[Sca-cooks] measurement

Terry Decker t.d.decker at worldnet.att.net
Sun May 25 12:46:13 PDT 2008


From: "Audrey Bergeron-Morin" <audreybmorin at gmail.com>

>> 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...)
>

I believe that Canada, being in the Commonwealth, followed the move of the 
Commonwealth into the metric system.  The United States, having no 
particular reason to change anything, still uses the English system of 1592 
along with the metric system and several quirky equivalencies adopted before 
we standardized on some of the international measures.  For example, the 
U.S. uses a "survey foot" which is slightly longer than the international 
foot of 30.48 centimeters, due to an earlier equivalency made between the 
metric and English systems and the problem of revising land measurements in 
millions of legal documents.

> 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.

Based on the international foot of 30.48 centimeters, an inch would be 
equivalent to 25.4 millimeters, making a 5/8 inch seam 15.875 millimeters 
and a 1/2 seam 12.7 millimeters, unless the actual width of the seam is 
smaller than the stated size (as occurs with finished lumber).

While I love playing with units of measure, I agree that trying to translate 
them on the fly can be a real pain.

Bear 




More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list