wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
on 13 May 20:43
nextcollapse
Except that moles would only work for counting granules of ground flour, as there is no “flour” molecule. Also, you’d need to have a very accurate measurement of the average mass of a single granule (or you’d need a packing efficiency coefficient and an average granule radius, otherwise you’d have to literally count them. Also, a mole of flour granules would be INSANELY large. 6.02*10^23 of anything larger than a macromolecule is no joke. At this point, since you’d have to weigh it or measure its volume anyway (unless you feel like counting microscopic flour particles for the next few trillion years), you might as well just use grams.
There’s a better way: German flour types. They’re specifying mineral content, e.g. standard “white flour” is Type 405, meaning that when you pyrolyse 100g of flour, 405mg of ashes will be left. As the minerals were all in carbon solution before, and temperatures are low enough to not melt them into slag, you’re essentially left with single atoms. Close enough at least for an assumption. If you disagree I shall hand you a mortar.
Of course, that doesn’t specify everything. I suggest also measuring the released energy, then jot both numbers down on the complex plane. So you have joule-moles of flour.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
on 13 May 22:08
collapse
We have now reached the peak: figure out how much flour you have by burning it to ash, then carefully measure the mass of that to figure out the amount of flour you need.
A mole is just a unit of measure. We typically use it to measure the number of atoms or molecules present. But you can also have a mole of other things.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
on 13 May 23:24
collapse
As a chemistry teacher, I am acutely aware. This is why I suggested that the only “thing” you could measure for flour would be “granules”, the leftover ground bits which make up the substance of the flour. However, a mole of granules would still be insanely large (because you’d have to have 600 sextillion particles of flour, which would take up an insane amount of space) and a mole of any chemical constituent like amylose would be impure, and thus the measure meaningless. The greatest problem still lies in the counting, which would require either nigh-infinite time, or would require a conversion from either mass or volume into moles, so the whole point of using moles becomes moot.
I mean, of course no one would physically count out a mole of something. You don’t physically count out each individual ion in a preparation of acid for your class, you just weigh the constituents and estimate. The joke I made was absurd, in the same vein as the original comic on which we are commenting. No one’s counting five hundred sextillion terabytes, either.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
on 13 May 22:49
collapse
Computational biochemists are working with a crack team of mathematicians as we speak to develop an alternative standard which does not need a reference mass
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
on 13 May 22:48
nextcollapse
I like to read bedtime stories to my wheat, so it learns more and has higher information density
I have absolutely no understanding of whatever is said here
Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 13 May 22:38
nextcollapse
Wouldn’t this make the units temperature-dependent?
Landauer limit is one kTln2 per bit of information, so at 300K about 3 zeptojoule per bit.
Dividing by c² we get 32 micro-quectogram per bit, so 32 yoctogram per terabit. 256 yoctogram per terabyte.
The Author wants half a septillion terabytes, 0.5•10²⁴ terabytes, half a yotta-terabyte.
That makes 128 grams.
Since I don’t know what on earth “a cup of flour” is, I can’t judge if the comic character proposes a reasonable conversion, but 0.1kg seems like a reasonable amount to use in cooking.
For baking I would rather have my units temperature dependent than density dependent (I can compact my flour or work with water or nuts, all having different densities, but my room temperature will always be roughly 300).
I endorse einstein-landauer units.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
on 14 May 00:26
collapse
184 grams is a touch high for “a cup of flour”, but I’m not gonna check your math, and the comic probably wanted to use “close enough” round-ish numbers. The weight of a cup of flour is usually somewhere between 120g and 145g, going by the conversions used by major baking recipe publishers like King Arthur, Cooks Illustrated, Washington Post, New York Times, etc.
Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 14 May 00:34
nextcollapse
I fear their apartment is at -50°C and this is a cry for help.
At least I am relieved to know that even acclaimed authors native to the cup-measurement system don’t know what “a cup of flour is”.
I’ll be off baking my pannenkoek with 150g of flour then.
Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 14 May 00:39
nextcollapse
I figured it out. Typed the ln2 into my text and then forgot it in the calculator.
Great, I’ma redo alll my numbers then rq
JackbyDev@programming.dev
on 14 May 09:28
collapse
Mass, not weight! Only because we’re being technical already.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
on 14 May 13:43
collapse
Grams are a measure of mass or weight. I assume we’re talking about measuring this flour here on planet earth, within the effects of its gravitational field lol
JackbyDev@programming.dev
on 14 May 15:17
collapse
At what elevation and where in Earth? 🤔 Again, only being this technical because that’s the tone. Not being pedantic.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
on 14 May 15:49
nextcollapse
The variance involved in converting cups of flour to grams is much greater than any gravitational variances caused by elevation or location. So that’s sort of irrelevant here.
JackbyDev@programming.dev
on 14 May 16:14
collapse
Oh, I disagree, on goofy technical posts like this is exactly the place to worry about it. The comic is about asking for an amount of bytes of flour and you’re upset I’m making a joke about mass and weight being different?
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
on 14 May 21:54
collapse
Lmao I’m not upset dawg, just matching your nitpicks with more nitpicks
This is a great second argument for using weight not volume for measurements.
Measuring mass is of course not viable, but measuring weight in a consistent location means all the ratios end up correct. While ratios between volume and weight measured substances change (and flour probably compacts differently).
That is why one should always use a scale to measure their fluids, and why metric is superior where 375ml of water or milk are 375g (convert the recipe ahead of time at a reference location), making this trivially easy.
If you wish to then correct the total mass of your dish, you can simply compare the weight and volume of water to work out the mass to weight ratio and correct accordingly.
DahGangalang@infosec.pub
on 13 May 22:53
nextcollapse
Metric appears to end at 10^30, but even then, I think the better way to phrase that number would be 5,000 quetta-bytes
No, you missed the point. See @milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee’s comment and link to Landauer’s Principle, the namesake of which is literally named in the title of the post.
TL;DR: Storing information requires a change in entropy. A change in entropy requires a change in energy. There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information. Energy is mass due to mass-energy equivalence. ∴ information has mass independent of its physical representation.
cholesterol@lemmy.world
on 14 May 17:14
nextcollapse
There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information.
Okay, but I still don’t get how that leads to a standardized measure of energy/mass for a given amount of bytes. That seems to be the premise of the comic.
information has mass independent of its physical representation.
So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?
So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?
That’s all in the linked wikipedia article, but since you asked:
At room temperature, the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.018 eV (2.9×10^−21^ J).
That’s 1 bit, so 1 byte is eight times that, which you can plug into E=mc^2^ to get its absurdly small equivalent mass.
It’s important(?) to note that Landauer’s Principle is not settled science and has yet to be rigorously proven, unless there’s some recent development which the comic is referencing. I haven’t checked.
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
on 15 May 11:37
collapse
When referencing another person’s comment, it can be helpful to link to that comment or the article you mentioned.
I’d also like to point out that many Wikipedia articles, particularly those written by experts on a given scientific subject, tend to be daunting rather than helpful for people not yet familiar with that subject.
Explanations like the one you offered in this comment and the next reply can help make topics more approachable, so I very much appreciate that.
To illustrate my point:
In this case, the article first describes the principle as “pertaining to a lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation”, which doesn’t directly highlight the connection to information storage. The next sentence then mentions “irreversible change in information” and “merging two computational paths”, both of which are non-trivial.
From a brief glance at the article on reversible computing linked further on, I gather that “irreversible” here doesn’t mean “you can’t flip the bit again” but rather something like “you can’t deterministically figure out the previous calculation from its result”, so the phrase boils down to “storing a piece of information” for our context. The example of “merging computational paths” probably has no particular bearing on the energy value of information either and can be ignored as well.
Figuring out the resulting logic that you so kindly laid out – again, thank you for that! – requires a degree of subject-specific understanding to know what parts of the explanation can be safely ignored.
Of course, experts want to be accurate and tend to think in terms they’re familiar with, so I don’t fault them for that. The unfortunate result is that their writings are often rather intransparent to laypeople and linking to Wikipedia articles isn’t always the best way to convey an understanding.
milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
on 14 May 06:40
nextcollapse
The whole point of cups is that you can buy an ingredient by the gallon and it’s very likely that you can double or halve the recipe to your heart’s content and eventually use up the entire package with no waste.
MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 15 May 11:08
collapse
An old, old wooden ship.
VoterFrog@lemmy.world
on 15 May 11:31
nextcollapse
A useful size to package and sell ingredients in, such that the person following a recipe can halve or double the recipe as needed and still use the entire package with no waste.
Would it help if I told you that it was defined as the volume contained in a cube whose length is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/166219513th of a second? I imagine it wouldn’t. Obviously the litre is superior, it’s a much less arbitrary cube defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/2997924580 seconds.
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
on 15 May 13:08
nextcollapse
This guy does.
Where I’m from, flour is sold as packages of 1kg, which they say is 1000g (way too much in my humble opinion) , which cannot be easily divided with simple maths when I want to halve or double my recipe. Recipe specify flour in grams, which makes it so very complicated when I need to convert it to ngogn, in the end I’m always left with flour in my package when I want to double the size of my cakes, which wouldn’t happen if the package size was sold in cubic potrzebies.
You guys have to weigh your flour? We just grab a cup and scoop it and then dump it in the bowl. You’re busting out the scale? You’re not exactly selling me on metric here.
But having industrial quantities is like most of the argument for using metric! You mean to tell me you’re not converting between kL and mL all the time and reaping the benefits of being able to just slide the decimal over? That’s a shame. I’m not sure that doing your everyday cooking in increments of 125g is all that useful then. The cup is sounding better and better.
By industrial quantities I mean we don’t have a massive sack of flour we can just dip a mug into, or several quarts (wtf) of high fructose corn syrup lying around.
Plus our cups vary in size from best china tea cup, to sports direct mug.
You know where are with 500g of flour and 350mls of water.
l is lowercase, an kl is not used. A kl is a m³, which water utilities charge by, and pools and interior volume are measured in.
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
on 15 May 14:40
collapse
What I do is my scale is underneath my bowl, every time I need to add a quantity of an ingredient I reset it to zero with what’s in it.
Though I get that filling a cup and dumping it in seems very practical at first glance, what happen when you need 3/4 of a cup ? Or 1.5 cup ? Do you have 20 cup in the kitchen of different sizes, then you need to grab the one of the correct size which isn’t more practical than having a scale which can do infinite granularity, also I expect you would take the wrong cup on many occasions and get the wrong quantity
There’s nothing inherently more natural about cooking in the metric system, people just prefer base 10 these days. People balk at 4 quarts to an arbitrary gallon but love 1 liter being the arbitrary cubic volume of 10 ten-millionths of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole passing through Paris [but not quite].
Cooking by volume was natural before everyone had accurate kitchen scales. You didn’t have a digital tare button in the 1800s but you did have a bunch of containers in common sizes.
what happen when you need 3/4 of a cup ? Or 1.5 cup ?
Generally you have 4 sizes: 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. You just use a combination of 2 sizes (1+1/2) or multiples of your smallest size (3x1/4).
You usually don’t need high precision for cooking, common ratios are good approximations (1:1, 1:2, 1:8, etc…). Baking is a different beast and I don’t know how people did it before weight.
Also, fuck tablespoons and teaspoons. They should just be replaced with 1/16 cup and 1/32 cup.
lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works
on 15 May 17:15
collapse
1/16 cup and 1/32 cup.
To say you’re not taking this seriously would be an understatement. A teaspoon is not half a tablespoon.
! Naturally, 1tbsp == 3tsp. Because of course it is. !<
We have the same measuring cups I’m sure you use for liquids. They have mL on one side, cups on the other and a scale for sub-sizes. We do have individually-sized scoops which are nice for over-scooping and just sliding your finger across the top to push off the excess and get the amount you need. It’s not strictly necessary though. They come in a set where each smaller scoop fits inside the larger ones in a tight stack that can sit in a drawer.
The infinite granularity is ultimately unnecessary. Recipes don’t call for 0.397 cups. I’m sure you don’t see any that ask for 438 grams. If you do the math on a lot of recipes listed in both metric and imperial, you’ll find that they’re not even using the exact same amounts. The convenience of using standard measures tends to outweigh the flavor difference with plus or minus a percent of ingredient.
A little more than 4.5 liters. Except a certain nearby country uses a little less than 3.8 liters as their gallon, so we get all sorts of “smaller than a gallon” packages labeled as a gallon, leading to people getting ripped off if they don’t realize they’re being sold something less than a gallon as if it were a full gallon.
In other words, the gallon is the original shrinkflation unit of measure.
Well then you’ve lost the whole advantage of base 10. You’re buying 2L or 4L containers and dividing them up into 250ml increments, having to do divisions of 8 or 16 like some common imperial peasant, only you’re doing it with numbers that have no real relationship with your daily life. I mean, ultimately it’s all arbitrary anyway. But when someone says use 2 cups, that’s 2 scoops, which seems better to me than having to know that 500ml is 2 scoops.
I have 1l milk and 1kg flour. My recipe wants ⅜ liter milk and 150g flour. 375ml is a bit odd but trivial ultimately, and very easy to measure when I just pour 375g into my blender on a scale.
Now how would imperial cups deal with 150g from 1kg?
I also have 45g oil, what odd measurements would that give when you try to divide it up without a single decimal number?
Try 24g suggar.
Our recipes rarely use weights except for maybe meats. We’ve got a scale in my kitchen but it hasn’t been touched in a while.
The ratios of ingredients matter more than the exact values so for the recipe you’re talking about, it’d be like 2 cups of milk, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup of oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (or 2 tablespoons, which is a pretty common size so most people probably have a scoop for that).
it wouldn’t though, it would be like 7.5 parts milk to 3 parts flour to almost a part oil to half a part sugar.
And that still being quite imprecise, using 22g or 26g sugar makes a change in taste I wouldn’t want to happen uncontrolled at random. I’m also closer to 41g oil these days, wouldn’t want to use 50 to make it fit some very coarse division.
Scoops of stuff also seems very imprecise. Are they at least levelled?
I also use “a pinch of salt”, which doesn’t have to be very precise, but if someone were to ask I could tell them “roughly 0.2g”, from having just measured it. I still remembr how much I hated descriptions like “a pinch” as a cooking novice, and now I can simply measure my pinch on a scale and others can confirm their pinch on their scale until it about matches 0.2g too. How would that work in imperial?
threaded - newest
Oh sure, throw a fit — just wait until you want to convert those units to kilojoules!
Who’s laughing now, tablespoons?!
The real problem is measuring flour by volume instead of mass.
Solve both by measuring with moles
Except that moles would only work for counting granules of ground flour, as there is no “flour” molecule. Also, you’d need to have a very accurate measurement of the average mass of a single granule (or you’d need a packing efficiency coefficient and an average granule radius, otherwise you’d have to literally count them. Also, a mole of flour granules would be INSANELY large. 6.02*10^23 of anything larger than a macromolecule is no joke. At this point, since you’d have to weigh it or measure its volume anyway (unless you feel like counting microscopic flour particles for the next few trillion years), you might as well just use grams.
There’s a better way: German flour types. They’re specifying mineral content, e.g. standard “white flour” is Type 405, meaning that when you pyrolyse 100g of flour, 405mg of ashes will be left. As the minerals were all in carbon solution before, and temperatures are low enough to not melt them into slag, you’re essentially left with single atoms. Close enough at least for an assumption. If you disagree I shall hand you a mortar.
Of course, that doesn’t specify everything. I suggest also measuring the released energy, then jot both numbers down on the complex plane. So you have joule-moles of flour.
We have now reached the peak: figure out how much flour you have by burning it to ash, then carefully measure the mass of that to figure out the amount of flour you need.
A mole is just a unit of measure. We typically use it to measure the number of atoms or molecules present. But you can also have a mole of other things.
As a chemistry teacher, I am acutely aware. This is why I suggested that the only “thing” you could measure for flour would be “granules”, the leftover ground bits which make up the substance of the flour. However, a mole of granules would still be insanely large (because you’d have to have 600 sextillion particles of flour, which would take up an insane amount of space) and a mole of any chemical constituent like amylose would be impure, and thus the measure meaningless. The greatest problem still lies in the counting, which would require either nigh-infinite time, or would require a conversion from either mass or volume into moles, so the whole point of using moles becomes moot.
I mean, of course no one would physically count out a mole of something. You don’t physically count out each individual ion in a preparation of acid for your class, you just weigh the constituents and estimate. The joke I made was absurd, in the same vein as the original comic on which we are commenting. No one’s counting five hundred sextillion terabytes, either.
are other burrowing animals also ok?
If you don’t have a mole at home, you can substitute with a gopher.
You can fit two moles in a liter, but a gopher is too big
What about lemmings :-)
Made even worse by mixing cups, spoons, pints, gallons and their crazy ratios
That doesn’t work anyway, since based on wheat variety, growing season, and grinding method, different flours have different information density.
They have an international prototype sack of flour in an old missile silo in Kansas. Ultimately that’s what all the measurements are relative to
And the “Room Temperature” room, which is located in Greendale.
Computational biochemists are working with a crack team of mathematicians as we speak to develop an alternative standard which does not need a reference mass
I like to read bedtime stories to my wheat, so it learns more and has higher information density
I just plug mine into USB ports
Sounds like the culinary world would benefit from having a measurement system that accounts for these factors.
We usually just look at the protein values on the package xD
Hundred sextillion terabytes. Yeah, everybody of calling it hungry sex bites in minutes.
I have absolutely no understanding of whatever is said here
Wouldn’t this make the units temperature-dependent?
Landauer limit is one kTln2 per bit of information, so at 300K about 3 zeptojoule per bit.
Dividing by c² we get 32 micro-quectogram per bit, so 32 yoctogram per terabit. 256 yoctogram per terabyte.
The Author wants half a septillion terabytes, 0.5•10²⁴ terabytes, half a yotta-terabyte.
That makes 128 grams.
Since I don’t know what on earth “a cup of flour” is, I can’t judge if the comic character proposes a reasonable conversion, but 0.1kg seems like a reasonable amount to use in cooking.
For baking I would rather have my units temperature dependent than density dependent (I can compact my flour or work with water or nuts, all having different densities, but my room temperature will always be roughly 300).
I endorse einstein-landauer units.
184 grams is a touch high for “a cup of flour”, but I’m not gonna check your math, and the comic probably wanted to use “close enough” round-ish numbers. The weight of a cup of flour is usually somewhere between 120g and 145g, going by the conversions used by major baking recipe publishers like King Arthur, Cooks Illustrated, Washington Post, New York Times, etc.
I fear their apartment is at -50°C and this is a cry for help.
At least I am relieved to know that even acclaimed authors native to the cup-measurement system don’t know what “a cup of flour is”.
I’ll be off baking my pannenkoek with 150g of flour then.
I figured it out. Typed the ln2 into my text and then forgot it in the calculator.
Great, I’ma redo alll my numbers then rq
Mass, not weight! Only because we’re being technical already.
Grams are a measure of mass or weight. I assume we’re talking about measuring this flour here on planet earth, within the effects of its gravitational field lol
At what elevation and where in Earth? 🤔 Again, only being this technical because that’s the tone. Not being pedantic.
The variance involved in converting cups of flour to grams is much greater than any gravitational variances caused by elevation or location. So that’s sort of irrelevant here.
Oh, I disagree, on goofy technical posts like this is exactly the place to worry about it. The comic is about asking for an amount of bytes of flour and you’re upset I’m making a joke about mass and weight being different?
Lmao I’m not upset dawg, just matching your nitpicks with more nitpicks
This is a great second argument for using weight not volume for measurements.
Measuring mass is of course not viable, but measuring weight in a consistent location means all the ratios end up correct. While ratios between volume and weight measured substances change (and flour probably compacts differently).
That is why one should always use a scale to measure their fluids, and why metric is superior where 375ml of water or milk are 375g (convert the recipe ahead of time at a reference location), making this trivially easy.
If you wish to then correct the total mass of your dish, you can simply compare the weight and volume of water to work out the mass to weight ratio and correct accordingly.
Metric appears to end at 10^30, but even then, I think the better way to phrase that number would be 5,000 quetta-bytes
Tera = 10^12;
SeptillionSextillion = 10^21Source
*500 000 quettabytes
*Sextillion = 10^21 ( = Zetta)
I’d recommend wikipedia here, your source seems to have taken 3 years to update their table and their image is still outdated.
They likely didn’t use quetta because it was only added 3 years ago, and is still not widely known. Or maybe it sounded better.
Derp, that’s what happens when you have to bounce between too many pages on mobile.
Thanks for the pointer!
Information is physical? I’m gonna need a source on that one.
i will Physically bitchslap you then you can deduce yourself the information about whether your face hurts or not, ayy lmao.
At least that’s how I choose to interpret this new information
I’d give a source but it’s physically in my house and it’s heavy
The idea is that information must have a physical representation. But I don’t know how that would lead to a standardized mass of a byte.
No, you missed the point. See @milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee’s comment and link to Landauer’s Principle, the namesake of which is literally named in the title of the post.
TL;DR: Storing information requires a change in entropy. A change in entropy requires a change in energy. There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information. Energy is mass due to mass-energy equivalence. ∴ information has mass independent of its physical representation.
Okay, but I still don’t get how that leads to a standardized measure of energy/mass for a given amount of bytes. That seems to be the premise of the comic.
So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?
That’s all in the linked wikipedia article, but since you asked:
That’s 1 bit, so 1 byte is eight times that, which you can plug into E=mc^2^ to get its absurdly small equivalent mass.
It’s important(?) to note that Landauer’s Principle is not settled science and has yet to be rigorously proven, unless there’s some recent development which the comic is referencing. I haven’t checked.
I appreciate you spelling some of it out, because I’m just curious and don’t have the background knowledge to really navigate this.
Then appreciate it for what it is. A meme.
Go back to school
When referencing another person’s comment, it can be helpful to link to that comment or the article you mentioned.
I’d also like to point out that many Wikipedia articles, particularly those written by experts on a given scientific subject, tend to be daunting rather than helpful for people not yet familiar with that subject.
Explanations like the one you offered in this comment and the next reply can help make topics more approachable, so I very much appreciate that.
To illustrate my point:
In this case, the article first describes the principle as “pertaining to a lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation”, which doesn’t directly highlight the connection to information storage. The next sentence then mentions “irreversible change in information” and “merging two computational paths”, both of which are non-trivial.
From a brief glance at the article on reversible computing linked further on, I gather that “irreversible” here doesn’t mean “you can’t flip the bit again” but rather something like “you can’t deterministically figure out the previous calculation from its result”, so the phrase boils down to “storing a piece of information” for our context. The example of “merging computational paths” probably has no particular bearing on the energy value of information either and can be ignored as well.
Figuring out the resulting logic that you so kindly laid out – again, thank you for that! – requires a degree of subject-specific understanding to know what parts of the explanation can be safely ignored.
Of course, experts want to be accurate and tend to think in terms they’re familiar with, so I don’t fault them for that. The unfortunate result is that their writings are often rather intransparent to laypeople and linking to Wikipedia articles isn’t always the best way to convey an understanding.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
Also see Redjard’s comment to this post
Information only exists in the world in the form of physical media, such as computer circuits, DNA or electrical/neuron pattern in your brain.
Okay, true, but that’s not the situation described in the comic.
Pretty sure math is intrinsic to the universe and wasn’t written down anywhere until we discovered it.
That depends on which side of “math is an invention” or “math was discovered” you fall into.
Entropy in information theory is equivalent to entropy in quantum dynamics / thermodynamics
<img alt="" src="https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/e611467c-d875-45ae-82bb-7c2f9166d984.gif">
Still a more acceptable measurement than “1 cup”.
The whole point of cups is that you can buy an ingredient by the gallon and it’s very likely that you can double or halve the recipe to your heart’s content and eventually use up the entire package with no waste.
What’s a gallon?
A pirate ship, I think.
An old, old wooden ship.
A useful size to package and sell ingredients in, such that the person following a recipe can halve or double the recipe as needed and still use the entire package with no waste.
Would it help if I told you that it was defined as the volume contained in a cube whose length is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/166219513th of a second? I imagine it wouldn’t. Obviously the litre is superior, it’s a much less arbitrary cube defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/2997924580 seconds.
But no one weighs flour in litres.
This guy does.
Where I’m from, flour is sold as packages of 1kg, which they say is 1000g (way too much in my humble opinion) , which cannot be easily divided with simple maths when I want to halve or double my recipe. Recipe specify flour in grams, which makes it so very complicated when I need to convert it to ngogn, in the end I’m always left with flour in my package when I want to double the size of my cakes, which wouldn’t happen if the package size was sold in cubic potrzebies.
this guy knuths how units work
You guys have to weigh your flour? We just grab a cup and scoop it and then dump it in the bowl. You’re busting out the scale? You’re not exactly selling me on metric here.
What can I say, other than we don’t have industrial quantities of ingredients in our houses, and we like accuracy in our recipes.
But having industrial quantities is like most of the argument for using metric! You mean to tell me you’re not converting between kL and mL all the time and reaping the benefits of being able to just slide the decimal over? That’s a shame. I’m not sure that doing your everyday cooking in increments of 125g is all that useful then. The cup is sounding better and better.
By industrial quantities I mean we don’t have a massive sack of flour we can just dip a mug into, or several quarts (wtf) of high fructose corn syrup lying around.
Plus our cups vary in size from best china tea cup, to sports direct mug.
You know where are with 500g of flour and 350mls of water.
l is lowercase, an kl is not used. A kl is a m³, which water utilities charge by, and pools and interior volume are measured in.
What I do is my scale is underneath my bowl, every time I need to add a quantity of an ingredient I reset it to zero with what’s in it.
Though I get that filling a cup and dumping it in seems very practical at first glance, what happen when you need 3/4 of a cup ? Or 1.5 cup ? Do you have 20 cup in the kitchen of different sizes, then you need to grab the one of the correct size which isn’t more practical than having a scale which can do infinite granularity, also I expect you would take the wrong cup on many occasions and get the wrong quantity
There’s nothing inherently more natural about cooking in the metric system, people just prefer base 10 these days. People balk at 4 quarts to an arbitrary gallon but love 1 liter being the arbitrary cubic volume of 10 ten-millionths of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole passing through Paris [but not quite].
Cooking by volume was natural before everyone had accurate kitchen scales. You didn’t have a digital tare button in the 1800s but you did have a bunch of containers in common sizes.
Generally you have 4 sizes: 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. You just use a combination of 2 sizes (1+1/2) or multiples of your smallest size (3x1/4).
You usually don’t need high precision for cooking, common ratios are good approximations (1:1, 1:2, 1:8, etc…). Baking is a different beast and I don’t know how people did it before weight.
Also, fuck tablespoons and teaspoons. They should just be replaced with 1/16 cup and 1/32 cup.
To say you’re not taking this seriously would be an understatement. A teaspoon is not half a tablespoon.
I know it’s 1/48 cup but that’s a stupid fraction and doesn’t follow any logic, one of the main reasons it should be thrown out
We have the same measuring cups I’m sure you use for liquids. They have mL on one side, cups on the other and a scale for sub-sizes. We do have individually-sized scoops which are nice for over-scooping and just sliding your finger across the top to push off the excess and get the amount you need. It’s not strictly necessary though. They come in a set where each smaller scoop fits inside the larger ones in a tight stack that can sit in a drawer.
The infinite granularity is ultimately unnecessary. Recipes don’t call for 0.397 cups. I’m sure you don’t see any that ask for 438 grams. If you do the math on a lot of recipes listed in both metric and imperial, you’ll find that they’re not even using the exact same amounts. The convenience of using standard measures tends to outweigh the flavor difference with plus or minus a percent of ingredient.
Something that can be divided by cups I believe
A little more than 4.5 liters. Except a certain nearby country uses a little less than 3.8 liters as their gallon, so we get all sorts of “smaller than a gallon” packages labeled as a gallon, leading to people getting ripped off if they don’t realize they’re being sold something less than a gallon as if it were a full gallon.
In other words, the gallon is the original shrinkflation unit of measure.
Yeah, because no other metric can be divided by an other size of the same metric.
That is why I always have 100ml over whenever I divide a liter by 250ml increments.
Well then you’ve lost the whole advantage of base 10. You’re buying 2L or 4L containers and dividing them up into 250ml increments, having to do divisions of 8 or 16 like some common imperial peasant, only you’re doing it with numbers that have no real relationship with your daily life. I mean, ultimately it’s all arbitrary anyway. But when someone says use 2 cups, that’s 2 scoops, which seems better to me than having to know that 500ml is 2 scoops.
I have 1l milk and 1kg flour. My recipe wants ⅜ liter milk and 150g flour. 375ml is a bit odd but trivial ultimately, and very easy to measure when I just pour 375g into my blender on a scale.
Now how would imperial cups deal with 150g from 1kg?
I also have 45g oil, what odd measurements would that give when you try to divide it up without a single decimal number?
Try 24g suggar.
I’d love to see all that converted to imperial.
Our recipes rarely use weights except for maybe meats. We’ve got a scale in my kitchen but it hasn’t been touched in a while.
The ratios of ingredients matter more than the exact values so for the recipe you’re talking about, it’d be like 2 cups of milk, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup of oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (or 2 tablespoons, which is a pretty common size so most people probably have a scoop for that).
it wouldn’t though, it would be like 7.5 parts milk to 3 parts flour to almost a part oil to half a part sugar.
And that still being quite imprecise, using 22g or 26g sugar makes a change in taste I wouldn’t want to happen uncontrolled at random. I’m also closer to 41g oil these days, wouldn’t want to use 50 to make it fit some very coarse division.
Scoops of stuff also seems very imprecise. Are they at least levelled?
I also use “a pinch of salt”, which doesn’t have to be very precise, but if someone were to ask I could tell them “roughly 0.2g”, from having just measured it. I still remembr how much I hated descriptions like “a pinch” as a cooking novice, and now I can simply measure my pinch on a scale and others can confirm their pinch on their scale until it about matches 0.2g too. How would that work in imperial?
*galleon
This kind of humor is what’s wrong with modern males.
Since I’ve seen you trolling in multiple threads and know you get a kick out of it, I’ll bite:
What in the world is wrong with this humor and why does it have anything to do with modern males?
Qq: anyone on this thread bother to think they’re being sarcastic? Or thats a no-no?
Well, it could be sarcasm but:
Seek help.
I’ve arrived