General > General Technical Chat
why is the US not Metric
KL27x:
--- Quote ---No we weigh it out in grams butter being, for the most part, a solid; we think it's quaint that you measure it by volume.
--- End quote ---
Solids: Can we at least keep our surface area?
Keeping it light, folks. No malice intended. In a slightly different track, let's disseminate what we are learning here.
--- Quote ---in all the European countries I've opened a pack of butter in, it comes in 250g blocks and they have markings for every 25g.
--- End quote ---
Wow, that is a lot of butter, lol. So if stated in grams, it is universally understood how much butter matter you shall add to your Baked Alaska. And for this purpose, we have these blue lines on the wrapper. Once you get the hang of it, you don't have to read the writing on the lines, anymore, because you will automatically know each line is 25 grams. And if you need more, like say 125 grams, you will just go 5 of these lines, or maybe just use half the stick. But if you think of it like "half a stick," then you will have to know the mass of a full stick. It's easier to just memorize that each line is 25 grams and count up to 5. Cuz this might end up in the middle of a stick, today. But tomorrow, who knows? Half a stick could be 500 grams of butter! And what a mess you have, then!
Nope. Stick with the blue line. It's the only other unit you need to know besides the Meter, the Liter, and the Holy Kg, Amen. This blue line is of course just a print on a wrapper that is so far subject to the whim of the butter company. But soon we'll have a vote to make sure it is compulsory. In case one butter company changes a stick to 298 grams but keeps the blue lines on there as 25 grams per line rather than what it looks like they may be doing is dividing the stick into 10ths, I am sure they will sell just as well as the stick we've used for the last 100 years.
I'm trying to tone it down, but maybe just take my posts not so seriously. Dry humor.
This butter thing illustrates one quirk that is not actually to do with metric vs imperial. I mean, we can do decimal divisions or 10th's in imperial, too. And we can divide a bar of metric butter into quarters and 8ths, if we want. But if you removed the wrapper, isn't it easier to eyeball a quarter of the bar than 3/10ths?
This whole divide is affecting the way we eat. We are undoubtedly artificially or subconsciously rounding over our recipes to match with blue lines of decimal (or factors of 2^-1 in imperial). This is causing some loss of culinary excellence due to error introduced by measurement bias. >:D
With the metric butter, it would indeed be easier to convey higher precision than the American stick. Leave the marking alone, rely on the fact that the bar IS a standard size and will be for the length of relevance of the cookbook, and state the amount of butter in % of a stick. Just switch from thinking of each line as 25 grams. And think of each line as 10% of the bar. So "add 37% of a stick of butter?" 3.7 lines of butter? :-//
Cuz you know, 25 per is not metric. It is not factor of 10. This blue line is basically like a "tower oz" of butter. If the recipe calls for 75g, this doesn't change into a 3, no matter how many times I shift the decimal point. But 30% is kosher. If you guys were serious about your metric, you would only sell butter in 1kg sticks, so your blue lines can be centagrams and the Plan will be one more step towards completion. A centagram is obviously a way better unit than a blue tower line of butter. The situation you have now, you're basically using 10ths of a 1/4 of a base unit of a kg. That's such an imperial thing to do.
bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: Cerebus on November 26, 2019, 11:56:25 am ---I got a package from the US of A today.
On the CN22 customs declaration form, surely the most international of documents almost by definition, the weight was printed only in lbs, with no metric equivalent. Now that strikes me as dumb, and it's the sort thing that might, not unreasonably, lead some people to perceive that the US is a teeny weeny bit arrogant about insisting on using weights and measures (in the explicit context of international trade let us remember) that are out of step with the rest of the world.
--- End quote ---
I beg to differ. I don't think the problem be the US. The problem is the imperial system itself, which is retrograde. It is the expression of a time that doesn't exist anymore. It has no place in the present, much less in the future.
KL27x:
Maybe it IS the Free Masons?
Our biggest export is air travel planes, which the fasteners and the ATC are imperial.
We also make an effort to produce a surplus of food and we try to push exports.
We are also the largest dealer of weapons. And I don't know what we put in those. But maybe we put imperial fasteners in the tanks and planes and air to air missiles we sell, too.
Cars are metric, but they are common enough. Most countries don't run out of cars during a war or embargo. But the above things might be a nuisance in case of disruption of trade routes. Starving is not a "nuisance," but I mean the screws. Starving is terrible.
Most of your german lathes would not be able to turn parts with imperial threading. And your imperial and/or CNC controlled stuff might get tied up. So we park our air craft carriers in your shipping lanes and wait for you to run out of screws you need to maintain and repair your planes and military weapons? :-//
SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: KL27x on November 27, 2019, 01:59:39 am ---[...]
Our biggest export is air travel planes, which the fasteners and the ATC are imperial.
[...]
--- End quote ---
You can legitimately argue that it doesn't matter, but you can also legitimately argue that it is a sign of a company that isn't keeping up with the modern world.
KL27x:
^I think it is odd.
On the MCAS Jakarta thread, it is said the aviation industry is very inflexible. They can't even remove a no-smoking sign from the 1970's because it will be too expensive. So changing fasteners would probably be a few km of red tape. There are probably quite a few fasteners in an airplane.
Earlier in the thread it was claimed that Airbus continued the tradition of imperial fasteners on their planes due to cost reasons. Even on a blank slate design, there are apparently a lot of common parts that are shared/recycled. So maybe you guys can take up a collection to change your own airplanes. It can't cost more than a few billion euros. And that's apparently chump change for the satisfaction of fixing something that isn't broken. :-//
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