Conversions

Let’s get religion conversion out of the way, because that’s not what this story is about at all. I was raised Episcopalian because my mom was raised Methodist and my dad was raised Roman Catholic and the Episcopal religion seemed like a fair compromise to them. Retained the Catholic pomp and circumstance, and featured incense from time to time, but progressive enough that they were allowed get married in the church in nineteen fifty, as a mixed couple. A heteronormative white mixed couple.

We ate fish on Fridays, a nod to my dad’s Roman Catholic upbringing. I don’t know a lot about Catholicism, but I believe that the main difference between that and Protestantism (ee-gee the Episcopalian sect) is that when Catholics take communion, they are supposed to believe that the communion wafer actually is the body of Jesus, while Protestants believe it’s a snack.

A styrofoam snack, as I remember it from my childhood. I'm a UU now. The snacks are way better.

Even as an Episcopalian, my mom believed in fate. Most remarkably, she believed that people had a pre-determined time to die. At some point during the two decades that I was an annoying teenager, I challenged her, Do you really believe that if you smoke a carton of cigarettes a day, pack on three hundred pounds, go skydiving every Thursday and then drive home drunk, those behaviors have no effect on your time of death? She said, Go away.

Conversions to know:

A quarter cup is four tablespoons, twelve teaspoons. This is handier to know than you might guess.

Six ounces is one hundred seventy grams, and two hundred twenty if you include the spoon. I know this because I eat exactly one hundred seventy grams of nonfat Greek yogurt and twenty grams of walnuts every morning, using a fifty-gram spoon. Your spoon may have a different weight from mine.

Tip: Weigh your spoon ahead of time. Also, if the spoons you use have different weights (check this!), it’s okay to use the average weight. Weigh them all together, count the number of spoons, count them again to make sure you haven’t made a mistake. If you have, count them a third time and take the average. Then divide the weight of all of your spoons by the average count of spoons. That will give you the average weight of a given spoon.

If you get a strange number, do it over.

It’s Mork’s fault that I weigh my breakfast. I don’t weigh anything else, except when I bake. Then I weigh the ingredients--or I use volume measurements if I absolutely have to, but my lip curls in an ever-so-tiny sneer.

I have stopped weighing myself because that’s the one irrevocable privilege bestowed upon you by the government when you turn sixty. But I do know this: If some unfeeling man (because you know it’s a man) asks you, How much do you weigh? and you’re feeling fat, answer in kilograms. Just say the number without stating the unit. Only the most horrible of insensitive louts would be obnoxious enough to ask the unit at that point. Insensitive louts tend not to be that smart, anyway. They'll just knit their brows and shuffle away.

If you’re feeling really fat, use stones. Seriously! Stone is a real unit. It’s like fathoms and pecks and bushels. Farmers in the You-Kay invented these units in the eighteenth century so they could fudge the weights of their pigs and okra on market day. The most unscrupulous used the smallest stones and the teensiest bushels. A possibly apocryphal tale tells of a farmer using pumice, polished to look like granite. I wish I could talk to that possibly apocryphal guy. He might have been a jokester, not unscrupulous at all.

Then early in the nineteenth century the international standards committees movement arose in Germany and said that one stone is fourteen pounds or six and one-third-ish kilograms. Just kidding: International standards committees never say ish. They exist to abolish the ish in life.

I was on an international standards committee once. Had to do with specifications for silicon wafers, mainly surface roughness. Let me tell you, that was a cushy job. I’d fly to Philadelphia every three months and stay in a nice room in the Four Seasons Hotel overlooking Independence Square. We’d drink nice wine and eat good food after we’d spent the day or three white-boarding different ways to specify surface roughness. I advocated power spectrum techniques, which probably doesn’t surprise any of you. But first I had to explain what power spectra are. I hope that part surprises you.

A mile is seventy point four lengths of the Highlands Rec Center pool. A lot of swimmers claim they’ve swum a mile when they've completed seventy lengths. I don’t want to cheat, so I do seventy-two. I could do seventy-one but then my towel would be on the wrong end of the pool.

Apple calls lengths of the pool laps, which I like but know is another way to cheat while swimming. A lap is a round trip, two lengths. When I swim I enjoy quoting numbers that are inflated by a factor of two, so I haven’t written Apple a letter, exposing their error. I say lengths when I’m feeling forthright, like today, and laps when I’m feeling braggy. I can point to Apple as my authority, but I still feel a little disappointed in myself afterward.

A kilometer is quite a bit shorter than a mile, which is why I report bike rides in kilometers. That way a century seems within reach. It’s called a metric century to distinguish it from the hella-longer not-metric century that cyclists who have not been The Not Athletic One most of their lives bandy about.

I dare you to diagram that sentence. That was a doozy.

Similarly, speeds expressed in kilometers per hour are way more impressive than miles per hour. Kay-pee-aitch are useful that way, both for touting your bike ride achievements and your top speed ever on two-eighty, our fair freeway.

Two hundred for me, in case you were wondering. I am sure that most of you have gone faster, and I’m content with that.

All countries who still use Imperial units, that is, the United States and the two other most progressive countries, Myanmar and Liberia, know that one pound is sixteen ounces.

In the You-Kay today, a pound is one point two Euros and one point three five You-Ess dollars. But that's something else entirely. Ironically, the You-Kay abandoned the Imperial system when I was four years old. Some time ago, that was.

We have a food scale for measuring our yogurt and spoons that has two toggle buttons: gram-kilogram and milliliter-fluid ounce. Now, I love this scale. It’s one of the ten things I’d save in a fire. (The first two are Percy and my Apple iWatch.) But recently Beau was using the scale and asked me, what exactly is a fluid ounce? Doesn’t it vary with the density of the fluid?

Beau talks like that. He’s an engineer.

Doggone it, scale, now that Beau has mentioned your fluid-ounce setting, I may have to knock you off the top-ten list. Up ‘til then I’d just been ignoring it. That whole em-ell-floz button is a load of crayola. I may have to pry it out with a screwdriver and stomp on it. Or put a square of electrical tape on top of it so I don't have to look at it ever again.

I said to Beau, You’re right!

I try to say that to him as seldom as possible.

I continued, Fluid ounce is a measure of volume, not weight.

(Or mass, as we educated people like to call it, just to acknowledge those pesky locational fluctuations in the gravitational force that are always messing up our baking. If you bake in Svalbard, don't forget to multiply all 'weight' measurements by 1.0000001.)

I added, The scale is likely referring only to water. It will work pretty well for fluids whose density is similar to that of water. Like lemon juice. Or tea.

Beau was measuring oil, a lower density fluid than water if ever there were one.

There’s one other conversion factor worth mentioning, because it’s been in the news lately. To me lately means in the last ten years. My son, Max, vehemently disagrees. He lives on a different time scale.

It’s dog years. New research has shown that the factor of seven was an over-simplification.

We are shocked.

It turns out that the conversion factor from dog years to human years is not a constant at all, but nonlinear as heck and dependent upon the breed of dog.

There isn’t a enough cockapoo data yet to give me confidence in the conversion curve for Percy. I wouldn't recommend using it for any dogs other than the most popular breeds, chihuahuas, pit bulls and labradoodles. So for the time being it may be best to just enjoy your dog as-is. That’s what I’m going to do.

[Photo creds: Top photo, me. Specks of yogurt and god-knows-what-else deliberately applied by Qtip to suggest scale is well-used.

At right: Cartoon from The Far Side, by Gary Larson. Bonus points for you if you can figure out why this cartoon is here. I admit, it's an obscure connection.]