The Off Topic Topic

[Valmy]

Pat Riley was always overrated.

Dude couldn't even beat Texas Western and was only third team All-American. Didn't even average 10 points per game in the NBA. Average at best.

[Tamas]

I am: going to see Springsteen in Wembley. Managed to find a ticket for the first half of the standing area that wasn't horrendously expensive

[Zanza]

Enjoy! 

[Valmy]

I am: going to see Ringo Starr at the Moody Center on Sunday. Peace and Love.

[celedhring]

Enjoy!

Got tickets for Springsteen later this month in Barcelona. Last tour was a blast.

[Syt]

Opening scene from Cheers, 1992. Guess Kerry was never the popular charismatic guy

[Sheilbh]

Absolutely ruined by a catastrophic misconversion of American cups into grams when cooking tonight

I should have trusted my hands and eyes when I was like this doesn't seem right.

On the other hand took three goes but made a fantastic quiche at the end of it

[Grey Fox]

Go mliters when going from cups.

[Jacob]

Yeah, just the other day I was baking some cookies requiring two different types of sugar. The recipe gave the metric amount in grams - 110 g in both cases - and the imperial amount in cups. But the cup measurement differed (I don't recall off the top of my head, but it was a pretty drastic difference).

It's the old "what weighs more, a pound of iron or a pound of feathers" thing.

You can't convert from mass to volume unless you know the density. Much less prone to error to go from one volume measurement to another.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah. I used an online calculator but it was clearly very wrong.

But haven't used a jug before which makes sense. (Although I always find measuring by volume for non-liquids very weird.)

Worked on something involving conversion and discovered from an Aussie colleague that Australians also use cups - but they are a different size than American cups

[Duque de Bragança]

This is why there is a distinction in French and other languages between volume, for solids, say 1 cubic decimetre (dm³) and capacité i.e 1 litre, for fluids, mostly.

 

[Sheilbh]

Interesting - there is in British imperial weighing too. So you have ounces and pounds for solids and fluid ounces for liquids.

But they're not commonly used any more. There's grams and mls. I don't think I've ever heard of volume for solids (British cookbooks are entirely weight for solids, volume for fluids).

It's another reason I try to do the cup conversion from American cookbooks - is I am not sure what a "cup" is. I don't know if it's supposed to be heaped or to the rim exactly, sometimes (especially with, say, herbs) you'll see a loose cup of herbs - which again seems confusing to me. Although that stuff doesn't matter so much I'm comfortable guessing a bit with herbs. But when you're doing anything involving baking it really matters.

[Grey Fox]

Around here, 1 cup is about 250ml.

1 tablespoon is 15ml & 1 teaspoon is 5ml.

[Duque de Bragança]

Interesting - there is in British imperial weighing too. So you have ounces and pounds for solids and fluid ounces for liquids.

But they're not commonly used any more. There's grams and mls. I don't think I've ever heard of volume for solids (British cookbooks are entirely weight for solids, volume for fluids).

It's another reason I try to do the cup conversion from American cookbooks - is I am not sure what a "cup" is. I don't know if it's supposed to be heaped or to the rim exactly, sometimes (especially with, say, herbs) you'll see a loose cup of herbs - which again seems confusing to me. Although that stuff doesn't matter so much I'm comfortable guessing a bit with herbs. But when you're doing anything involving baking it really matters.

Not cooking obviously, but that's another reason why dubs of Anglo shows keeping ccs (cm3) in French instead of millilitres (ml) as in common use in French are weird. 

Well, if you want to go full pedantic, physics teacher or  in French, mass is measured in kilogrammes whereas weight (poids) is measured in newtons (N). 
 
That's beyond the scope of cookbooks, obviously.

[HVC]

Aren't newtons a measurement of force?

*edit* Nvm weight is a force of gravity thing, so sort of makes sense.