Re: The rye bread! Result and troubleshooting.

Cindy Hamilton wrote:

On 2024-08-16, Dave Smith <adavid.smith@sympatico.ca> wrote:

On 2024-08-16 11:28 a.m., Cindy Hamilton wrote:

On 2024-08-16, Dave Smith <adavid.smith@sympatico.ca> wrote:

On 2024-08-16 5:22 a.m., Cindy Hamilton wrote:

On 2024-08-16, Leonard Blaisdell <leoblaisdell@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>

So far, our "conversion to metric" has cost me one additional set of tools.
Plumbers haven't bought into it, so I still need a 1/2 inch wrench!
I was lied to, by those in charge, when I was a kid!

>
You were certainly misled.  Those who were advocating for metric
underestimated the stubbornness and ignorance of the American public.
>

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It wouldn't be so bad if they actually knew most of the Imperial system.
It's easy enough to figure there are 10,000 square meters in a hectare
but very few Imperial proponents know how many square feet there are in
an acre.

Can we use google?  What I don't know I can find in under one minute. I'm not using that conversion right now.  BTW it's 43,560 sq. ft. What's improper about it is that sq. ft. is usually used to measure floor space in a building and acre is usually used to measure residential land space.  You can't just say 1 acre is 10 buildings because there's going to be space between the buildings.

Well, yeah.  But nobody thinks that way.  Might as well worry about furlongs
per fortnight.
>
My "2-acre" plot is 264 x 336 ft (if memory serves), but it's not exactly
2 acres.  I suppose if I were dumb enough to want to fertilize the
entire thing I'd have to do the arithmetic.  I usually want to fertilize
only a portion (say, if I'm seeding grass), so I say, "Will a bag that
does 5000 square feet be enough for that area?"

>
That will be something to worry about when you can buy partial bags.
Most people guesstimate the size of the lawn, look at the coverage per
bag and then buy enough bags to do the job and round up or down.
>
>

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Most city and older suburban lots are about 5000 square feet.
Zillow tells me my mother's lot is 4269 square feet.  Nobody
cares what fraction of an acre it is.

>
Acre was just the first example of Imperial mysteries that came to my
mind. To be honest, I was not exactly sure. I thought it was something
close to 45,500. I knew that wasn't exact but I was pretty sure that no
one here would have any idea without looking it up. The average person
doesn't know how many feet or yards there are in a mile.

It comes to a lot of people's mind.  Google completed the question How many square feet are in an acre before I had finished the word 'feet,' as the top entry in the list of searches.

5280 feet.  5280/3 yards ;)
 OTOH, I'm not average.
 

Then there are
the more obscure weights like grains, drachms and stones. For distances
were have chains, furlongs and leagues.

 Except for stones, those are all specialized to certain professions
or applications.  I don't expect most metric users to have much use
for nanometers, either.  Stones aren't used in the U.S.  We express our
body weight in pounds.

Oh no, not nanometers, we use Angstroms in electrical engineering.  That also explains why.  It's probably the best argument I have against full metric system for the US.  Would it accomplish anything if now you're doing maths all over crazy numbers far out of range of anything an elementary school student can handle?  What is it, the Greeks who invented the metric system?  There was no such thing as an electron back then, no such thing as 8000 miles through the center of the Earth to the other side, no such thing as titanium armor.  They just hadn't seen everything and for the furthest discoveries today metric won't do.  I don't claim to have seen everything either, but I've seen enough to know this.
If we're going to switch over to metric, it is going to need some improvements first.