[Sca-cooks] measurement Was:Re: Sign of the Timesperhaps--Dinner at Crown - cancelled

[S CLEMENGER]

I could also point out that switching to metric would make unholy hash out 
of a lot of land measurements, at least here in the American west, where a 
lot of property is measured out in square miles, and acres (as a percentage 
of a square mile).
Besides, maybe we like it this way, eh? Just because everyone else is doing 
something doesn't mean I, or we, have to follow along....
--Maire, who deals with both metric and "normal" <grin> measurements, but 
generally they're pretty segregated....Yarn, for instance, comes in grams 
(50 grams, 100 grams), but I think of it in terms of grams OR yards, and 
rarely, meters.  Knitting needles, though, are measured metrically (for 
diameter) AND imperially (length), and our labeling system for them is 
different that Canada's, which is different than other countries, etc.....
OFC--my kitchen scale just does pounds and ounces, and yes, it's irritating.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Audrey Bergeron-Morin" <audreybmorin at gmail.com>
To: "Cooks within the SCA" <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 9:02 AM
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] measurement Was:Re: Sign of the 
Timesperhaps--Dinner at Crown - cancelled


> > why does the US still use the old measures, rather than metric?
>
> Still, with everything that's been said, I still can't see why Canada 
> could
> make the switch and not the U.S. (being Canadian myself, our close 
> proximity
> to the United States and the fact that our parents grew up in the "old"
> system means that a lot of us think half in one system, half in the other. 
> I
> still measure people's weights and height in imperial, and sew in 
> imperial,
> and buy my meat in pounds instead of kilograms and my gas in litres, but I
> have no instinctive notion of how long a mile is or what a temperature is 
> in
> Fahrenheit - well, except for an oven temperature, which means nothing in
> Celsius...)
>
> But yes, officially, we're all in metric. You just learn to convert in 
> your
> head for most things... IMO the metric system makes much more sense, but
> once you learn to do things in one system, it's hard to relearn in the 
> other
> because you lose that "instinctive" notion of how much means one unit. I
> still think it's very weird that they make a 5/8 seam equal to 15mm, when 
> in
> fact it's closer to 14mm... I guess the same could be said with cooking
> measures.
>