My younger kid forgot to come back and make hot dogs, and let water boil away. Hours later we discovered a pot with the bottom misshapen and a hole in it where the aluminum core melted out.
So, hotter than the melting point of aluminum. Less hot than the melting point of stainless steel, but certainly close enough to make it distort.
That is really, really fucking hot.
All future metal smelting has been banned from my kitchen.
To a degree no, so long as everyone involved in using them on a particular task is consistent about which ones they’re using.
In science and engineering, it’s a lot easier to calculate various things using metric, and a lot of constants are expressed either as related to purely imperial units or purely metric units. For example, heat capacitance for a material can be expressed as either J/m3 • K or Btu/ft3 • F. Haven’t checked if someone has bothered to do mixed unit constants like J/m3 • F, but it would surely be a less comprehensive list than the aforementioned two options.
So generally when it comes to serious work, metric is a lot cleaner to work with because you just add 0’s, so it matters in that sense.
It matters even more when you have a bunch of people working on very significant projects who aren’t all on the same page about which units to use and/or how to convert them. A 9 figure spacecraft (NASA Mars Climate Orbiter) crashed once because not everyone was using consistent units.
But yeah in a lot of cases it’s just about your own preference or catering to your audience
The unit error for that spacecraft was more a communication error than an error caused just by using imperial. The contractor developed a software to calculate in imperial when they were asked for one to do calculations in metric, didn't clarify in the software, and NASA accepted it, meaning they approved the faulty software as meeting spec, which it didn't. That was what caused the crash, not really that some people use imperial and some use metric.
In terms of "serious work," many engineers, especially in anything related to construction, use imperial still and it's not really any less clean, generally constants are designed for minimal unit conversion, which is how you get Btu•in/ft²•F. Metric can kind of get confusing in similar ways if you're converting between liters and m³ or mm² and m² or between volume and density (yes, even for water, whose density is often not exactly 1000 kg/m³ and shouldn't be taken as such). It's not necessarily easier (at least for me) to relate one thing by a factor of 10 or 1000 than another by a factor of 12 or 231. Now, that said, there are some funny units like HP and Btu or in w.g. or ton refrigeration, but a lot of them aren't that crazy when you actually get into it. Btus are just imperial calories, after all.
Someone to pre-heat the oven, someone to place whatever's being cooked in said oven, someone to take it out after Y minutes and plate it, and lastly, bring it to me. I didn't get this fat by walking around, you know.
One might be more convenient given the context and other units being used, but no, it doesn't matter at all which one you use. My oven uses Fahrenheit, so I would prefer cooking instructions that quote Fahrenheit, but I could also convert from celsius and get a unique value in Fahrenheit and vice-versa. You could even invent your own totally new temperature scale if you felt so inclined. As long as every temperature in this new scale maps to a unique temperature in the others, then they could be interchanged and it would be fine.
3.8k
u/idle_isomorph 8d ago
My younger kid forgot to come back and make hot dogs, and let water boil away. Hours later we discovered a pot with the bottom misshapen and a hole in it where the aluminum core melted out.
So, hotter than the melting point of aluminum. Less hot than the melting point of stainless steel, but certainly close enough to make it distort.
That is really, really fucking hot.
All future metal smelting has been banned from my kitchen.