Hacker News Reader

Comment by madcaptenor | Hacker News Reader

That wouldn't work in the US, because we measure a lot of things by volume, don't use the same units for everything (small volumes are measured in teaspoons or tablespoons, larger volumes in cups), and tend to use lots of fractions in cooking. So a recipe wouldn't call for 150 g of butter, it would call for 2/3 of a cup. I suppose you could have multiple scales on a kitchen slide rule though.

View on HN

For American-style recipes you could use something like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/5y1r4h/kitchen...

Wouldn't that all still be the same ratio though? If you set the slide rule to convert 250 to 150, shouldn't it e.g. also convert 2 cups to 1.2 cups?

Measuring cups aren't graduated in 10ths. They're split into 8 liquid ounces. 0.2 cups = 1.6 oz.

(My wife, who is from Finland, thinks the measuring system is insane. At least now I'm good at estimating conversion from F to C.)

Your wife is correct. Imperial measurements are absolutely ludicrous.

The US uses customary measures. The UK used Imperial.

TIL

+- 20 % error, insignificant for the accuracies used with either system.

Volume is just base 2 instead of base 10. It’s probably the most sane of the imperial measurements.

I assume you mean the cups that come in various containers of a particular size, because the ones I know come with a scale.

My liquid measuring cups are glass and have a customary scale graduated in liquid ounces, not 10ths of a cup. They also have metric measures on the other side.

Yep. And it would convert 2 tablespoons to 1.2 tablespoons too. There is no reason it wouldnt work for American recipes.

Most American measuring cups don't use decimals, unfortunately. You get things like ¼, ½, and ⅓ cup measures. Of course, still doable, just takes some extra mental work.

And if you can do that much mental work, you probably don't need the slide rule. I think a slide rule graduated with "cooking fractions" (i. e. the sizes of measuring cups and spoons that people actually have) would be a good idea.

https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/5y1r4h/kitchen...

Well I use a cooks measure for that allows you to quickly measure different things by volume flour rice etc.

Keep in mind that slide-rules typically have more than one scale. So there could be a scale for volume, a scale for weight- even a scale to estimate cooking times.

Now I want one of these. (Especially the "estimating cooking times" parts - I'm weirdly good at mental arithmetic so I don't actually need this for volumes and weights.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com