Quote:
Originally Posted by Jayfar
Then again, I have that same Pyrex® measuring cup pictured in the wikipedia article and it does have markings in both metric and US units.
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I suspect these are going to be around for a long, long time as many cook books and family recipes make use of Imperial style measurements, and people will be annoyed when their newly purchased measuring device doesn't without awkwardly looking up or converting the quantities required. I spent quite a long time in the USA and UK growing up (and am British by nationality and birth) so I'm quite used to mixed unit thinking like RosieC describes. Indeed, many more recent cook books provide both, noting you ought to follow one or the other, but not mix and match units. Sometimes you get used to converting between units; miles, kilometers and nautical miles are all things I've had to convert between quite often, although generally only doing the conversions at the one decimal place conversion rate.
I still often think of (hot) weather in terms of F, although living in South Africa since late 1999 means I'm pretty used to C now (they're fully metric around here, other than on really old things) - but I've always used C for cold (i.e. if it's near 0, it's damn cold - of course if it's near zero in F it's really bloody cold) - never did get the hang of F for cold.
I also often think of a meter as being "slightly longer than a yard" - this may have something do to with having possessed from my youth in the USA, a yard stick. That said, I prefer using metric units in practice for length measurements, particularly if you get any more accurate than the nearest inch.
I also miss being able to order a pint of cider (or is it 568ml...?), because they only sell beer in draught form here; what they call cider only comes in bottles (and sometimes cans) :/
It's interesting how different US and UK non-metric units can be in size, and that contrary to everything being bigger and better in Texas, both the pint and gallon are smaller in the US. Or maybe Texas uses the UK measurements?.
And of course,
, I'm fairly used to thinking in metric units for most things. It's interesting to note F is so odd as the guy who invented it wanted to represent some non-linear points on a linear scale (I vaguely recall he wanted water to freeze at 0, human blood to be 100 and water to boil at 200.
Oops). C rather more sensibly takes two phases of one substance - water - and then interpolates/extrapolates from there.
Incidentally, perhaps
the most famous (at least as a book title) degree of F
is wrong.
---------- Post added at 02:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:53 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Skayc1
those who have had success with seaweed extract making your orchids grow better roots, what regimen did you follow?
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Not all seaweed extracts are necessarily comparable - as with anything derived from natural products, there is batch variation, and "seaweed" covers a LOT of different things (it would be like labelling meat in supermarkets "vertebrates" - you might get anything from fish to beef, pork, game meat etc).
The method used to create the extract may also play a role in the effectiveness of a particular product.
When you buy a pill of paracetamol (acetaminophen) that says 500mg on it, it's got 500mg in it (within a defined margin of error); if you buy a herbal (forget a "homoepathic extract") extract of e.g. a plant, you have no real idea of how much of whatever is supposed to be the active ingredient in there, unless it's specified relative to the amount of some particular chemical in there. (i.e. 50ml/l of pepper extract isn't the same as 50mg/l of capsaicin - 50mg/l of a Jalapeno will be significantly different from 50mg/l of Habanero or 50mg/l Naga Bhut Jolokia - yet they would all most likely be labelled as "Capsicum" [of course, if it gave you the species of
Capsicum you might have a better idea of it's potency, as all these three are different species/hybrids - but given the diversity of varieties in
Capsicum annuum alone, this probably wouldn't help].
This is similar to the amount of the active ingredients [plant growth regulators/hormones] in the seaweed extract - different mechanisms of extraction, different growth seasons, different species will all play a role, so what might work for one grower with one brand may not necessarily translate to a different extract - but hopefully a single brand should produce a more uniform result...