h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Met - tricky

I was recently working on a small project in Caribbean. Due to the small size of our work they took all the measurements and sent them to us - in feet and a two place decimal of a foot. I finally told them if they wanted to just measure in metric I could convert the numbers just as easily, they seemed surprised.

On some jobs for foreign companies, or the US Military, we are required to provide dimensions in both US and Metric. As everything is drawn with US units the feet and inches always add to the total, the metric ones seldom do.

FS

Yeah, like writing '1.5 feet'. Now, what's the point of that?

Actually it was more like 1.53 Feet
Which converts 1'-6 3/8"

Or more useful sill 18 3/8" = 18.375" those are numbers I can work with
.01 feet is about an eighth of an inch.

FS

All these feet and stuff are so difficult.
With the metric system I know where I am and everything can be converted to everything else.
Like... one litre of water has one kilogram and fits in a cube of 10x10x10 centimeters. So,say they write that I should take 210 ml of milk I don't have to fuss with these cups that have lines at different measurements but I can simply use scales.

Milla, it's interesting that you use decilitres I think. Out packages show everything in gramms and millilitres, but when we go shopping and order ham or something we do it in 'deka', which is 10 gramms. So instead of 200 gramms of something we say 20 deka.

Dad told me that my grandmother from Wien used to say deka!

I know! lets send a probe to Mars, it's about umpteen million miles away. Oops! it crashedwho put coordination's etc in metric ?

(or t'other way round?)

Ah, so you heard that anecdote too, prof? I once tried to verify it, but never got anywhere. Maybe I should try again

(The story goes that NASA send a thing of some sort to but it vanished - and investigations revealed that some of the guys w*rking on the project used metric measurements, while others didn't. Bummer!)

Something similar happened to Hubble

I think they did happen. US engineers.

We usually say and buy a round of to make up for it

Must have been one h*ll of a round, we're talking many many millions of US $ here

Hey, what do you know, this time I found it in my first attempt:

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/01/news/mn-17288

"In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation"

125 USD - and you didn't hire a proper translator?

Well, as far as I know from my bf (who studies Physics) it's like this:
In science they use the metric system all over the world, no matter which system people usually use where the scientists come from. This is to make it easier for the scientists to understand each other. There's only one nation where they don't do that... now have a guess...

Argentina?

When my dad was in engineering school, he and three friends took an elective course in astronomy. The prof was an elderly but well-regarded astronomer who knew his engineering students had little time for anything outside their core courses.

As a final, the prof assigned them to draw a map of the solar system as it was understood in the late 1940s. Of course, being in a hurry, they pooled their efforts - meaning, one drew, the others copied.

The prof was really amused at their map of the solar system - drawn to scale, clearly labelled, in miles.

You can always tell as US engineer. But you can't tell him much...

I skipped most of the posts, sorry. Might go back and read them later... I apologise if my laziness causes me to end up repeating something that's been said before.


Anyway, as someone who does a lot of cooking, and uses recipes from all over (for example, I tend to like recipe blogs, both local and foreign), I can tell you that while it's definitely very easy to use cups and tablespoons (and many, many recipes use them - not only the US ones!), there are two main problems with that:
1. Sometimes you need accuracy. Even if you use 'official' measuring cups and spoons, rather than whatever you have lying around - which might be all sorts of different sizes, of course - with some materials, such as flour, volume can be very deceptive. Depending on how much the flour is compressed (which depends both on how you fill it into the cup, and on stuff like the type of flour, the humidity, and other stuff I don't know much about), a cup in volume can vary widely in terms of weight. And while in some recipes it's fine to go by eye, or to have a bit more of this and a bit less of that (and I do love those recipes!), sometimes you do need to have more precision. And a cheap scale is great, for that - 100g is always 100g, after all.

2. But what about, say, water or oil? That won't compress, so why not use volume?
Sure, and it's very useful, providing you know which volume the recipe's talking about.
See, a US cup is about 240ml. But in Israeli recipes, a cup is usually 200ml (in British recipes I think it's somewhere in the middle). That can make quite a difference, in a recipe. Which is why I always like it when a recipe will have the ml measures as well, just to make sure we're on the same page.


(Also about recipes, the fact that ounces measure both weight and volume can be incredibly frustrating! )





...And don't get me started on Fahrenheit.

Good point. A cup is not always a cup.

Even bra cups are different!

Don't let 2legs see that. He'll get started.