges are a measurement, but they aren't a unit. They don't necessarily have any linear correspondence to actual distance/volume/whatever, and in fact are typically inverse (higher number = smaller thing). And yes, they're categorical. (Sometimes you even see 00 as a gauge number.)
Metal hardness having a bunch of different units is quite annoying but also interesting.
There are quite a few ways to measure the hardness the most interesting being Vickers. You plunge a diamond of a known force into a surface and measure the size of the indentation. This is surprisingly accurate but does leave a small diamond mark on your surface.
With a sufficiently small part a blacksmith or other folks can determine the hardness of a steel just by listening to how it rings. Hey, you can also test for cracks with a ring test, the most common use is ring-testing a vitrified grinding wheel to see if there is no crack
Alot of engineering is just listen and maybe the odd hit with a hammer
We're in such a stupid time. I'm an EE, I typically do all my engineering in millimeters, but most of my coworkers prefer the clownshoes unit "mils". Half our soldering irons are set to Fahrenheit, the others Celsius.
In ordinary every day life, I've found that I use metric for measurements under an inch or under an ounce. At a certain upper limit it makes more sense to use metric for large values too.
So I have to suffer with the magic constant 25.4 bouncing around my brain every day forever and constantly converting trivial measurements into worse units.
I will never convert a measurement to fractional inches. If you must have inches as an input you can suffer a damn decimal point.
Readit News
Man, the progressive school (Comanche Elementary in Overland Park, Kansas!) must have had a huge impact on my life. In addition to open classrooms (I was in Unit 5, not 4th Grade), team teaching, a focus on experimental science, a circular layout to the school with a sunken (architecturally) library in the center…
Yeah, we went over the Metric System that whole year. I can still sing the "Metric Family" song from the film on metric units ("Kilo", "Milli", etc.). And to my young and impressionable mind, the U.S. was joining the rest of the "Free World" in a kind of Star-Trek-like casting aside of the old things that divided us—joining each other with a focus on progress, science, space…
President Carter came along around the same time or shortly after. And I have a photo of a family road trip to South Dakota, Montana: the sign that indicates the altitude of a particular mountain pass has both feet and meters. I Google-mapped the same location recently and of course it's no longer in meters.
I feel like in my elementary school days (the 1970's) the U.S. was on the cusp of a future of optimism—no doubt buoyed by having put astronauts on the Moon, but I was wildly on board for it.
But then some kind of shit seemingly started to poison the country. I don't feel we have ever returned to that level of national optimism. Perhaps 1976, the Bicentennial, was the end of it. (Recently watching the film "Nashville" brought me back a bit of the vibe of the times.)
I've been missing it my entire life since.
* (From my viewpoint as a millennial. Gen Z might think the golden years were during Obama, or just pre-COVID. To some extent every generation has a point in time that they see with rose tinted lenses.)
Don't forget that connecting everyone to the internet was going to produce world peace, utopia, universal education and understanding. Instead of creating a conduit for memetic viruses to infect the world at unprecedented speed.
Of course they do. It's the formative years & youth. Roughly from the time you form a mature consciousness (12-14 yo) to roughly your late 20s or maybe early 30s when all your tastes, preferences etc. are formed.
I’ve always found this peculiar because at times I have felt the same, but reflecting over the years and I guess as my mind settling on lived experience and opinions I’ve come to appreciate the Imperial system far more precisely because of its absurdities but also because of its history and usefulness without instrument.
As someone who, well, finds say Renaissance or Impressionist art to so far be the peak of human artistry, I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity in contrast to Frank Lloyd Wright, Banksy, minimalism, and the cold calculation of the more “scientific” metric system.
Underneath that all is also this view that the United States at least needs to “join the world” and adopt Metric, and soccer, and such and I find myself increasingly rejecting both and other similar notions in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity.
I hope we never change sustems, and I don’t think we will anytime soon. If we do, however, we should not switch to Celsius because the useful scale of Fahrenheit is far superior 0-100 versus 0-32. Celsius isn’t very Metric-y.
Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001.
> in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity
You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitely not the pinnacle of cultural uniqueness or non-conformity. Why not adopt a more esoteric and fun language for yourself such as, who knows, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.?
> in contrast to [...] the cold calculation of the more “scientific” metric system
Decimals are optimized for cold calculation, yes. Would you like to use a monetary system based on pounds, shillings, and pence - like the UK and Australia right into the 20th century? Did you know that the New York Stock Exchange traded in increments of $1/8 and later $1/16, before fully decimalizing?
Well, first of all, I'm not sure why you're defining those scales as the "useful" ones. They don't even equate to each other. But why are you arbitrarily using 100 as the end of your Fahrenheit scale? Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'? If you read his paper, Fahrenheit's scale is actually 0-96.
If you're working with small motors, the Ke (back-EMF constant) and Kt (torque constant) have different and crazy Reagan units (e.g. V/krpm, inch-ounces/A) but in SI they have units of V/(rd/s) and N-m/A, which if you crunch them down to kg, m, etc. are identical and so have the same numerical value (because they represent the same transformation from electric to mechanical or vice-versa). Power is the product of voltage and current or torque and speed - if you use the SI units no conversion required. Inertia was confusing as hell, some vendors specified it in MOISS, or milli-ounce-inches-seconds-squared, not only involving different unit but you can also get balled up in the mass vs force confusions.
Converting a drawing from one system to the other perfectly is practically impossible. Conversions can't always be exact and because tolerances are commonly specified in round numbers within a system.
In my garage I still have both metric and Reagan-unit tools. Even though my cars, even the American ones have been metric since the '80s, I have to have the other tools for other household things like the garage doors!
And then there's the tire size abomination - an unholy union - a 255R70-14 is 255 mm wide at the bulge, the sidewall height is 70% of that, and the rim diameter is 14 inches.
I agree that 1 °C is too big a step when dealing with thermostats but that's easily solved by using 0.5 °C resolution.
Except that Fahrenheit's extra precision doesn't really matter. Unless you can tell the difference between 72°F and 73°F, or 34°F and 33°F.
Enjoy the warmth!
Nobody who grew up using the metric system feels it ‘cold’ and yearns for something with more character.
RWR and the charismatic traditionalism he espoused have caused a great deal of harm to American society.
Metrication is not at the top of that list, but it is one of many examples that we still live with today.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ - the oil ran out and the post-war boom ended.
That said, I still use tons of decimal math because sometimes it is more useful, but not always.
The worst is the hardware. I inherited a full assortment of #2-#10 stainless SAE UNC hardware from a business move (already in nice parts drawers, too). It was pretty awesome for just having whatever I needed on hand to build things. But now as I maintain more and more things that are metric native, I've been building up the assortment of metric threads as well.
I suspect this is one of the real pain points of fabricators (plus taps/dies). And I'm guessing they're still still Imperial native due to existing tooling, making the conversions not clean (it's easy to convert 1/2 inch to 12.7mm and measure that, but it's not straightforward to convert 10mm to 0.3937 inches (25.2/64ths) and measure that.
Childhood Zeitgeist is a perfect term for this. We all pine for it.
NASA did this using customary units
>I've been missing it my entire life since
Surely you've learned by now that you're missing childhood, not an actual thing about the US? I'm asking this as someone who does think this era was peak Americana, but for totally different reasons than you present, and having not been alive then myself.
The Apollo Guidance Computer performed all internal calculations in SI units, and only converted to US customary units for display:
https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/...
I share some of the same disappointment, especially going back and noticing disinvestment in the schools, which were one of the gems of the area.
(And then of course Prop 13 came along and impaled California.)
1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like.
2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there are awkward numbers baked into the system. e.g. 5280 feet in a mile. 128 ounces in a gallon.
3. "It's too much trouble to change." You're already using metric units. U.S. customary units have, metrologically, been defined in terms of metric units since the Mendenhall order of 1893[1]. i.e. A meter is defined in terms of how far light can travel in a period of time defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium. If you needed to know exactly how long a meter is for a very precise measurement, a reference meter could be produced in a lab by aliens who have no idea what a meter is by using this definition. No such definition exists for a foot or yard. Nobody maintains physical reference yards (the old-school method) anymore. If you want those aliens to measure out a yard precisely, you tell them how to measure out a meter and then tell them 1 yard = 0.9144 m.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.
I mean, every unit is arbiturary. But we need to pick something.
I don't have any love for either, but F is the easiest to pick fun at when none of the standard temperatures make any sense. 32 for freezing water, 212 for boiing, 98.6 for human temperature? The 0 and 100 scale were based on the freezing point of some particular saltwater mixture and 90 degrees for human body temperature (which was corrected and then the scale updated to get to the modern temperature).
The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters.
Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats.
They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile".
Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.
They only case in daily practice where 1°C is too large is the difference between normal body temperature (36.5°C) and mild fever (37.0°C), but thermometers have to be graduated in much smaller subdivisions anyway.
I prefer Fahrenheit because it's based around the human, but it really doesn't matter, and it's probably better long term to have measurements that are not based around the human condition, but we're talking about benefits to society tens of thousands of years from now, rather than today.
No we aren't. It doesn't matter what the units are defined as, that is not what determines which units we are using.
The inch-foot-yard-mile scale are not uniform, and not easy to calculate. Their only convenience is easy divisibility by 3. The practical example of uniform scale of this kind is seconds-minutes-hours, which, I suppose, go all the way down to the Sumerian 60-based scale. The mm-cm-m-km are much easier in practice.
Sub-inch units are an honest binary system, and as such is pretty practical. The fact that it's written as a ratio of decimal numbers is sometimes unhelpful though, comparing 7/16" and 1/2" takes either mental gymnastics or memorization. Millimeters are somehow more convenient here, but not by such a large margin as with inch-foot-yard scale.
The Fahrenheit scale is uselessly arbitrary; 0°F does not match anything useful, and 100°F is not that useful either.
The only mile that makes sense is the nautical mile, 1 nm matches 1" of arc on the map / globe, the same way as 1 km is 1/40,000th of the arc.
But it isn't a good reason all by itself.
Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally experience 5 degrees F - 100 degrees F at different points of the year. That's 95 degrees of precision with no decimal. In C, that's -15 to 37.8, a mere 52.8 degrees. The difference between 75 (usually a beautiful day) and 85 (hot) is 23.8C to 29.4C. Everything packed into this tight range.
Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
For science, sure, I'll use metric.
AS someone that grew up with metric that feels fairly natural and not tight at all?
>Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
I used ruler tapes with both metric and imperial on either side and i always wondered how one could use the inches since they're so big and didn't always have the same minute subdivisions. Also doing my math in decimals seemed easier than calculating with quarter or 1/8th inches or smaller.
>For science, sure, I'll use metric.
Surely it would feel more natural to use the same for everything and all measurements.
I want to know how much rainwater my IBC roughly holds. I take out my measuring tape real quick. I'm not even sure how I'd get started in imperial without some strong intuition build up over years?
Really all there is to that discussion.
Your tape measure didn't have 1/3, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 subdivisions? Sounds like a bad tape measure (or really just one where US Customary was an afterthought).
As for science, well, most people don't do it. Those that do can use different things in different contexts, it's not that hard.
They might have measured precisely at the weather station, but local variation in temperature makes that extra precision meaningless unless you are located exactly where the measurement happened.
Even in a climate controlled room, there will be a degree or two of variation between different parts of the room.
that extra decimal point gives people false confidence about the measurement being more precise than it is.
because so much science (even in the US) happens using the metric system, the actual measured average [0] is 37 degC, and 37.0 degC == 98.6 degF. the nuance of the average being more of a confidence interval (37 +/- 0.5 degC, possibly larger) gets lost as well.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_temperature
And I just poke my nose out the window and look outside to see what the temperature is
Rules of thumb can be learned either direction!ps HN tables are not really a thing, are they?
pps Suspiciously many experiments are conducted at 293K
So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures.
If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees you could go higher resolution and it'd be fine because rounding would occur like we do with vehicle speeds. Or we could go lower resolution and just make the degrees bigger, which is basically what celsius is.
That's really just because you're used to it. The rest is rationalization...
OTH of course the rest of the world can hardly complain since we didn't switch time or (angle-)degrees to decimal either ;)
So long as we live on earth, metric time won't make much sense.
The problem was that it messed with the week, having a "day of worship / rest" every 7 days, which was then every 10 days
But if it was closer to freezing say 42°F =5.556 °C (again) so 5°C. So arbitrarily we could say 57°F was 12°C =53.6 °F actually.
But a true Canuck knows knowing the temp is barely half the battle, what’s the wind speed and humidity? 29°C can be a lovely day if it’s dry or completely unbearable if it’s humid.
We hardly ever use decimals for weather-related measurements, the other factors above being more relevant.
Contrast that with measurements where I would say if you need to know a precise one you should be using decimal; ie what do you do if it doesn’t precisely third or fourth? If you’re talking about tool sizes then any system works as long as your froodle matches the grommlet.
C * 2 + 30 = ~F
If you convert a nice, round number from one system to the other, you'll end up with a more precise, less nice number, which will give the impression that Celsius is harder to use.
In reality, people from metric countries just think in 5-degree increments: 25 is a beautiful day, 30 is hot. It doesn't feel any harder to read than Fahrenheit.
I wonder if there are people that moved to the U.S., switched to Fahrenheit and now find it more intuitive than Celsius. If one is easier than the other, I assume it still doesn't make up for the hurdle of learning a new system.
I've done the move twice in each direction. Neither is more intuitive.
When I moved back to C after 22 years in F, I had to adjust again. It took a few months. The other times were after fewer years, but still took (re)adjusting.
With you on temperature though.
https://surveysupplyinc.com/lufkin-12-foot-hi-viz-engineers-...
only because that is what you are accustomed to
because I grew up with metric, m/cm are much more convenient for daily use
I will allow that a "foot" is useful as an approximate intermediary unit between m and cm
> Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
again only because the US construction industry grew up using fractions instead of decimals
all of the math normal people use in everyday life happens in base 10.
"it's easy because it's base 12" is an absolutely ludicrous idea.
what's 7'5" divided by 3? divided by 4?
what happens if you need to divide by 5?
and sure, there are various mental math tricks you can learn to make this easier...or you could just use the metric system.
7'5" is 226cm. that's a normal, boring, everyday, base 10 integer.
you don't need to learn a special set of "mental math for base 12" tricks. instead you can re-use the same mental math tricks you use for every other base 10 number.
On a sidenote: an ounce is 100g here and a pound 500g. Mainly by being in common usage and translated to common used weights. "An ounce more okay?" is an easy way to sell more without mentioning how much it actually is in numbers.
1 US cup is 2.37dL.
Otherwise, a metric tablespoon is 15mL and a teaspoon is 5mL.
I wonder if there's a place on the internet where I can find more of this sort of seemingly strong and well-thought out arguments for something that is so clearly subjective (if not just inferior).
Any platform where snooty articulate people congregate will have such arguments by the bushel.
Below 10 deg C - it is cold, Heavy jacket weather
10-15 Typical winter weather (at least where I live) light jacket
15-20 Spring/Autumn weather long sleeves no jacket required
20-25 Pleasant day T-shirt weather
25-30 Getting hot, ceiling fans/AC time
30-35 Hot
35+ very Hot
Meanwhile, I'm fine at 98.6 degrees, but everyone freaks out over 100 degrees. it's a more precise unit, right?
feet/inches make more sense to be attached to. they are based on your body parts (roughly), and we spend a lot of time looking at humans. inches divide our fingers, feet are... well, feet. And yards are steps. We intuitively know what all those feel like through everyday life compared to the scientific way we derive a centimeter. inches and feet being base 12 is more a coincidence than anything else (or maybe not. Maybe there's some golden ratio shenanigans at play).
I worked as an engineer and the only drawings specified in imperial were pre 1970s and all the CNC controls are programed in mm feed rates in mm/rev or mm/min
Unless you're doing some kind of scientific calculaton there's no need to think about decimals of celsius at all. Just like Fahrenheit users surely don't care whether it's 50 or 53 or whatever. It's around 50, that's all you need to know.
The results from this recipe were never consistent when I used volume measurements. I converted to mass in metric and now I get consistent results.
adapted from: [https://www.justsotasty.com/wprm_print/11594](https://www.justsotasty.com/wprm_print/11594)
Banana Brownies
Prep Time: 15 minutes mins
Cook Time: 35 minutes mins
Total Time: 50 minutes mins
### Equipment
- 9x13 inch (23 x 33 cm) baking pan*
### Ingredients
- 227 g unsalted butter (2 US sticks) unsalted butter (The better the butter, the better the results. In the U.S. market, Kerrygold yields the best results, followed by Cabot, and "well, it's still brownies" Market Basket house brand.) - 400 g dark brown sugar - 2 large eggs - 5-10 ml vanilla extract - 150 g mashed bananas (about 2-3 large, brown bananas) - 156 g all-purpose flour (I prefer King Arthur All Purpose Unbleached Flour) - 60-70 g cocoa powder - 2-3g teaspoon salt - 280(ish) g chocolate chips (I prefer Ghirardelli Bittersweet 60% Cacao Baking Chips, use 1 bag) )
### Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350F degrees (180C or 170C fan forced). Line a 9x13 inch (23x33 cm) pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil leaving an overhang around the sides. Alternatively, lightly grease the pan. - Melt the butter in a double boiler. Add in the brown sugar, stir, and let it sit in the double boiler, stirring occasionally until the mixture has a nice caramelly flavor. - While the butter-sugar mixture is cooking in the double boiler, combine the dry ingredients. - Sometimes cocoa powder is lumpy, and you may need to sift it. The alternative I use is combined flour, cocoa powder, and salt, and use a whisk to mix it all together and break up any lumps if there are any. - Take the brown sugar butter mixture off of the double boiler and mix in the mashed bananas and vanilla. - The bananas usually cool the mixture enough that the eggs won't cook when you put them in, but if the mixture is hot, add some flour, add some of the dry ingredients, and that will cool it down enough to add the eggs safely. - Stir in the chocolate chips. - Pour/spoon the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 35 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean or with a few damp crumbs. - Cool fully (about 4 hours), then slice. Store brownies in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 4 days. (Never last that long in my house)
this for me is the real appeal of metric, not that somehow a meter is magical, but at least there is one system, with a consistent set of rules, that allows us to do some magic things like tell the approximate volume of water given a weight.
edit: omg I forgot about nominal wood sizes. the underlying system actually has different units based on the material and the usage. copper gauge is not the same as steel gauge. thats pretty hopeless. for precious metals we also have the pennyweight
if "room temperature" was smack in the middle, at 50 degF, you might have a point.
but no, it's pure post-hoc rationalization.
being naked at 0 degF will kill you. being naked at 100 degF will (usually) not. they're not remotely equivalent.
instead, think of it this way - human beings are mostly water, and 0 to 100 degC is "percentage of the way from water's freezing point to boiling point".
room temperature is "about 20% of the way to boiling". 40% or higher starts to cause our bodies to overheat. a typical sauna will be somewhere between 50 and 70% of the way.
For those wondering why there is this distinction, the British Imperial units were created by the Weights and Measures Act 1824; US customary units follow the Winchester Standard of 1588.
edit: ref https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zfnjb7h
Road signs are still in miles.
If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would adapt within a year or two, but we need to wait at least 3 years for that to even begin to become a possibility again.
Weights are even easier as pretty much everyone uses grams as the smallest daily unit and most people can convert to and from metric on the fly for ounces, lbs, kgs. Liters aren't uncommon, and ml<->gram equivalence for water is well-known. Traditional kitchen volumes probably wouldn't be displaced because metric has no answer for those in first place.
Temperature is where metric will fail to gain adoption because Celsius totally sucks unless your daily life consists only of boiling or freezing water at sea level. No advantages over Fahrenheit except maybe arguably for science, because it's Kelvin with an offset.
Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.
I guess you imagine we’ll all be calling half inch pipe twelve seven after this year adjustment period?
I guess people do it with bullet calibers.
There are many more fun and exciting non-metric measurements you might encounter than plain old fractional inches.
A fabricator might encounter sheet metal thickness in "gauge". Wire sizes, ammunition, and machine screws also come in "gauge" sizes but all four are different scales. US drills come not only in fractional inch sizes, but letters and numbers as well. Furnace efficiency is often specified in percent, but air conditioner efficiency comes in SEER. Water softener capacity is in "grains". Pipe threads come in "inch sizes", but that usually means NPT. Metal hardness and rubber durometer measurements have their own scale which doesn't really belong to either camp.
To be fair, a lot of these are categorical units. Screws come in #2 or #6 or #4, but you'll never need to worry about #3.7.
A wise professor once told me "All these different units will not be going away within your lifetime, so you better get used to working with them."
or 0000. Which then can conveniently be abbreviated to 4/0.
There are quite a few ways to measure the hardness the most interesting being Vickers. You plunge a diamond of a known force into a surface and measure the size of the indentation. This is surprisingly accurate but does leave a small diamond mark on your surface.
With a sufficiently small part a blacksmith or other folks can determine the hardness of a steel just by listening to how it rings. Hey, you can also test for cracks with a ring test, the most common use is ring-testing a vitrified grinding wheel to see if there is no crack
Alot of engineering is just listen and maybe the odd hit with a hammer
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/pirates-caribbean-...
In ordinary every day life, I've found that I use metric for measurements under an inch or under an ounce. At a certain upper limit it makes more sense to use metric for large values too.
So I have to suffer with the magic constant 25.4 bouncing around my brain every day forever and constantly converting trivial measurements into worse units.
I will never convert a measurement to fractional inches. If you must have inches as an input you can suffer a damn decimal point.