In the spirit of rapprochement with Europe and reorientation away from the United States, it’s time to complete the Metrication process in Canada that was stopped prematurely by the Mulroney government.
In the spirit of rapprochement with Europe and reorientation away from the United States, it’s time to complete the Metrication process in Canada that was stopped prematurely by the Mulroney government.
I went to the states a couple years back. Went to a tavern and was deciding on a beer. Bartender overhears I’m Canadian and tells me the size of the pints in decilitres 🙄
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty comfortable with FL oz from reading soda cans and stuff. I just find it crazy how unintuitive metric is to some.
I appreciated his effort, I just thought it was funny
That’s just ridiculous. The pint is a measurement unit in itself. The fact that the bartender didn’t seem to be aware of that fact is a failure of the imperial system in itself, though not really a surprise since the system relies entirely on memorizing arbitrary values that have no connection with other units.
Though admittedly, the US pint is smaller than the British pint, so there is justification of pointing that out.
A pint in the U.S. is 16oz. What’s a British pint?
For us it is 2 cups in a pint 2 pints in a quart 4 quarts in a gallon. (People seem to struggle with remembering that until you tell them quart as in quarter, or 4 in a dollar etc)
Weights are fucked, but I usually just remember 16oz is a pound. Only drug users and chemists remember 28 grams in an ounce. So an 8 ball (1/8th is 3.5 grams). And depending on where you are ranges from 110-240 dollars. So you go to the store and buy a bottle of liquor (sold in metric units, and the store owner will stupidly call it a half gallon) but it’s 1.75L, 1L or 750ml for $20-30. And you’ll pass out 2 days later super dehydrated upset you wasted all your money.
Dunno in oz, but a US pint is 473mL, and a British pint is 568mL. Quite the difference TBH, and a bunch of bars in Vancouver got fined a few years ago due to shorting customers not providing a full pint when selling them. Some of them were even forced to buy new glasses because they weren’t big enough to fit a full pint.
This is a reoccurring problem with the imperial system, since the units just turns into words and no longer hold their meaning as measurements because they’re so arbitrary in the first place and are next to impossible to convert on the fly. Like a span is the width of a hand, but that’s useless when the difference in size is easily 50% to double just comparing between women and men. Or how you need to specify fluid or dry ounces, yet people often don’t bother and just confuse each other by not specifying. Or how complicated conversions and comparisons are to the degree that most people don’t do them in imperial and just force themselves to memorize what each arbitrary unit is in a vacuum.
28g to an ounce is a good thing for homebrewers to know, too! I measure hops in grams, and recipes are often given in ounces.
Recipes are just food chemistry i suppose.
Touche
Decilitre is actually the common unit for drinks in Hungary (and possibly in other countries). Hungarians also use dekagramm, which is 10 grams. But the cool thing about metric is that to convert, you just move the decimal around!
A lot of my European beer glasses have dL on them. Offhand I can think of duchesse (Belgium), and Delirium Tremens (also Belgium). Okay, maybe it’s just beers from Belgium, I’d have to take a look.
“I’d have to take a look.”
Sounds like you have booked a special evening in the pub: “Can I try the next beer please?”
Haha. It’s for purely scientific research.
That would be the correct way to do it. Just one or two digits for most common sizes, from shots to full glasses. I’d say a very large percentage of European beers, wines, etc. measure that way, and the remainder use mL.
Seems to be a cultural thing. Here in Canada I see mL and L most often for drinks.
One quirk of metric I have taken a liking to recently, is in Japan, apparently they measure their object dimensions in mm. ‘The size of one sheet of Letter paper in mm is 279.4mm x 215.9mm.’ I don’t know why, but for some reason I like this.
I hate fucking fl.oz. I understand cups, teaspoons and tablespoons, but then there’s the odd recipe that uses ‘fl.oz.’ and I always have to go look it up.
Yeah, what the hell is a florida ounce anyway?
An ounce of fentanyl
8 fl.oz. to a cup. Also every Pyrex measuring cup I’ve ever seen has fluid ounces alongside cups, and usually a scale on the other side for mL.
Sure, but if the recipe calls for X fl. oz. of canned tomatoes, and my canned tomatoes doesn’t show fl. oz. I have no idea how many cans to use.
The cool thing is, it’s still an easy conversion to bring it back to a familiar unit!
To be fair, pints in the US are 95 mL smaller than pints in Canada, so it’s at least a good reminder.
The states has this funny thing where when they do use metric, like in medicine, they often still use weird-ass nonstandard metric options, like decilitres. I imagine if they eventually switch their unit of weight is going to be something like “well, one fornoy is exactly how much a litre of crude oil weighs”
There is such a unit as a metric teaspoon and metric tablespoon. Used by the American medicine industry to give dosages. Actual moon landing unit tea- and tablespoons work out to something like 4.9 and 14.7mL, which are rounded to an even 5 and 15mL respectively for dosing liquid medicine. Because if you’re ordinary American citizens giving your child some Dimetapp at 3 in the morning, maybe you don’t have a vessel to meter out milliliters but you can probably lay your hands on your kitchen measuring spoons.
When did Florida make their own standard oz?