Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
Exactly. How is a foot anymore arbitrary then a meter?
Or a cup anymore arbitrary then an ounce?
Imperial measurements were based on arbitrary things, metric has specific scientific definitions for their weights.
1l of water is 1kg at sea level, why the fuck is kings foot size the defacto foot?
What do you mean? A pound is legally defined as 0.45359237 kilograms.
And the kilogram is defined:
These are all currently defined off of the same universal constants, just with different multipliers, which are all arbitrary numbers: 6.62607015 is just about as arbitrary as 0.45359237. Hell, the number 10 is arbitrary, too, so we still use a system for time based on dividing the Earth’s day into 24 and 60.
Like, I get that there’s some elegance in the historical water-based definitions derived from the arbitrary definition of length, but the definition of “meter” started from about as arbitrary a definition as “foot” (and the meter was generally more difficult to derive in the time of its adoption based on the Earth’s dimensions).
If you have to ask that you have no idea how metric works
Until a few years ago, a kilogram was defined by a block of metal.
From 1799 to 1960, the metre was defined by another block of metal. Before 1799, it was defined by a measurement that was hard to verify.
That kind of sounds arbitrary.