> "Shortcrust pastry to fill a 9-inch pan? 5 ounces of flour and 4 ounces of butter" Useful mnemonic, but completely arbitrary. If you cook/bake regularly, you

> "Shortcrust pastry to fill a 9-inch pan? 5 ounces of flour and 4 ounces of butter" Useful mnemonic, but completely arbitrary. If you cook/bake regularly, you know the standard amounts used. I know the amounts needed for a bread that fits into my rising basket, starting with 450g white flour and 50g rye flour, 350g water and so on. If you decide to go more advanced, you use baker's percentages anyway, which of course map neatly to a base-10 system. > "The fact you can't evenly divide a metric unit in three is terrible." The elegance of metric is that everything divides neatly into 10ths and powers of 10, which makes it simple to convert measurements from one scale to another, for whichever level of precision you require. Meters work for farming, centimeters work for houses, millimeters for woodworking, micrometers for machining. Just as the common misconception of a 2x4" (really 1.5x3.5") becoming a bizarre 3.81x8.89cm is unrealistic and based on misconceptions, so is the idea of people somehow being unable to divide a metric measurement into thirds. Your pencil line is going to be thicker than any inaccuracy anyway, but the precision (repeatability) is going to be the same no matter which measuring system you use, as long as your measuring device is accurate. If you want a more accurate measurement and cut, you use a more accurate measuring device and scale. I grew up learning and using metric for everything. Imperial may as well be an alien measurement from another planet, to me an inch is just an old-fashioned way of saying 2.54cm, and eyeballing a cm has literally never been an issue. Regarding the kitchen cabinets, if you were to redefine 100mm as "the width of a kitchen cabinet", you would be optimizing for one specific use case over others. The entire point of a measurements system is that it is universal, repeatable and logical, not based on arbitrary units. 600mm is a perfectly good measurement, no harder to remember than 100mm or 20 kilometers or 250 grams.