8 ms·

Cooking units are much better suited for the task than metric units. Typographic units are non-metric and metric units are inconvenient in typography, because

Cooking units are much better suited for the task than metric units. Typographic units are non-metric and metric units are inconvenient in typography, because millimeters are too big for character sizes and too small for page units and centimeters are both too big and too small at the same time. French (?) shoe sizes are numbered like 38, 39, 40, 41, etc. and the difference between these sizes are 2/3 cm, because it's a practical difference to mass-produce different shoe sizes. It's not metric, obviously. Parsecs are not metric. Heck, light years are not metric; and look at how rich the unit is, it tells you a lot about the distance. Try to express the distance to Alpha Centauri in metric units and comprehend it.

davty 12y ago
1 light year = 9.4605284 × 10^15 meters
- knodi123 12y ago
  heh, the numeric part is pretty much 3*Pi.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
  Can you actually name this number without looking in a dictionary? I cannot. Nine and a half zillions, I guess. So Alpha Centauri is like 44 zillion meters away; very enlightening.
  - Tomte 12y ago
    You can always invent a name (and "light year" is nothing else, just not based on a "round" number of meters). For example, since failure rates in safety engineering are usually pretty small and nobody wants to pronounce "something times ten to the minus eight" or similar, the term "fit" was invented to stand for 10^-9. (Although I admit that "failure in time" is a stupid name for a dimensionless constant) Similarly you could invent a "galactic length" or however you'd like to call it.
    - Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
      Light year is not just a name; year is a natural length of time and light speed is also a natural constant. The whole unit is natural and is based on things that make sense on such distances. This is same for all natural units; they grew up from usage. (This resulted in things that appears illogical, like having different with similar name for different applications, but this is only appearance. We measure water differently from oil or precious drugs and differently when we cook with water or build a dam, so it makes all the sense to have different units for different purposes.) Meters, however, have a different story; the meter was invented by some French scientist about the time they were changing everything after the revolution, including month names; somehow month names reverted back to normal, but meters stayed. The meter was initially defined as 1/40,000,000 of the length of a meridian. Here only the length of the meridian is natural to some extent, although I fail to see how it is relevant to what is normally measured with meters, and the constant is completely artificial.
  - lkbm 12y ago
    Sure: nine quadrillion, four hundred and sixty trillion, five hundred and twenty-eight billion, four hundred million. Next would be quintillion, sextillion, septillion, nonillion, decilion, undecilion, duodecillion, tredecillion...um...quaterdecillion(sp?) Granted, I had to write it out to convert (or I could have sat and derived the rule--divide by three and subtract two to get the prefix). And I may be an exception, having spent a brief bit of my childhood interested in names for very large number. :-) But it's pretty easy to know that 10^15 is bigger than 10^10. 10^5 times bigger. Ideally, we'd get sufficiently familiar with scientific notation to immediately understand that the difference between 9 lightyears and 9 000 lightyears is the same as between 10^12 meters and 10^15 meters. I don't hold any illusions that people do have that fully internalized, of course. I don't.
    - Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
      You probably know Archimedes names for big numbers too :) What I'm trying to say is that every sufficiently different field of human interest has some kind of units natural to this field. The metric system claims to be universal, but it's like one size fits all, but nobody looks their best. I can measure a backyard in millimeters, but why would I need it? I don't need this kind of precision there. A yard is a more natural scale because it's about the size of a step and this is about the right unit for what I do in the backyard. And inside the house I usually need a finer resolution, so I use feet instead of yards. If I build something on a smaller scale, I switch to inches; and so on. Every field has its best unit and the relationship between them is organic and is not always the fixed 1:10 as with metric.
venomsnake 12y ago
> Cooking units are much better suited for the task than metric units. No they are not. Measuring everything on the scale to a gram yields much better and consistent results than wondering if your dish will fail because some inexpedient was more tightly packed or if your spoons are the same spoons that someone else had. And while a person could argue that ounce vs gram is moot, it is total nightmare for volume given stuff on dry ingredients.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
  I agree that weighting is the key to stability for professional cooks and bakers, but up to a gram or not depends on what you're weighting, how much of it, and for what purpose (and yes, the gram itself as a unit is irrelevant). This is engineering tolerance and it's same in every field; even a fine metalworker can be imprecise provided he stays within the defined range. Yet for part-time cooks as most of us are weighting is impractical: we don't have scales, and even if we do the amounts are usually too small. And stability is not necessary the goal :) For home cooks the usual task is to scale a recipe up or down and with cooking units the math is much simpler. Another thing about cooking units is that the number of different units helps to convey that engineering tolerance I've mentioned; the smaller the unit, the less the tolerance. When everything is expressed in one unit, you need to specify the tolerance explicitly.
  - ajmurmann 12y ago
    This is a very American view. When I grew up in Germany EVERYONE had a scale for cooking because every recipe gives all larger quantities in grams. I think the only exception is the difference is the equivalent of "a pinch". When I moved to the US I didn't have a scale and most recipes I cooked were American and I ended up using cups etc. I got totally used ot it after a while and everything was fine. However, I love cooing and wanted to get more into modernist cuisine. That pretty much requires a scale. Having used a scale for cooking again I cannot overstate how incredibly convenient it is. It saves a lot of time and cleaning of measuring devices. You just put your container (pot, bowl or whatever you will use later for processing) onto the scale; zero the scale; and start puring in the first ingredients till you go tthe right amount. Then you just zero the scale again and do the next ingredients. No need to rinse measuring cups in between. The metric system also has the added benefit that 1 liter translates for water based liquids to 1kg which means you again just pour the liquid into your bowl that's on the scale. The scale has pretty much only upsides. The downside that most people in the US don't have a scale is only a downside because culturally US Americans don't use scales for cooking. On the flip side you can say that measuring cups are incovenient because Europeans don't have them.
jvdh 12y ago
> Parsecs are not metric. Heck, light years are not metric; and look at how rich the unit is, it tells you a lot about the distance. Try to express the distance to Alpha Centauri in metric units and comprehend it. The distance to Alpha Centauri is so mind-bogglingly huge that the human mind can not comprehend it. This has to do with the scale of things, and has absolutely nothing to do with the unit. I can define the distance to Alpha Centauri to be 1 Alce. 1 is a really nice number that you can grasp, but it still helps you no further in understanding that distance.

davty 12y ago

1 light year = 9.4605284 × 10^15 meters

knodi123 12y ago
heh, the numeric part is pretty much 3*Pi.
Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Can you actually name this number without looking in a dictionary? I cannot. Nine and a half zillions, I guess. So Alpha Centauri is like 44 zillion meters away; very enlightening.
- Tomte 12y ago
  You can always invent a name (and "light year" is nothing else, just not based on a "round" number of meters). For example, since failure rates in safety engineering are usually pretty small and nobody wants to pronounce "something times ten to the minus eight" or similar, the term "fit" was invented to stand for 10^-9. (Although I admit that "failure in time" is a stupid name for a dimensionless constant) Similarly you could invent a "galactic length" or however you'd like to call it.
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
    Light year is not just a name; year is a natural length of time and light speed is also a natural constant. The whole unit is natural and is based on things that make sense on such distances. This is same for all natural units; they grew up from usage. (This resulted in things that appears illogical, like having different with similar name for different applications, but this is only appearance. We measure water differently from oil or precious drugs and differently when we cook with water or build a dam, so it makes all the sense to have different units for different purposes.) Meters, however, have a different story; the meter was invented by some French scientist about the time they were changing everything after the revolution, including month names; somehow month names reverted back to normal, but meters stayed. The meter was initially defined as 1/40,000,000 of the length of a meridian. Here only the length of the meridian is natural to some extent, although I fail to see how it is relevant to what is normally measured with meters, and the constant is completely artificial.
- lkbm 12y ago
  Sure: nine quadrillion, four hundred and sixty trillion, five hundred and twenty-eight billion, four hundred million. Next would be quintillion, sextillion, septillion, nonillion, decilion, undecilion, duodecillion, tredecillion...um...quaterdecillion(sp?) Granted, I had to write it out to convert (or I could have sat and derived the rule--divide by three and subtract two to get the prefix). And I may be an exception, having spent a brief bit of my childhood interested in names for very large number. :-) But it's pretty easy to know that 10^15 is bigger than 10^10. 10^5 times bigger. Ideally, we'd get sufficiently familiar with scientific notation to immediately understand that the difference between 9 lightyears and 9 000 lightyears is the same as between 10^12 meters and 10^15 meters. I don't hold any illusions that people do have that fully internalized, of course. I don't.
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
    You probably know Archimedes names for big numbers too :) What I'm trying to say is that every sufficiently different field of human interest has some kind of units natural to this field. The metric system claims to be universal, but it's like one size fits all, but nobody looks their best. I can measure a backyard in millimeters, but why would I need it? I don't need this kind of precision there. A yard is a more natural scale because it's about the size of a step and this is about the right unit for what I do in the backyard. And inside the house I usually need a finer resolution, so I use feet instead of yards. If I build something on a smaller scale, I switch to inches; and so on. Every field has its best unit and the relationship between them is organic and is not always the fixed 1:10 as with metric.

venomsnake 12y ago

> Cooking units are much better suited for the task than metric units. No they are not. Measuring everything on the scale to a gram yields much better and consistent results than wondering if your dish will fail because some inexpedient was more tightly packed or if your spoons are the same spoons that someone else had. And while a person could argue that ounce vs gram is moot, it is total nightmare for volume given stuff on dry ingredients.

Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
I agree that weighting is the key to stability for professional cooks and bakers, but up to a gram or not depends on what you're weighting, how much of it, and for what purpose (and yes, the gram itself as a unit is irrelevant). This is engineering tolerance and it's same in every field; even a fine metalworker can be imprecise provided he stays within the defined range. Yet for part-time cooks as most of us are weighting is impractical: we don't have scales, and even if we do the amounts are usually too small. And stability is not necessary the goal :) For home cooks the usual task is to scale a recipe up or down and with cooking units the math is much simpler. Another thing about cooking units is that the number of different units helps to convey that engineering tolerance I've mentioned; the smaller the unit, the less the tolerance. When everything is expressed in one unit, you need to specify the tolerance explicitly.
- ajmurmann 12y ago
  This is a very American view. When I grew up in Germany EVERYONE had a scale for cooking because every recipe gives all larger quantities in grams. I think the only exception is the difference is the equivalent of "a pinch". When I moved to the US I didn't have a scale and most recipes I cooked were American and I ended up using cups etc. I got totally used ot it after a while and everything was fine. However, I love cooing and wanted to get more into modernist cuisine. That pretty much requires a scale. Having used a scale for cooking again I cannot overstate how incredibly convenient it is. It saves a lot of time and cleaning of measuring devices. You just put your container (pot, bowl or whatever you will use later for processing) onto the scale; zero the scale; and start puring in the first ingredients till you go tthe right amount. Then you just zero the scale again and do the next ingredients. No need to rinse measuring cups in between. The metric system also has the added benefit that 1 liter translates for water based liquids to 1kg which means you again just pour the liquid into your bowl that's on the scale. The scale has pretty much only upsides. The downside that most people in the US don't have a scale is only a downside because culturally US Americans don't use scales for cooking. On the flip side you can say that measuring cups are incovenient because Europeans don't have them.

jvdh 12y ago

> Parsecs are not metric. Heck, light years are not metric; and look at how rich the unit is, it tells you a lot about the distance. Try to express the distance to Alpha Centauri in metric units and comprehend it. The distance to Alpha Centauri is so mind-bogglingly huge that the human mind can not comprehend it. This has to do with the scale of things, and has absolutely nothing to do with the unit. I can define the distance to Alpha Centauri to be 1 Alce. 1 is a really nice number that you can grasp, but it still helps you no further in understanding that distance.