Why are there 16 parts to an inch. Like yeah it’s divisible by 4 but decimals and percentages on a system based on 100 are so much easier to calculate than fractions.
What are those little sixteenths called
Why don’t you have millimeters. What happens if you need to measure something smaller than 1/16th of an inch. Why is your smallest area measurement the length of my fucking thumb
BECAUSE of your dumb inches and sixteenth and fractions, nothing else makes any fucking sense to remember. What’s an inch? 16 little notches. What’s a foot? 12 inches. What’s a mile? 5,280. How the FUCK does anyone remember that. You know what’s easy to remember? 10 millimeters are 1 centimeter. Do you know what centimeter means? 1/100th of a meter. You know how many of them are in a meter? 100. Easy shit
Okay this one is at Imperial but whose tablespoon is a tablespoon based off. Why are tablespoons and teaspoons both distinct measurements, they’re fucking spoons. They’re almost the fucking same. Like if you had “inches” and “binches” and binches were for no reason at all 1/42nd smaller and you only used them for measuring sawdust. Fuck completely off
Okay actually still looking at Imperial and speaking of Teaspoons and Tablespoons, the names don’t indicate anything. How would ANYONE simply deduce by name which is bigger or smaller. Why would a spoon for food be bigger than a spoon for a drink. They both gotta fit in your fucking mouth don’t they
Did we all standardize our fucking spoon volumes before we standardized our math? And CUPS? Who in the cholera factory was using scientific standard measurements to quality control your cutlery for any of this to be at all reliable for anyone following recipes
Alright back to you Metric WHAT DOES OUNCE MEAN AND WHY IS IT ABBREVIATED AS OZ
WHY IS POUND ABBREVIATED AS LB FOR LIBRA LIKE SCALES LIKE A CRYPTIC ASS ILLUMINATI SECRET MESSAGE WHEN “P” IS PERFECTLY AVAILABLE. YALL AINT PAYING MONEY IN POUNDS AND PENCE SO WHATS THE CONFUSION
Okay also why the hell would the British using Pounds to mean money run away to make America and start using Pounds to mean weight instead. Do I weigh a hundred dollars? Does Chadley at the gym bench press a thousand cents? I hate you
What is a gallon for. What does it mean. You know what’s easy to convert to milliliters? Liters. What the hell is an ounce to a gallon
On top of that, what’s your measurement transference? We have grams for weight, liters for liquid, meters for distance, and they’re all like 1:100:1000 and shit. What do you DO to like. Show how many square inches of mass a gallon has or whatever
Oh shit I ain’t even got into Fahrenheit yet
Actually fuck all of us, the end
15. The names
Units of measurements and why are my JAM, and I was born for this.
0. First, many people will say “that’s not metric, that’s Imperial” and they’re all fake fans who don’t know that United States Customary(USC) units are legally defined as the metric system in a funny hat. However, that funny hat is made of hundreds of years of history, mostly English and a bit of Roman.
You literally don’t have to divide it up like that. I have a framing square with 8ths, 10ths, 12ths, and 16ths, and my combo square goes down to 32nds.
They’re just 16ths. It’s a fraction.
“Millimeters” literally just means “thousandth of a meter”. In machining we have thou as in “thousandth of a inch” that’s generally used like a standard unit.
Most of these have a historical reason for their size. A foot has 12 inches for the same reason a day has 24 hours, and you buy eggs 12 at a time. For much of history, many sorts of mercantile math was done in base 12. It’s extremely easy to divide up. 12 factors down to 2*2*3. You can’t beat that utility with a base under 20. A mile USED to be 5000 feet. Then some king changed the foot to be 10/11ths of the original size, but the mile stayed the same size, so it just got more feet in it.
A tablespoon is half an ounce. At one point, you just had your Cooking Spoon you would use to measure out ingredients, but as cooking became more precise and the government needed to legally define these quantities for trade, it was defined as half an ounce. Teaspoons are a third of that, and then we’re back to fractions.
Teaspoons are stirring spoons, not eating spoons. Depending on where you are, a tablespoon refers to either the largest spoon you eat with, or a serving spoon. Either way, one is for stirring cream and sugar in a small cup, and the other might not even fit in a teacup.
Math is still not standardized between industries, but we needed to standardize what a cup means for trade. If I sell three cups of oil, it had better be the same three cups that everyone else is selling.
Because we got a lot of these from the Romans. Oz literally just means “twelfth”.
Yeah, it’s just history here. P isn’t being used fucking anywhere. Pints are pt, Pascals is Pa, and PSI is actualld lbf/in^2.
The Pound Sterling system of money was actually based on the value of a pound of silver. It’s since devalued since the year 800, but at one time a Tower Pound of silver was 1£.
16 oz to a cup, 16 cups to a gallon, that’s 256 oz to a gallon. It’s more base 2 math. I can divide a gallon of liquid into two equal amounts with just two containers, but five parts is pushing it.
Mass is pounds. Gallons are kitchen volume. Inches are distance. If you need Large volumes, we usually start talking about cubic feet, and convert to gallons never because why would you need that? Equally, why would you need cubic feet of milk or gasoline? They’re for different settings.
Fahrenheit is actually really clever. First, the thing you hear the most about is the way it’s defined around the human body. 0 is the freezing point of a brine that’s very similar to the human body, and body temperature was set to 90. Those measurements have drifted a bit in redefinition, but it sets at very good baseline for a 0-100 scale of fucking cold to fucking hot. The really clever thing is that it ALSO puts water freezing and boiling 180 degrees apart. You know, like half a circle? If you had a dial that was flat left at zero, and flat right at boiling, it would also be a protractor. You wanna talk funky unit conversions? How about converting temperature to angles.
