It’s 16. Four TB to a 1/4 cup. Still, even though I’m apparently one of only seven (I know, you were joking, but there’s a bunch of us who know), it’s a fucking pain in the ass vs. metric. My brain doesn’t work in the TB + tsp fashion, and there’s no way I can make that calculation on the fly. OK, I guess I have the information available to make that calculation, but I’d rather just multiply by 1/3 metric numbers. Much faster for me.
I don’t think we can mandate a conversion to the metric system.
For context, I’m about 99% metric in my daily life now. It pisses me off when the doctor weight my kids in pounds. Or me, for that matter. Medicine is science, right? And my pediatrician is from southern Asia!
I track my vitals in metric, I bicycle in metric (because it’s an international pursuit), and because of many international assignments and foreign wives, it’s just easier to work in a single system of measurements. My smart thermometer is metric, my 3D printers are metric, and everything is metric except my car, because exit numbers are in miles, and construction, because a 2x4 is a 2x4. Even my oven is metric.
I’ve even forced one of my suppliers at work to default its equipment to metric units for sales to my company. Seriously, psi, mils, and F? They agreed, because their German competitor is already metric.
(A couple of years ago my daughter’s sedation dentist asked for her weight, which I gave in kg. He converted it to pounds, then on the computer, converted it back into kg to give her the correct sedation!)
It works for me.
Yet, what works for me doesn’t work for everyone. People like the units they’re comfortable with. Canada went metric how many decades ago? And yet, I’m always confronted with Imperial units when I go there. The UK still uses stones and miles.
There’s no real mechanism for the USA to “go metric.” Do you pass law outlawing US customary units? What about free speech? If I want to sell a gallon of milk, fine, I’ll mark it at 3.78 liters, but I’m not prohibited from calling it a gallon. Prohibit a publisher from marketing a cookbook in F degrees? Yeah, real Constitutional issue there.
Sure, we could post speed limits in km/h and renumber exit numbers, but what’s the real impact of that? I seem to remember some signage to that effect between Phoenix and Nogales, now that I think of it. Whom did that impact?
The only route to the “converting” to the metric system in the USA is the same as getting people to stop smoking and wear seatbelts.
I’m up-to-date. I use Smoots for length.
You can’t prohibit individual people from calling it a gallon, but you can absolutely prohibit it from showing up on the label or being used in advertising. And if you like, you can prohibit sales of gallons of milk regardless of how they’re labeled. People can call 4 liters a gallon if they want, but eventually they’re just going to stop. Somehow no one is bothered by 2 liter soda bottles, even though they’re the “moral equivalent” of a half-gallon.
Units don’t spring up out of the blue. People use the units they’re familiar with. And if all the labels and signage are in metric, that’s what people will get used to. At least the kids will, and that’s all that matters in the long run.
Hey, don’t blame me if people don’t know how to use their tools!
Yeah, obviously just 40ml, for \frac{1}{6} of a cup, but I don’t know if a 40ml spoon is a common size. Does it require using a graduated cylinder to get it right? I’ve done things like 2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon + \frac{1}{2} teaspoon, because it’s extremely easy to pull spoons out of the drawer and achieve the exact right measure.
I know people cook in the base 10 world, and they probably have a bunch of spoons that let them approximate lots of fractions. I also know the oven isn’t accurate enough for it to matter if it bakes at 350F or 175C. The point is in most cases it doesn’t matter which unit is used, as long as the user understands how it works.
I was a student during the “Big Changeover” of the US to metric. Part of the problem is the people teaching it then were not that familliar with it. Another part is that it was not used outside of the scientific and engineering community at the time. It’s not like we could have gone to the store and see things labeled in grams and liters (litres). And yet another part, getting back to the teachers, is that they spent the time inadequately teaching the new system so they neglected the old system. IMHO that created a *lost generation" as far as measurements are concerned.
The complaints about Celsius make me wonder what some of you folks consider to be cold weather. 0°C is mighty cold to me. Anything with a minus symbol before it is also cold.
I’ve been living in Asia since the beginning of 2005 and have gotten fairly used to metric. It’s a lot easier than all that crap that’s bundled into traditional measures. But soon enough, the other two countries using English traditional measures, Liberia and Myanmar, will have officially switched over and Ameican can be more proud of our exceptionalism.
The First Law of Automotive Repair says: any given vehicle will always need a 10mm socket for something important. Said 10mm socket will always be missing from your toolbox.
The USA is already metric as far as food labeling goes. Calculations are based on metric units and a customary equivalent is posted in most cases. A fifth (gallon) of vodka or a bottle of wine are not 757.082 mL anymore, haven’t been for decades. It’s 750 mL exactly.
In what way is a 0-100 scale over a limited range of temperate human experience objectively better? Climate scientists are very concerned with areas around the freezing point of water, having that be the zero on the scale is a useful thing.
That, and the 100 end of the F scale is in no way going to be the top end of common human experience, the way things are going.
1 °C = 1K, and 1 °F is not. That’s very useful
I wonder what bizarro world people live in where 100 was ever considered the top end of human experience. It’s a little on the warm side, but where I grew up it was almost always >100 F on the hottest summer days. You still went outside and did stuff.
Well, 1 °F = 1 °R. That’s no more or less useful.
I agree. Plus I add timezone.
It is currently 2013-01-24’T’07:57+02:00 where I live
But I am a nerd who has had issues with date/time in my programming life, so I like to be really, really specific
YYYYMMDD is the only system that really makes sense, and almost everywhere in the world does not use this in common practice, so programmers are right in one case.
Nobody actually uses Rankine to do science.
ISO 8601 for the win.
Absolutely this - speaking as someone who is that generation in my own country, I use metric for everything. The only reasons I know imperial measurements at all are because the encyclopedias I grew up with were all American and used them. I guess if that weren’t the case, I’d have had to learn them at uni, instead. Or when doing medievalist stuff.
I don’t even use them in my roleplaying games anymore. I was always having to do mental maths with published materials. Nowadays, I just have my own settings use sensible units from the get-go.
Hmm:
OK, amend that to “no-one sensible” . Idiocy like that is why there’s one less satellite orbiting Mars than there should be. (I could phrase that better, I don’t know when MCO was actually intended to de-orbit. Expect I know it wasn’t “immediately”)
Having lived in Asia on and off during the 80s and then from 1990 to now, there isn’t anything I convert anymore.
Maybe hectares because both Japan and Taiwan use 坪 (tsubo in Japanese and ping in Chinese). Apparently they are not exactly the same, as 1 ping is 0.9997625 tsubo. One tsubo is roughly 3.3 m2 or 35.5 ft2 and is the area of two tatami mats.
There are many legacy units used in Taiwan or Japan, such as the tsubo. Another is 尺 shaku, which is 303 mm, and is used in carpentry and other areas. Wood is often sold in shaku dimensions.
Eh, that wasn’t really a bug with customary units, but rather Lockheed Martin just not adhering to the software interface spec. Could have happened with the metric system too, if one party had (for example) reported velocities in km/h and the other in m/s. Or even km/s. The metric system doesn’t eliminate conversions completely.
At any rate, celsius/kelvin doesn’t get you anything aside from compatibility with most science. In particular, there is nothing “coherent” about it. There’s seconds, meters, kilograms, and amps, which can all be combined together in interesting ways to form pascals, watts, volts, etc. And then there’s kelvin sitting off on its own, with almost no connection to anything else. You could swap kelvin with rankine in SI and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in its usability.
5mL for a teaspoons; 15 for a tablespoon, more or less. Pretty easy to add up. Which equals the 2TBSP+2tsp.