So much for the unalloyed enthusiasm for the metric system

July 20, 2020 7:20 AM

OnThisDay 1973: Willie Rushton railed against the Metrication Board, who had come for his beloved British yard. (SL Twitter)
posted by Think_Long (66 comments total)

If anyone can find a non twitter or facebook link for a mod to swap out that could be nice.
posted by Think_Long at 7:20 AM on July 20, 2020

It's one of many videos on this page (towards the bottom) as a start.
posted by scorbet at 7:37 AM on July 20, 2020

That is some tie.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:17 AM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Hopefully, when they rebuild out of the ashes of both the UK and US, one of the first decisions they'll make will be to go fully metric, partly for practical reasons and partly out of revulsion for the mindset that led to the horror they had just emerged from.
posted by acb at 8:19 AM on July 20, 2020 [14 favorites]

My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
posted by entropicamericana at 8:48 AM on July 20, 2020 [11 favorites]

When I was a proto-teenager I had the misfortune to be introduced to Horatio Hornblower and besides having a malign impact upon my psychological development as an adolescent, (you want to talk about fuel for repression,) this acquaintanceship left me with an enduring bafflement regarding British money. It all seemed to be denominated on a logarithmic scale with a wholly arbitrary use of interchangeable words to describe any given value at any given time or situation.

The metric system might not be as romantic as stones and bushels and long tons and the confuscation of prefixing "Imperial" willy nilly to units of measurement but it is probably better for the mental health of every young person wanting to know how far it is from here to there.
posted by Pembquist at 8:53 AM on July 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

One of the fun things about growing up in the 80s in Ireland is that I ended up fairly "bilingual" when it came to a lot of units. You'd be taught metric in school, but everyone still used imperial at home, and food would be sold as units of 454g and similar. (However, I never learned how some of the imperial units relate to each other. I know what a mile is, and what a yard is, but I'd need to either google it, or convert to metric to tell you how many yards in a mile.)

This has been handy working in a German company with occasional US clients, as I have a much better feel for what's plausible in feet and inches or pounds. Still can't cope with Fahrenheit though.

There are still a couple of holdouts in Ireland, with the main one being that you can still sell pints (proper pints of 568 ml, not the tiny US ones.) Baby weights are also reliably reported in pounds and ounces, possibly as 10 lbs sounds more impressive than 4.5 kg!
posted by scorbet at 9:24 AM on July 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

...wholly arbitrary use of interchangeable words...

Don't worry, that hasn't changed - we're still playing word games with new money ;)

Decimalisation took plenty of coins away but added a bunch of new ones and left just enough interchangeability to let some of the old terms to carry on being used. So for example, "ten bob" (ten shillings) is still in use (it means 50p), while "nugget" means a pound coin.
posted by vincebowdren at 9:24 AM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

The silly thing is that all the imperial units in the US are metric anyway by the Mendenhall Order of 1893. A pound in the US is defined in statute as 0.4535924277 kilograms. They've done this because all of the metric units are defined by fundamental constants and can be recalculated without any reference object.

Even weight (kg) is now defined in terms of the Planck constant:

h = 6.62607015×10−34 kg⋅m2⋅s−1

We know how long a second is (9 192 631 770 hyperfine transitions of a Cs-133 atom), and how long a meter is (how far light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second), and now with the Planck constant, and the magic of e = mc^2, we can solve for kg.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:59 AM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

The funny thing is that weight can actually be measured in Hz.

1 kg = 1.356392608384e+50 Hz.

That's the frequency of a photon that would have enough energy to be equivalent to 1kg of mass.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 10:01 AM on July 20, 2020 [12 favorites]

FYI, the highest energy cosmic ray we've ever seen is (3.2±0.9)×10^20 eV which is 7.696870589552 x 10^34 Hz. That works out to about 51 joules or 5.6745152856 x 10^-16 kg.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 10:03 AM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

FYI, that's half the weight of a single chicken pox virion. There was that much energy in that particle (it was going at 99.99999999999999999999951% the speed of light) if converted to mass it could produce half a chicken pox virion. That's nuts.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 10:09 AM on July 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

This thread weighs too much. I think it's all the numbers.
posted by kozad at 10:34 AM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

possibly as 10 lbs sounds more impressive than 4.5 kg!

By this logic American men should prefer centimeters to inches.
posted by sjswitzer at 10:46 AM on July 20, 2020 [12 favorites]

Willie Rushton's piece was satire, yes? On that BBC Archive page, I saw the other old vox pops video on metric (Kilomolometres - 1978) where the one guy says at about :33, "We're losin' all our national heritage, in't we?" "Like what?" "Well, you know, money's all changed, decimalisation, all the weights being changed, measurements, and everything. I think, you know, we're an island on our own. And let's face it, we once ruled the world, didn't we? And now we're just being part of a community, you know? I don't agree with it at all."

How the young man mashed in all of that from switching to a new system of measurement is something else. Then again, there was a very similar attitude in the US when Jimmy Carter's administration tried to implement the metric conversion here in the 70s. No one wanted to do it. Reagan's administration halted any other public encouragement to switch to metric once he was in office.
posted by droplet at 10:51 AM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

By this logic American men should prefer centimeters to inches.
You mean milimeters. 100mm sounds impressive!
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:09 AM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

"By lining up 26 peasants, you end with a distance of 26 yards, give or take a peasant" (at 2:49)
😆
The whole Edward I bit is good. "Thus, if you had a docile peasantry, you could measure anything in yards, feet and inches."

In looking up "coombs and chaldrons" I found this 1917 article via the Wikipedia entry for tierce.

SHALL GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA ADOPT THE METRIC SYSTEM?, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts Vol. 65, No. 3374 (JULY 20, 1917).

The author was the President of the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America AND of the American Institute of Weights and Measures. I should not have been surprised by the ideology that he explicitly uses to oppose conversion to the metric system, but I was, well, read for yourself.

p 605: [Metric advocates] do not look deeply enough to see the consequences. They regard weights and measures simply as means of estimating and recording. They do not consider the things that are tied up with them, or the knowledge that is associated with them. By "things" I mean the standards that have become interwoven in our civilisation and industry, upon with indeed civilisation and industry are based.

...

p. 608: Considering the Indo-European race alone, there is a much larger population that does not use the metric system than does; and their nations are far superior in industrial development, measured by iron production, let us say, to all other nations combined. The foisting of the metric system upon them would be, therefore, like letting the tail wag the dog.

posted by spamandkimchi at 11:10 AM on July 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Willie Rushton's piece was satire, yes?

I think Willie was trying to send up both sides, almost all numbering systems are based on some absurd relative notion of measurement.
posted by Lanark at 11:19 AM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Willie Rushton's piece was satire, yes?

Not as much as you might think. It's from Nationwide, which is what passed for news and current affairs on the BBC in the early 1970s:

It followed a magazine format, combining political analysis and discussion with consumer affairs, light entertainment and sports reporting. [..] Eccentric stories featured skateboarding ducks and men who claimed that they could walk on egg shells. The show's tendency to sidestep serious matters in favour of light pieces was parodied in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, where the show, instead of reporting on the opening of the Third World War, chose to feature a story about a "theory" that sitting down in a comfortable chair rests one's legs.

People think of Monty Python as satire, but it captures the flavour of 1970s British television with uncanny accuracy.
posted by verstegan at 11:27 AM on July 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

"Thus, if you had a docile peasantry, you could measure anything in yards, feet and inches."

Peasant turns to the camera: Eh it's a living.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:41 AM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

Willie Rushton was a famous satirist, yes.
posted by ntk at 12:31 PM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I miss Willie Rushton. One of the greats. Died far too young.
posted by epo at 12:47 PM on July 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

scorbet, I can help you with remembering how many yards in a mile:

"King George the Third said, with a smile,
1760 yards to a mile"

As a bonus, 1760 is the year that George III became king of Great Britain and Ireland.

As mnemonics go, it's not terribly useful these days, perhaps.
posted by kumonoi at 1:23 PM on July 20, 2020 [7 favorites]

If you did track you may remember 440 being a quarter mile; 440 x 4 = 1760.

My favorite mnemonic is “in 1493, Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.” (Before you complain, sure, he did the other thing too.)
posted by sjswitzer at 2:06 PM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

"King George the Third said, with a smile,
1760 yards to a mile"

Thanks, but as it turns out my “approximate” version involving converting miles to metres to yards accidentally gives me the right answer - 1600 metres to the mile and 1.1 yards to a metre gives 1760 yards to the mile. So I don’t have to try and remember it... which of course means I now will.
posted by scorbet at 2:11 PM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

We know how long a second is (9 192 631 770 hyperfine transitions of a Cs-133 atom), and how long a meter is (how far light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second)

Nice round numbers, nothing arbitrary about how they were selected.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:17 PM on July 20, 2020

On one of my last trips to Europe I got fed up with converting Celcius to Farenheit, so I decided I'd try to learn at least what the decades of Celsius were so that I could immediately appreciate what a temperature meant. As a public service to my fellow Americans I present it here:

0 C = 32 F, 10 C = 50 F, 20 C = 68 F, 30 C = 86 F, 40 C = 104 F

So:
< 0 C: Freezing
1 - 10 C: Cold
10 - 20 C: Cool
20 - 30 C: Warm
30 - 40 C: Hot
> 40 C: Really hot

Now I don't have to think about it anymore.
posted by sjswitzer at 2:20 PM on July 20, 2020 [17 favorites]

Certainly the units in metric are somewhat arbitrary and to my sensibilities ill-adapted to the human scale. (I admit this is due to a lifetime of familiarity with the old system and not at all objective.) But it's funny that a kilometer was originally defined as 1/10000th the distance from the equator to the pole. As if that was a useful standard to measure against!

But this has an interesting consequence in the computer era. Since there are (roughly) a billion centimeters to go a quarter of the way around the Earth and since 2^32 is somewhat over 4 billion, you can represent longitude or latitude to somewhat better that 1cm precision in a 32-bit word. Which I think is pretty neat.

Anyway, regardless of familiarity, the value of the SI (metric) system is right there in its name. It's a system and it's international, neither of was true previously.
posted by sjswitzer at 2:31 PM on July 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

While I'm on a roll here, I had long wondered about how certain "familiar" building dimensions were handled in metric countries, and this surprisingly turns out to be related to the convenient divisibility of feet and yards.

In the US we (used to) see goods packaged with even measures in ounces and weird random decimals in grams. Surely building supplies such as sheets of plywood (4'x8' here) or lengths of pipe wouldn't be in weird decimal lengths. And as it turns out they're not. Instead, they tend to be in multiples 60 cm, which is coincidentally about 1% from 2 ft. So a sheet of plywood is 120cm x 240cm and virtually identical to a 4'x8' sheet in the US.

This leads to my next hack for dealing with metric intuitively: 3 meters is 10 ft (again, to within about 1%).

Finally, since divisibility of lengths is important for construction purposes ("get me half a sheet of plywood"), multiples of 60 are even more divisible than multiples of 12. So even the divisibility argument doesn't in practice weigh against the metric system.
posted by sjswitzer at 2:53 PM on July 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Temperature conversion is helped for me with these reversible pairs.

16 = 61
28 = 82
posted by mdoar at 3:45 PM on July 20, 2020 [16 favorites]

I like to watch videos on youtube by master machinists. It gives me a chuckle when they shift between the metric spec of the workpiece, but inevitably shift into thousandths of inches when estimating how far off something is.
posted by interogative mood at 5:49 PM on July 20, 2020

So:
< 0 C: Freezing
1 - 10 C: Cold
10 - 20 C: Cool
20 - 30 C: Warm
30 - 40 C: Hot
> 40 C: Really hot

I rely on 0C = 32F
and “The western desert lives and breaths at 45 degrees”
as a rough bound.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:53 PM on July 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

The UK 20 ounce pint is hard to ditch and somehow persists in UK and in Ireland, as mentioned. It just seems a very satisfying amount of beer without being overwhelming like a liter. There is dialog in 1984 to this effect.
posted by w0mbat at 6:11 PM on July 20, 2020

< 0 C: Freezing
1 - 10 C: Cold
10 - 20 C: Cool
20 - 30 C: Warm
30 - 40 C: Hot
> 40 C: Really hot

-10C: really freezing
-20C - oh, hell, it's really cold
-30C - let's throw coffee in the air and watch it freeze
-40C - two winters ago the wind chill was -40-45 and i had to walk a mile to work because the car wouldn't start

did you know that you can feel cold in your bones?

-70C - i was dressed for this kind of wind chill, but my breath would fog up my classes and then freeze them immediately, so i had to take them off

now what was that you were saying about 0-10C being cold?
posted by pyramid termite at 6:21 PM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

When I worked in a supermarket server-over back in the 90s I'd get old people coming in and asking for a pound of beef mince or whatever, lots of people still thought in the old units. Since then metric has almost completely taken over. The biggest headache that still persists IMO is 50mm versus 1 7/8" tow balls.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 6:42 PM on July 20, 2020

My useless but cool trick is that you can convert between miles and kilometers[*] by referring to your handy nearby fibonacci series, move up high enough past, say, 3, and find the next number to roughly convert miles to km, the previous to go from km to miles. For example, 13 miles is roughly 21 km, while google says it's actually 20.9215 km.

You might say what about 10 miles?

Well, 987 is pretty close to 1000, and the next number is 1597 [**], so dividing by 100, 10 miles is about 16 km. Google? "16.0934 km"

* Amazingly enough, this works for speeds as well!

** No, I only have them memorized up to 55. Google is good for this too (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of this, but maybe you have a fib sequence on the back of your notebook or something).

Why this works is also cool: the fibonacci sequence converges to the golden ratio, 1.61803398875, which is close enough to the ratio between miles and km. No one's ever suggested to me this is anything but coincidence.
posted by morspin at 8:46 PM on July 20, 2020 [10 favorites]

Being a wet scientist in the us also makes one bilingual in measuring systems. Metric is easier and better and simpler. I blame imperial units (and my perpetual lack of understanding abt the relationship of tablespoons and cups and pints and quarts and ounces) for why I’ve never taken to baking. I’m pretty adept at mixing up buffers and media in the lab though! I feel fortunate to have that innate understanding of Celsius that comes with setting the incubator because now when we’ve bought the only thermometer that was left on amazon and it won’t change to Fahrenheit as promised, well that’s ok.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 9:06 PM on July 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Decimalisation took plenty of coins away but added a bunch of new ones and left just enough interchangeability to let some of the old terms to carry on being used. So for example, "ten bob" (ten shillings) is still in use (it means 50p), while "nugget" means a pound coin.
posted by vincebowdren

I am all for the metric system, including decimalised currency, but I do kinda miss our version of the florin (= 2 shillings, or 24 pence). A few of those in your pocket meant a good night out. :)

••••••

In the US we (used to) see goods packaged with even measures in ounces and weird random decimals in grams. Surely building supplies such as sheets of plywood (4'x8' here) or lengths of pipe wouldn't be in weird decimal lengths. And as it turns out they're not. Instead, they tend to be in multiples 60 cm, which is coincidentally about 1% from 2 ft. So a sheet of plywood is 120cm x 240cm and virtually identical to a 4'x8' sheet in the US.
posted by sjswitzer

Here in Australia when we first went metric (in the mid-60s) we often just rounded off existing Imperial measurements to the closest metric equivalent, without changing the actual dimensions. So 3/4" was simply relabelled 19mm, for example, and various (British) Imperial threads are still very common, alongside actual metric thread ('M' threads).
posted by Pouteria at 9:08 PM on July 20, 2020

"A pint's a pound the world around" - um, no. It's about five pounds in London, I understand.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 11:26 PM on July 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

I have that one rattling around in my head too.
Meaning that a pint (of milk, would you believe) weighs one pound, divisible into sixteen ounces. But then I get all confused about fluid ounces and why a cup of flour and a cup of red wine vinegar require two diffently calibrated measuring cups and it all goes shillings and half-crowns on me.
posted by bartleby at 12:26 AM on July 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Meaning that a pint (of milk, would you believe) weighs one pound, divisible into sixteen ounce

Presumably that would vary with the breed and diet of the cows and other factors, to say nothing of skimmed milk and such.
posted by acb at 1:04 AM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Well a liter of water weighs a kilogram. Fresh? Saltwater? Perrier?

Another one I got wedged in there somehow is the 'Silesian yard', the amount of cloth measured out from the edge pinched in one hand with the arm held straight out, to the nose. But I never found if it was supposed to be with the nose facing forward, or toward the pinching hand, or away? Or is that how you put a thumb on the scale?
posted by bartleby at 1:42 AM on July 21, 2020

800 square feet is almost exactly 45 tatami.

(A cubic yard of water weighs 120 stone, give or take a buckets' worth. If that helps anyone.)
posted by bartleby at 2:50 AM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Presumably that would vary with the breed and diet of the cows and other factors, to say nothing of skimmed milk and such.

Except for honey and oils, the variance between food liquids isn't enough to matter for cooking.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:59 AM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Though if you use it to calculate a pound and then use that for some other purpose, you may have problems.
posted by acb at 6:56 AM on July 21, 2020

My favorite mnemonic is “in 1493, Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.”

Wait, I thought it was "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue"
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:32 AM on July 21, 2020

My favorite mnemonic is “in 1493, Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.”

Wait, I thought it was "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue"
Well he sailed during both years, though of course 1492 was his first voyage, so both are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:24 AM on July 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

It just seems a very satisfying amount of beer without being overwhelming like a liter.

They often sell beer in 600 ml sizes here in Germany, which is close enough. It's similar to the way that butter comes in 500g blocks (approx. 1 lb).

I blame imperial units (and my perpetual lack of understanding abt the relationship of tablespoons and cups and pints and quarts and ounces) for why I’ve never taken to baking.

We don't use cups over here at all, and measure dry ingredients by weight instead, so US recipes are always a bit of a minefield. Butter being the worst - how are you supposed to measure a half a cup of butter? Americans tend to chime in at this point with the fact that it's easy as it's marked on the butter packet. Oddly enough, in a metric country there is no division into "sticks" on the packet... (Yes, I know a stick is 4 oz / ~110g).

Metric is easier and better and simpler.

This.

Even if "the units in metric are somewhat arbitrary and to my sensibilities ill-adapted to the human scale" (?), the fact that almost all of the units are decimal based makes it so much easier to do calculations without having to remember all the conversions between the units. Normally you just need to double check where the decimal point should be. At least for science and engineering, metric is so much simpler.
posted by scorbet at 9:44 AM on July 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Temperature conversion is helped for me with these reversible pairs.

16 = 61
28 = 82


There's a pattern!

04 = 40
16 = 16
28 = 82
310 = 103
412 = 124

Read 310 as 40 and 412 as 52....
posted by phliar at 9:54 AM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Americans tend to chime in at this point with the fact that it's easy as it's marked on the butter packet.

The whole stick is a half a cup. It's also marked as 8 tbsp, and since each package of 4 is 453 grams (again, almost nothing in the US is packaged as metric), then a half cup is 113 grams. Have fun measuring that out. I personally always just guess on liquid ingredients.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:44 AM on July 21, 2020

On this day 2020, weather forecasts in the UK use metric for temperature but imperial for windspeed.

Met Office forecast for London Click the "more detail" button to see windspeeds.

BBC Weather forecast for London It doesn't even indicate units, but it's definitely °C for temperature and mph for windspeed.
posted by swr at 10:51 AM on July 21, 2020

how are you supposed to measure a half a cup of butter?

If you have a standard-size coffee-scooper-outer, four of those. I forget whether they're 2 tablespoons or 30 ml, but the difference doesn't matter in the kitchen.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:08 AM on July 21, 2020

On this day 2020, weather forecasts in the UK use metric for temperature but imperial for windspeed

Annoyingly, “kilometers per hour” breaks the system by introducing those pesky Babylonian 60s... into the denominator of all places!
posted by sjswitzer at 11:37 AM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think maybe the difference with cooking is that metric people use kitchen scales and imperial people use measuring cups. Different tools for different systems
posted by LizBoBiz at 11:38 AM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

My Willie Rushton number is 2. I stood next to Barry Cryer at the urinal at The Pleasance at the Edinburgh Festival. For some reason this is one of the touchstones of my life in the UK.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 12:32 PM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've started using a scale when baking and I cannot begin to describe how much easier and faster it is than using measuring cups. I even discovered that my stainless steel measuring cups happen to weigh exact gram multiples, e.g. 50, 70, 100 grams. That's some very thoughtful design that I might never have noticed.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:34 PM on July 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

A US nickel weighs 5.000 grams in case you ever have to use a balance scale but for some reason don’t have any weights but do have a bunch of nickels.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:55 PM on July 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

Can someone help me out with a comparison for a hectare? The ubiquitous American 'football field' works for me, because it's conveniently also about an acre.
So even if I didn't know how big either of those units were, if you told me that the flat top of an aircraft carrier is four and a half acres, I'd at least know that it must be big, because they're using agricultural land measurements for a boat.
And I have plenty of sense memory of standing at one goalpost and looking at the other end, so I can fudge a hundred yards is a hundred meters is an NFL field is a football pitch is an acre of wheat.
But I just somehow never acquired a conceptual unit in my head, or no 'feel' for a hectare. What does a hectare of sunflowers look like? How many cars can you park in one?

I feel the opposite way about the Foot. (That's about the long side of A4 paper to everyone else.) Maybe it's because my big boot soles measure about one foot, and my personal cubit (from elbow to watchband) is also about a foot, and a lot of floors are covered with one foot squares of linoleum or terra cotta tile. So 'ten feet away' is ten shoes or ten forearms or ten floor squares. Easy. "I need a stick or a piece of wood, about two feet long" is a simpler bundle of units than 60cm. But that might just be me.
posted by bartleby at 4:26 PM on July 21, 2020

Can someone help me out with a comparison for a hectare?

Most of the inside of a standard running track. The rectangly bit in the middle and one of the roundy ends, but not the other roundy end.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:05 PM on July 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

A hectare is about 10 Trader Joe's parking lots.
posted by sjswitzer at 6:10 PM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I was taught to measure butter by displacement - if you need 1/2 cup, you put 1 c water in the measuring cup then add the butter until the water level is at 1.5 c. (Just an example - I wouldn’t do this for 1/2 cup since it’s marked on the package but for other less regular measures or fancy butter without markings).

Yeah that’s why I don’t bake.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 8:32 PM on July 21, 2020

30 is hot
20 is nice
10 is cool
0 is ice
posted by Rhaomi at 12:04 AM on July 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

an eighth = 3.5g
a quarter=7g
a half =14g
an oz=28g

You do not need to know above an ounce, it is just "plenty" and you needn't worry, unlimited d00bage.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:27 AM on July 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Can someone help me out with a comparison for a hectare?

In USA sporting terms, a hectare is the fair territory on a baseball field with a 370 foot fence, or about 1.7 times an American football field.

•••••••••

an oz=28g

In Australian currency that would be two 20c and one 10c coins.

So I'm told.
posted by Pouteria at 4:33 AM on July 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Easy. "I need a stick or a piece of wood, about two feet long" is a simpler bundle of units than 60cm. But that might just be me.

But see, I could write pretty much the same reasoning, but talking about half a metre instead of 2 feet. I mean, half a metre is a simpler bundle of units than 1'8", right? It's a bit hard to know how much is actually the unit, and how much is simply that it's more familiar to you (and more useful if everything around you is built around those units).

I think that's also a bit the problem when people consider the idea of switching units (along with the more political aspect!). It's easy to think about what it would be like for you to have to switch over and hard to imagine what it would be like for a generation or two down the line, when the switch is more or less complete. Unfortunately, the generation that would have to decide to make the switch also gets the most cost and the least benefit.

As someone in the middle, I do get that inches and feet and so on seem a bit more "handy" than their metric equivalents, but as I do a lot of calculations I prefer metric for the ease of conversion between different units. (However, I'm sure I wouldn't be all that happy if it were 50 years ago, and I were the one to have to start getting used to metric after using only imperial all my life.)
posted by scorbet at 5:26 AM on July 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

how are you supposed to measure a half a cup of butter

By displacement, if you don't have a marked package. Put butter in a cup liquid measure that has 1/2 cup of water in it until the water comes up to 1 cup. (It floats, you have to push it down a bit).

Or just freaking go metric already.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 4:13 PM on July 22, 2020