Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
Imperial measurements were based on arbitrary things, metric has specific scientific definitions for their weights.
1l of water is 1kg at sea level, why the fuck is kings foot size the defacto foot?
What do you mean? A pound is legally defined as 0.45359237 kilograms.
And the kilogram is defined:
These are all currently defined off of the same universal constants, just with different multipliers, which are all arbitrary numbers: 6.62607015 is just about as arbitrary as 0.45359237. Hell, the number 10 is arbitrary, too, so we still use a system for time based on dividing the Earth’s day into 24 and 60.
Like, I get that there’s some elegance in the historical water-based definitions derived from the arbitrary definition of length, but the definition of “meter” started from about as arbitrary a definition as “foot” (and the meter was generally more difficult to derive in the time of its adoption based on the Earth’s dimensions).
I’ll nitpick that said definition is also arbitrary. Why is it 1l of water at sea level, and not molecular weight of the water? And why a Liter anyway.
Even metric units like time are somewhat arbitrary. Why is a second based on caesium frequency, and not some other element?
Why? Because 1L is 1000 Cubic centimeters, which takes 1000 calories to raise 100 degrees to boiling point.
Nothing is arbitrary with metric, everything is also directly related to every other measurement.
Because 1 Drakon is 1000 Cubic 100tholians, which takes 1000 Vornies to raise 100 degrees on the Flugar scale to boiling point.
Metric is very scientific, but it was made through arbitrary means. They chose to make it easier than imperial by using divisions of 10. But it’s all based on a single measurement that they made up through arbitrary means.
“We have this length called a meter. How do we define it? Let’s use it to measue something in nature and then use that measurement to define it.”
Again, the definition ITSELF is arbitrary. The system is valid in itself much more than Imperial is, but it still has the same underlying issue. There’s no ‘base’ unit of measurement in the universe. Even if we defined measurements based on the diameter of a hydrogen atom, that would still be arbitrary. Because we could have just as easily picked helium, or lithium, or any other element.