It’s hard to cook in a system of weights and measures you aren’t used to. That’s the bottom line. I’ve converted plenty of recipes from imperial to metric and it’s a PITA. But that’s just because I’m unfamiliar with what the measurements translate to in the system I’m used to.
I’d like to know why you couldn’t scale the recipe to suit. Was it in metric? What made it hard to halve or double?
I got something–sugar–that I am accustomed to measuring by volume, and it seemed to be asking me to measure it in weight. So I start weighing it and it looks like an insane amount. I should note, I usually cut the sugar in any recipe I’m using by at least half and go by taste. You can always add more sugar. But even half of it looked like it would be way, way too much, and you can’t take it out.
Aw come on, get real. Go to a stationary store to buy a ruler. Next go to Home Depot to buy a tape measure, finally go to a fabric store to buy a cloth tape. If you can find decimal versions of those three measuring devices in those locations buy them and send them to me with the receipts. I’ll pay you for them and give you $100 for your trouble.
The bottom line is fractions are the default way to measure distances less than 1" here in the United States.
This also points out the hot mess building a building is.
The surveyors lay the building out using direct reading rods that measure in 1/100s of a foot which is almost but not quite 1/8"
The rest of the building is built using fractions, not decimal inches.
Then look at a common building tape measure. The first part of the tape is in 1/32" or maybe 1/64", while the later part of the tape is in 1/16". More than once I’ve seen people count the three little marks to figure out which fraction it is.
How much will you give me for this nifty item which divides inches into tenths?
Cool. Buy that at Staples and you are 1/3 of the way to being $100 up.
I never said they didn’t exist but engineer scales are such a small percentage of the rulers out there you are literally picking fly shit out of pepper.
Compared to your basic fractional ruler like this http://m.staples.com/touch/product.html#164566
Made of wood, plastic or metal what do you think the comparison in sales is? One engineering scale to one thousand fractional rulers? One to ten thousand? One to one hundred thousand?
Bottom line is fractions are the common and cumbersome way we measure less than 1".
Yeah..I misspoke, a 2 by 4 would of course be 50 x 100…
And I understand that even in the day a 2 by 4 wasn’t exactly that - there’s been a column about it I think, something about rough cut and planed or something…
I don’t deny that fractions are the default way of handling this stuff in the US for most things (for machining, thousanths are absolutely the default way, and PCB manufacturing also tends to be a based on decimal fractions of an inch). Just saying that this has nothing to do with customary units per-se. It’s just a weird thing that happens to be associated with them much of the time. We could get rid of them while keeping inches if we wanted.
In the very worst case, only two extra conversions are necessary. If I’m trying to divide 5’ 3-3/32" into sevenths or whatever, I just convert to decimal inches at the beginning, do the math, and then convert back for the fraction-based measuring tape. Not a big deal when the intermediate math is the complicated part (like if I need trig or something).
PS: I’m pretty sure I could do the first two challenges. The decimal cloth tape is not gonna happen, though.
Decimal ruler
Decimal tape measure
Like I said, a decimal cloth tape ain’t gonna happen. Pretty niche market these days, though.
It has everything to do with customary English units. Schools spend a couple of semesters teaching common fractions with the examples of how to measure shit.
Stop 100 people on the street and ask them to write down one quarter of an inch, how many do you think will write down 0.250?
It silly, it’s stupid, and overly complex compared to using mm.
Your first link seems to be out of stock, fyi.
That’s not evidence that they’re associated–just that it’s common practice, and kids are taught to understand common practice.
And I never spent a “couple of semesters” learning fractions in conjunction with units. For general math use, sure (fractions are useful in math for all kinds of reasons).
Was there something fundamentally fraction-based about the US stock market prior to 2001? Of course not; after all, it was denominated in dollars, which are decimal. It just happened to be established practice (starting from centuries earlier), so all of their tools and systems were based around that. It was surely an immense amount of work, but in the end the conversion to decimal prices was completely straightforward since it had nothing to do with the fundamentals. It’s just a different way of storing a number.
Like I said, I use decimal inches all the time, and an existence proof only needs a single example. It’s possible, and at worst only a tad less convenient than metric, but with the advantage (for an American) that it still works with the same base units.
An architect’s scale, then.
I have probably a half-dozen decimal steel rulers and a handful of architect’s scales around, so it’s not like they’re hard to come by.
How do I feel about the metric system? We’re just good friends.
A question for those who switched from English units to Metric in their lifetimes… what are the recipes for cooking/baking like? Do they use the metric equivalent of an English measure or just bite the bullet and round the amounts of ingredients up or down to the most convenient metric measure where the least significant digit is a 5 or 0 (zero). Either way, I’m guessing “1 large egg” is the same in both systems.
What are the metric measuring spoons and cups? 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, and 1000 mL?
I do think that ultimately it boils down to one prefers the system they grew up learning.
I suspect it depends location, but where I live 1, 5(teaspoon), 15(tablespoon) and 100(usually also have a 50 mL marker) mL are the standard and people writing recipes will assume you have them.
Your tape measure is online only. Sorry. You are 1/3 assuming your local Staples or whoever stock an engineering rule.
Ok, so that has SFA to do with the metric system. The US, the UK and Australia each have their own sets of cups and spoons for cooking measurements, and there are variations between them. A recipe in volume measures might have been a disaster all its own if you didn’t know that 1 cup isn’t the same volume in the UK or Australia as the US (although some of them are close enough that it wouldn’t matter for most things).
I prefer recipes that give quantities in weights rather than volume because I don’t always know the country of origin of the recipe I’m using. 1 cup isn’t always 250ml, but 250g is always 250g.
Can I pay you in metric dollars?
What gets me about metrics is there are 7 basic units milli, centi, deci, unit, deca, hecto, kilo - yet I almost never hear deci, deca, or hecto used. So for example when measuring distance or length its either centimetets or meters.
For what it is worth, here in Sweden my measuring jug is marked with decilitres, soft drink cans and small bottles are marked with centilitres and it is quite common to buy things in hectograms, for example loose sweets/candy.
Here is an article from a newspaper last month warning about three decimetres of snow. Again, a commonly used measurement, especially in those sort of circumstances.
Decametre I’ll agree is rarely used apart from certain scientific areas. Same with decagram. My guess is that with mm, cm, dm, m, and km all in common use (and here they also commonly use mil, the Swedish Mile, to mean 10 km) we’ve already got enough granularity. Sometimes you can have too many units.
ETA:
For example, hardly anyone uses chain (22 yards). A cricket wicket is a chain, an acre is a chain x a furlong, so there are uses. Just no one ever (really) refers to something being a chain.
Don’t forget the Guinea unit of account (after the coin was dropped) - worth 21 shillings, it was. 
This one caused me no end of confusion reading English history & historical fiction.