Re: CHAT: browsers

John Cowan wrote:
> Tristan scripsit:
>
>
>>In America, do you use fluid
>>ounzes for icecream and solid ounzes for honey?
>
>
> Ice cream is indeed sold in fluid ounces, or rather in binary multiples
> thereof: half pints (8 fl. oz., about 236 ml), pints, quarts (= 2 pints),
> half gallons (= 2 quarts), gallons.  Note that "ounce" has no "z"; the
> "z" is actually an old abbreviation sign, the same used in "viz." =
> "videlicet" = "namely".
>
> I suspect the story is similar in the U.K., but the unit sizes are
> different.  The U.S. fl. oz. is about 29.6 ml, and there are 16 of them in
> a gallon.  In the U.K., though, the fl. oz. is about 28.4 ml, but there
> are 20 of them in a gallon, so gallon, half gallon, pint, and quart are
> about 20% larger.  (The U.S. is sticking to the older system here.)
I wish you'd make up your minds (yeah, I know it's the English being
difficult here, saying they'll convert to metric but keeping their
old-fashioned measurements around for the fun of it). On the other hand,
dual labelled stuff has started to be reasonably common on things like
imported cooking oil and shampoo (I guess it's one label for all English
speakers), but it's always grams and American measurements, never
Imperial. (I think. I worked it out because I knew that Australia used
to have a pint that sat somewhere between 500 and 600 mL,* and America
has one that's less than 500 mL, and because one jar of oil had the
measurement in both millilitres, pints and fl ounces. But I never knew
about that 16 vs 20 fl oz a gallon thing.)

*This I knew because I wondered if 600 mL bottles of drink/cartons of
milk exist because of pre-metricness (confusingly, it is the case for
milk, but not the case for drinks: it was the result of a 'value-added'
thing that became standard, as is 1.25 L soft-drink bottles). I never
worked out why we have 375 mL cans but Europe settles for these
cute-looking tiny 330 mL ones... (They are *incredibly* funny when
you're used to 375 mL cans. They have their heads chopped off!)

> I don't buy honey, but I believe it's sold the same way.  Genuine solids
> are usually sold by weight, that being easier to measure automatically
> (breakfast cereal, e.g., has a notice saying "Contents sold by weight,
> not by volume; settling may have occurred during shipping").
They do that here too. I never understood why (cereal boxes are good
material to teach children to read with, because they're on the brekky
table when children aren't doing much but eating. The reasonably
complicated language also results in a better education than Spot
books). If it says 800 g, of course it's sold by weight, not volume.

> Nobody uses
> solid ounces any more; even the GNU units program knows them not.
Hm? So weight is done in only pounds? (Apparently Americans don't use
stones, either, and there goes my knowledge of weight measurements.)
When were ounces ousted? All our dual-labelled scales and suchlike have
ounces (not that we have many left. They break after a few decades and
replacements are mostly metric-only. I understand it's illegal to put
inches on rulers these days. Though given the popularity of 40 cm
rulers, I doubt they'd be all that useful any more. (While I was in
primary school, schools decided that 40 cm rulers would be so much more
useful, but forgot to tell the manufacturers of pencilcases, which were
mostly designed to accomodate 30 cm rulers.))

> BTW, a tablespoon (unit of volume in cooking) is 20 ml in Australia,
> 15 ml in the U.K., and approximately 14.7 ml (exactly half a fl. oz.) in
> the U.S.
I have a feeling teaspoons are different too. Cups are obviously
different between Australia and America, but given that a cup here is
250 mL (quarter of a litre), I'm guessing they're the same in the UK.

Not that cookbooks are compatible at the best of times; mince here is
(mince) meat, over in America it's apparenly some fruit-based thing, you
have sticks of butter, we measure it in grams, you have raw-egg
substitute, we have raw eggs, and you can't substitute 20 g (or whatever
would be common) of raw egg for 20 g of raw-egg substitute. (There's
incompatibilities with England, as well. For all I know, there could be
incompatibilities with NZ as well.)

Tristan.

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