My grandfather worked for a German wine company and they used hectoliters.
He showed me these rather large hectoliter glass jugs (I hesitate to call them bottles).
It’s really simple, Leo.
See that packet of Sweet-n-Low on the table? It’s 1 gram.
I suspect that 1cc of gold weighs more than 1cc of most things, so I wouldn’t go by volume.
Cookbook author Peg Bracken came up with this idea, after weighing several items.
Hence the version I heard while growing up (in the UK) - “A pint of pure water’s a pound and a quarter”.
(Of course, this rhyme is doubly useless in America because as well as short-changing us with your piddly little pints, you don’t even pronounce “water” to rhyme with “quarter” for the most part!)
Hey, that’s pretty neat. Is there something similar for U.S. units?
It’s not too bad but contains an error for 14 cm. I’m pretty sure the exemplar shown there for 14 cm is a typo and really should be for 14 inches. At least in my experience.
N.B. This breaks down past milli.
Edit: after glancing at the wiki, am I the only person who thinks it is a bad idea for the prefixes (zetta, yotta) to be so similar to (zepto, yocto)? I guess it should be really obvious in context, but still…
That is generally an excellent chart–except I don’t understand "2Liter Bottle=3Liter.
The temperature thing got me interested (although not directly useful in cooking): I remember in my body (in Farenheit) exactly the temperature outside on the morning of 9/11/01, and the temperature of a heat wave in the Negev desert – which xkcd basically nails.
Actually, they have. The classic small hexagonal-type-thingy oyster cracker IS just about one gram.
