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"Pheww it's 90 today" or "Pheww it's 32 today"?

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Mojo

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Mrs BR assures me that a cup is a standard measure of volume in baking terms (not weight), and it is 240ml. Or put another way 4 doz. teaspoons.
Standard in the USA, but not common here at all and indeed you’ll only find measuring cups at specialist shops. Unfortunately American websites tend to come up first on Google when you search for many recipes, and these use it as a measure for both liquids and solids. For instance a cup of flour may be about 120g, but a cup of butter is nearly double that.
 
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GRALISTAIR

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How much do I weigh? I know the answer in stones and pounds, but I have no idea in kg or in pounds like the Americans do it.

For the latter I would need to learn the 14 times table.
And I learned the 14 times table in my childhood- so useful living in the USA. I was 238 pounds which is 17 stones exactly. Way way overweight. My goal is 195 pounds and have been trying for over a year now. So I knew 14 x14 = 196 so psychologically 195 is 13 stone 13 pounds.
 

Bald Rick

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Standard in the USA, but not common here at all and indeed you’ll only find measuring cups at specialist shops

Specialist shops... and in our baking cupboard where we seem to have scores of them ;)
 

nlogax

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Most irritating for me is the mythical "cup." Certainly if you search for any recipe on the internet you will most likely end up with a recipe which thinks it acceptable to provide ingredients in "cups." My standard history is full of me searching for a recipe, clicking on the first link, then 5 seconds later re-searching for the same thing with "uk" added to the end.

Nowt so mythical about the common cup! I've got cup measures in my kitchen and use them fairly often.
 

mmh

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Specialist shops... and in our baking cupboard where we seem to have scores of them ;)

Mine came from those specialist shops, err, Wilko and Asda! Cups aren't confusing beyond being foreign. More confusing is that the US pint is slightly smaller than a British pint but the US fluid ounce is slightly bigger than the British one. None of it really matters though, the differences are small enough to make no difference.
 

Mojo

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Mine came from those specialist shops, err, Wilko and Asda! Cups aren't confusing beyond being foreign. More confusing is that the US pint is slightly smaller than a British pint but the US fluid ounce is slightly bigger than the British one. None of it really matters though, the differences are small enough to make no difference.
I've never seen them in Wilkinson, looking on the Wilkinson website now I can't see them either.

I'm talking about using "1 cup" as a unit of measure, not a set of cups that show measures in ml.

Not planning on buying them either, because it's a daft American system. The most ridiculous recipe I once saw called for 3 cups of spinach. Do I squash it down so it all fits in? How tightly? What about the recipes that call for multiple cups of stuff to be added, am I expected to have five different cups in the drawer, or do I have to waste time washing it up after each use?
 
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mmh

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I've never seen them in Wilkinson, looking on the Wilkinson website now I can't see them either.

I'm talking about using "1 cup" as a unit of measure, not a set of cups that show measures in ml.

Not planning on buying them either, because it's a daft American system.

I know you are, so am I. My set of scoop measures in cup sizes (which I believe were American, inherited from a neighbour from the US) sadly got lost in a house move. I was talking about my measuring jugs, which are marked with cups as well as a mix of imperial and metric measurements.
 

causton

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I know you are, so am I. My set of scoop measures in cup sizes (which I believe were American, inherited from a neighbour from the US) sadly got lost in a house move. I was talking about my measuring jugs, which are marked with cups as well as a mix of imperial and metric measurements.

Mine is from the exotic Flying Tiger stores, it's a drinking glass just over a pint and has different measurements marked on the side like a jug (including, of course, cups) - so you can use it to measure or if you run out of clean glasses fill it with beer or other desired drink :lol:
 

nlogax

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After a little light googling I've discovered there are three specific cup types.

Metric cup (250 ml)
US customary (236 ml)
Imperial (284 ml)


Presumably I've been using US cups as that's where I bought them - but tbh it doesn't matter. Who's really going to quibble over 34ml?
 

malc-c

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I'm in my late 50's so as a kid it was fahrenheit that I grew up with... remembering weather forecasters stating temperatures in fahrenheit first followed by the equivalent in centigrade.

Now I'm familiar with celcius...

I find the whole measurement system is used fascinating. There were campaigns by market stall owners (amongst others) to continue to display and sell items by the imperial system (lbs and Oz) rather than being forced to use metric. We still use MPH as the main measurement of speed, and beer is still sold in pints. But for temperature, most of us are more familiar with celsius scale where 0 degrees is freezing and 32 degrees C is hot !
 

si404

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Also, SI units makes perfect sense if you have grown up in a country that uses them exclusively.
Well sure - if you grew up with no alternative, you will of course think it makes sense: because you are taught to think in the system and don't get to understand different ways of doing stuff. It's like English people find the gendering of inanimate objects like tables bizarre as there's not really grammatical gender beyond people/animals, but the French happily do it as that's what their language does.

With units, I'm pretty 'bi-lingual' and can understand both sides - some things I prefer customary (estimations, body weight/height), others metric (science stuff), others I'm indifferent (distances, speeds - though km/h rather the SI m/s). There's good and bad features of both systems, but most of the time they are just different, rather than better/worse.
And it is a system of units that works together making it very easy to do calculations in your head. To quote Josh Bazell:
Bazell's quote (in green) is a bunch of nonsense. First off, it's far from pure SI and so needs correcting:

"In metric, one milliliter 1cm^3 of water occupies one cubic centimeter 1000 mm^3, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie 4.184J of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade Kelvin —which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point."

Using the metric-based customary units like litres and calories is cheating - especially if talking about SI, which is even more specific. Metric in general, and especially the SI system that's a subset, doesn't like these special units and seeks to get rid of them, whereas the customary system embraces such alternative units (of volume and energy in this case) if they are useful. Do you know your 4.198 times table off by heart to do it in your head? A level chemistry we were allowed calculators just for dealing with stuff like that (and we used the rounded 4.2). So often customary has digs like "do you know how many fathoms in a furlong?" even though you'd never be ploughing or horse racing downwards through the sea and so don't need to know it's 110, but you never get "do you know how many Joules in a calorie?".

And lets not forget that centimetres are only really tolerated as they are the foundational, original, metric unit (defined before the metre) - it would be 10mm or 0.01m if it was pretty much other unit: we never talk about centi-Amps, or hecto-Joules, and prefixes are only really multiples of 10^3 other than for units of distance, area and volume (ie metre-based). Hence why I converted to cubic millimetres.

As for 1% of the difference between water freezing and boiling, it's totally and utterly useless as a concept. Celsius has a nice zero point - but the percentage thing is just arbitrary - even assuming base-10, why is 100 important? Why not 1000 as the SI prefixes go: kilo-, mega-, giga- (1000-based) rather than hecto-, myria-, mega- (100-based). Likewise if 100 was genuinely special, we'd be using grads (400 to a circle, 100 to a quarter), not degrees (360 / 90) - of course, there's 180 degrees Fahrenheit between water freezing and boiling: same as half a circle. That Celsius is a centigrade system is only cool-sounding because we decided it was cool-sounding - objectively it isn't.

Personally I find the way that Fahrenheit set up his 96-grade scale more mathematically cool with its repeated halving, and water freezing a third of the way between the two bounds - but both are completely meaningless scales in and of themselves - its experience that tells us actually how big a degree C or F is, not the concepts behind how big a degree is. It's the anchor points that have meaning, and Mr Fahrenheit went with the wrong anchor points (though water freezing is a third anchor a third of the way up and if it was where zero was put, it would be less weird and the UK would still be using that scale).

"An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it."

OMG there's 60,221,407,600,000,000,000,000 atoms of hydrogen in a gram! What a totally unmeaningful thing!

Moles are just a fancy way of getting stuff in the right proportions* - there's zero reason why there couldn't also be a number of atoms that leads to a customary weight unit (pick whatever one you want), or a gallon of gas, or both. As long as you are using the same multiplier in your calculations, it doesn't matter. Likewise there's no reason why there couldn't be a pseudo-metric unit that's the number of atoms in a litre of gas (to remove the 24 - or 22.4 now that stp has been changed from 20°C to 0°C) - other than having task-specific units to make the numbers nice is antithetical to the metric system - as we see below when I have to throw in the specific heat capacity of water for the metric calculation, but not the customary.

*proportions, of course, being easier if you aren't obsessed with 10 and percentages. Defaulting to thinking in percentages was, IME, the biggest barrier for my peers during our education when engaging with fractions. Those who thought in fractions by default could still deal with percentages just as well.

"Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go **** yourself,’"

This is a different question! If you are going to have to move the goalposts...

Taking the original question of heating 1 degree, it takes 8.34 BTus to heat a (US) gallon of water 1F - it didn't take me long to work it out - I just had to work out pounds per (US) gallon and it's 8.34 - this takes no time at all nowadays with Google. A British Thermal Unit is 1lb of water 1F - customary can also do the same stuff metric is being praised for by Bazell - only metric actually doesn't want to do that stuff and, at-best, merely tolerates you using calories! Air conditioning in America uses stuff like 'ton of cooling' (freezing a ton of water in a day = 12000BTu/h) and BTu happily - units like these that are task-oriented and make the numbers nice is a feature of customary, not metric. If they wanted to do it by volume of water they could use units that would do that - but they measure water by weight not volume there, just as they measure flour by volume (cups) rather than by weight when baking...

And let's look at "how much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature [mass] of water to boiling". First off, we need to define 'room temperature' - we'll go with the formerly-standard temperature of 20°C / 68°F. We'll also assume the formerly-standard pressure of 1atm (since changed to be 100kPa, because the 101.325kPa previously used was too real-world and not artificially round enough!) so that water boils at exactly 100°C /212°F. A kilogram of water takes 80kcal to heat from room temperature to boiling, but that's metric-customary, not SI, and so we need to get the calculator out to multiply by the specific heat capacity of water (4.184) to arrive at the answer of 334.72kJ. A pound of water takes 144BTu to heat to boiling (a gallon 1200.96BTu, for completeness). Which is easier? Customary as it fudges out the constants! Though, sure, the metric-customary is a little bit easier than the US-customary as 100-20 is easier than 212-68.

"because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities."

But customary can do that, and in better ways because they don't try and insist on a single one-size-fits-only-one-thing-if-that unit per thing being measured and so can smudge out constants. The problem is that it's in the hands of Americans who like saying saying what they see ("sidewalk" etc) and so units done this way get called stuff like 'foot-acre' or 'foot-pound' rather than some fancy name from Latin or after a scientist that makes it sound like some magical convenience that they line up rather than simply a definition of the unit.

How much weight does a mass of a pound have on earth? A pound (OK, that a pound-mass and a pound-force are both a pound is confusing, but the numbers are directly related). How much weight does a mass of 1kg have on earth? 9.81N - there's a constant getting in the way!

And of course, 'directly relate' is a funny term to use with metric - given that it deliberately tries to not be directly relatable to reality. Take that original foundation unit - the centimetre: a billionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator via Paris. An unimaginable distance (that took them years to calculate, and even then it was slightly off because it was a deliberately obtuse constant to work off) divided by a unimaginably large number. We only know how big a metre is, because we learnt how big a metre is - at least with a foot we could get a intuitive estimate from the definition!
 

si404

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For instance a cup of flour may be about 120g, but a cup of butter is nearly double that.
But a cup of flour and a cup of butter have the same volume - cups are measuring a different thing (volume) to the weight we tend to use.

Then again, butter doesn't get measured in cups, but by 'sticks': 4oz or ½cup. Butter tends to be sold in that unit there (whereas we'd tend to do it roughly twice that - 250g) and so you just unwrap and dump it in. Or use the measurements that often (more so in the U?) on the pack - typically in the US done in tablespoons, in the UK more typically 25g (metricated oz) multiples.
 

DynamicSpirit

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Can't we just all agree to use natural physical units? Would be so much simpler: You just work on, that the speed of light, the mass of an electron, Planck's constant, and the permittivity of free space all equal 1. Simples! [*]

(If my calculation is correct, in natural atomic units, 1 standard US cup = 4 x 10^39 )


[*] (OK maybe I'm glossing over that there are several different choices of 'natural' units)
 

DelW

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Straying slightly off topic, my favourite American unit is acre-feet as a unit of volume. A field an acre in size submerged by a foot of water. Excellent.
That sort-of makes sense for calculations like run-off of rainfall into a reservoir, but then the problem is that you have multiple awkward conversion factors needed to turn the answers into gallons: something like 4840 x 9 x 1 x 6.23 from memory (for imperial gallons).

If there is an equivalent metric unit it would presumably be hectare-metre - which is 10,000m^2 x 1m = 10,000m^3 = 10 megalitres: easy-peasy!
 

si404

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is that you have multiple awkward conversion factors needed to turn the answers into gallons: something like 4840 x 9 x 1 x 6.23 from memory (for imperial gallons).
But such conversions are not needed the vast majority of the time - if you needed to work in cubic feet, you'd have just done it in the first place. And anyway, nowadays, you just whack it into a computer and get a conversion in seconds.
If there is an equivalent metric unit it would presumably be hectare-metre - which is 10,000m^2 x 1m = 10,000m^3 = 10 megalitres: easy-peasy!
Sure, but this is only 'useful' in that it's there - we have a hammer, so we think hitting things is important.

But you wouldn't have hectare-metres in the first place, because that's a feature of customary that metric dislikes: creating bespoke units for a task. OK, metric does have some metric-based customary measures - hectare and litre being two of them because SI has big gaps when it comes to area and volume - but they are rarities and frowned upon. Unless you had learnt the ways of the acre-foot, you'd have calculated the volume as square metres*metres and be dealing with numbers 10,000 times bigger (or 100 times smaller if you went km^2*m) than you would have if hectare-metre was useful. And that's why you've converted to megalitres - 10,000 is just the wrong scale of number for comprehension - too big. Whereas 10 is nice and easy.

Of course, 10,000,000 is even harder to comprehend, which is why we like to pretend that "megawhatever" is a different unit to "whatever", rather than it being a shorthand for "million whatevers".
 

xotGD

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This thread won't be complete without reference to "Olympic Swimming Pools" as a measure of volume...
And Wales as a measure of area.

And double decker buses as a measure of length.

And house as a measure of energy or power. As in a wind turbine producing enough electricity to power 5,000 houses. Just tell me the MW!
 

si404

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This thread won't be complete without reference to "Olympic Swimming Pools" as a measure of volume...
In an earlier draft of my post one above yours I had a hectare-metre in "Olympic Swimming Pools" because 10,000 cubic metres and 10,000,000 litres are not the best numbers. It's 4 Olympic Swimming Pools (25m*50m*2m).

PS: An acre-foot is just under half an "Olympic Swimming Pool".

And house as a measure of energy or power. As in a wind turbine producing enough electricity to power 5,000 houses. Just tell me the MW!
They normally do, but they give houses in addition because "how much can the wind farm power?" is a more useful question than "how much power does the wind farm generate?".
 

Mojo

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Then again, butter doesn't get measured in cups, but by 'sticks': 4oz or ½cup. Butter tends to be sold in that unit there (whereas we'd tend to do it roughly twice that - 250g) and so you just unwrap and dump it in. Or use the measurements that often (more so in the U?) on the pack - typically in the US done in tablespoons, in the UK more typically 25g (metricated oz) multiples.
Or, just measure butter in grams like all sensible cook books have done for the past 30-odd years (our Be-Ro baking book dates from the late 80s), rather than the bonkers system of trying to measure a solid with a unit of volume. Makes things a lot easier for everyone concerned.
 

JonasB

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Did you read my post? This is literally what it says.

Great, I must have misunderstood it.

After a little light googling I've discovered there are three specific cup types.

Metric cup (250 ml)
US customary (236 ml)
Imperial (284 ml)

And:
US legal (240 ml)
Old Canadian (227 ml)
Swedish (150 ml)
Japanese (180 ml)

And many more…

There's good and bad features of both systems, but most of the time they are just different, rather than better/worse.

Using the metric-based customary units like litres and calories is cheating - especially if talking about SI, which is even more specific.

The good about SI is that it is the de facto world standard. Calories is old (but the quote might be as well), but the litre is not. It is a non-SI unit officially accepted for use with the SI.

And lets not forget that centimetres are only really tolerated as they are the foundational, original, metric unit (defined before the metre) - it would be 10mm or 0.01m if it was pretty much other unit: we never talk about centi-Amps, or hecto-Joules, and prefixes are only really multiples of 10^3 other than for units of distance, area and volume (ie metre-based).

No, the metre is the orginal unit. Centimetres where the base unit of the CGS system though. And while you could talk about centiampere if you want to, decimetre, decilitre, decibel, hectopascal, hectolitre and hectogram are all pretty common in some areas.
 

si404

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No, the metre is the orginal unit.
No the centimetre was defined as a billionth of a quarter of the earth's circumference, and the metre defined as 100 centimetres. Doesn't really matter though - 1/10,000,000 is just as deliberately obtuse as 1/1,000,000,000 - my point that the metric system's metric is designed to be unintuitive, aloof and divorced from reality still holds.
It is a non-SI unit officially accepted for use with the SI.
Then why, if the litre is officially accepted, had to use the ugly and horrible dm^3 (which is the only place I've ever seen decimetres in the wild. deci-anything even, other than decibel) in my science A levels due to litre being unacceptable?
Yep - if power goes up by a bel (which are obsolete and unused) it's 10 times more powerful and if it goes up by 1 decibel it's 1.259 times more powerful, because 10 is 10 times 1.259. Oh wait...

The deci- isn't helpful here. While 10dB is the same 10:1 power ratio as a bel, the logarithmic scale just makes it complicated to deal with prefixes, and it's not like a bel is useful. IIRC, everyone who has taught me about decibels (school teachers, college lecturers) has pointed out that it would be better if they had given the unit a new name when they decided to go with it, rather than confusing people with the deci-.
The good about SI is that it is the de facto world standard.
Sure, and that's very useful - both that it's global and that it's globally standard (eg the many different cup-sizes*). But, on the other hand, there is surely nothing wrong with not using the global standard if you are more comfortable working with different units. You just might not be understood unless you 'translate'.

Your profile says you are in Sweden. English is the de facto world standard language, and you are clearly very able to use English, but there's nothing wrong with you speaking in Swedish. Even with others and even if they are also fluent in English if you (plural - a problem with English...) find it easier to use Swedish. It's also fine if a Swede doesn't learn English, though obviously they will have issues communicating to the outside world.

Swedish isn't inferior or lesser than English - it's just different - some things may be better, other things may be worse - but really the only thing English has going for it over Swedish is critical mass. It's the same with customary (of whatever ilk) and metric.

*The only reason why this really matters is because globalisation has made the world smaller. But the very same thing that means that we come across recipes with US cups and other such things that confuse us - computers - also enables us to convert incredibly easily.
 

xotGD

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Drifting further off topic, but when I was young I used to get very confused by the use of 'part' as a unit. For example, one part cement to two parts sand.
 

matacaster

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Joiners often go into wood yards and ask for things such as 4.8 metre lengths of 3" x 2" even though the wood yards have long since changed the width and thickness to metric (of course they rounded them down!). Nobody bats an eyelid.
 

si404

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Joiners often go into wood yards and ask for things such as 4.8 metre lengths of 3" x 2" even though the wood yards have long since changed the width and thickness to metric (of course they rounded them down!). Nobody bats an eyelid.
They also only seem to come in multiples of 300mm (also rounded down imperial conversions), but - while the cross-section is continued to informally be in inches as '3x2' is easier than 47mmx75mm - they might bat eyelids if you asked them for 16ft lengths instead of 4.8m.

I think the cross-sectional dimension in inches functions like a product name.
 

Bald Rick

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I keep my car temperature in C. As you can imagine it throws my American friends and colleagues off

I hope you have a number plate that spells a particularly offensive term in proper English that the Yanks won’t understand.
 

si404

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I hope you have a number plate that spells a particularly offensive term in proper English that the Yanks won’t understand.
Didn't some British actor drive round California for years with one such example before the California DMV found out - and they only found out because he was bragging about it in the British press?
 

Mcr Warrior

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Didn't some British actor drive round California for years with one such example before the California DMV found out - and they only found out because he was bragging about it in the British press?
Quite possibly; I do recall a story about some guy who registered 'NULL' as his personally registered California licence plate; in due course he received a blizzard of fines in the post every time a traffic cop wrote up a traffic ticket and omitted to complete the licence plate details of the vehicle(s) concerned.
 
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