Other What's ruining your life right now?

that sucks
sorry to hear it.

 

Minor car accident involving me and a rugby ball sized rock, did some pretty severe damage to the car, hoping it is repairable and not written off.

 

So, I went down to change the laundry in the basement of my complex and as I'm moving the wet clothes from the washer to the dryer a piece of dog poop falls out of one of my shirts.

I call my wife and she comes down thinking I'm crazy. I threw the piece of poop in the garbage before she got down there but found a few articles of her clothes have little smears on them. She has no sense of smell (the smears have a faint dog poop odor) and starts claiming I'm crazy. She says it's probably baby food from our daughter. I know it's poop and she's pissing me off because she's getting mad at me for dragging her down to the basement for nothing (except I'm not).

She just wants to put all the clothes in the dryer, but is capitulating with me and putting them back in the washer begrudgingly. I tell her not to do it in large handfuls because I want to make sure there's no more poop, and I tell her to put them in a different washing machine. She still thinks I'm crazy. I'm getting more pissed off, but she's going along with my insanity to keep me from getting really pissed.

Finally, in the last handful of clothes another clot of poop falls onto the top of the dryer I was moving all the clothes into. I hand it to her and she's disgusted and finally agrees that I'm not insane and that it's poop.

So we rewash the clothes, but when we go back down to move the clothes to the dryer someone else has taken the only working dryer (out of 4). It's been two hours but this other person keeps rotating their stuff in.

Our guess is some a***ole washed their dog's poop covered blankets without cleaning the poop off first. The poop hid in the bottom of the washing machine and came out with our clothes. There aren't many other options that make sense.

I'm not much of an animal person and this is the reason why. I don't want to deal with animal poop. I don't want to walk a dog, watch it take a dump in someone else's yard and then touch it through a plastic bag. Nothing seems more disgusting to me that millions of people volunteer for. It's not that I hate you if you have a dog or cat, but I start to hate you a little bit when the consequences for your decisions start ruining my day. I barely tolerate the fact that the one working dryer's lint collector is often full of animal hair. I put up with it because I have no other options. But this dog poop thing is ridiculous. It's a waste of my time and money.

 

It's just digested food, bro. Don't hate on poop. Love the poop... and the poop will love you.

 

Have you ever tried to read an American Cookbook? Cups? What cups are those? And why is different food measured in different cuppage?

Silly Americans and their imperial measurements. They're like one of three countries in the world that refuses to adopt the metric system. Surely measuring food in ml and grams is more efficient.

Please american members, enlighten me. Why is using a 'cup' of sugar any more efficient than just measuring it in grams?

 

The UK - still using 'spoons' (tea, desert and table) for cooking amounts, miles for distance and gallons for fuel efficiency (yet fuel is sold in litres?!)...

 

Beer is sold pints, fuel in litres, distances/road signs are are in miles but you buy lengths of stuff by the metre.

And big things are explained/measured in relation to a double-decker bus...

 

Isn't the UK great

 

Dont even bother with ml. Just use grams for everything. You can put your bowl on a digital scale and add ingredients. 100ml of milk? 100 grams of milk.

 

Don't forget American Gallons are smaller than British gallons as well lol stupid americans

 

We have one of the best ones at work. Our standard earth rod is 5/8" diameter by 1.2m long...

 

Actually most British Cookbooks say teaspoon (tsp) but use the metric 5ml as well.

Same goes for tablespoon at 15ml.

All of the road signs also measure in Kilometers as well as miles.

 

Their pints are smaller too... yanks, can't do anything properly...

 

Don't forget you still use stone when referring to your weight (14 lbs).

I'm all for measuring weight when cooking (chance for error is essentially 0), but most recipes in the US still use cups. Anything that uses weight is in oz, but is only used when easy to pre-measure (like breaking off 1oz pieces of baking chocolate.

But don't confuse this with fluid oz, which is another measurement of volume.

And "cups" means customary cups, not legal cups, but nobody really knows the difference anyway.

But the truth is I actually like the weird units in the US. I'm sure it's 90%+ that I grew up with them, but conceptually I like the idea that the units change to fit the activity. Horse races are in furlongs. Foot races are in yards or miles. I measure my height in feet and inches.

The units seem arbitrary and they're a pain to convert . . . unless you use them everyday, but they're based on human proportions and what humans can relate to for whatever activity they're doing.

Metric is beautifully arbitrary. All units can convert easily to other units. It's base 10 for easy math. But it's still arbitrary. One metre is 1/10 millionth the meridian passing through Paris between the north pole and equator. Why Paris? Arbitrary. Why not the equator? Arbitrary. In an attempt to better define the meter for all time the definition is now "The distance traveled by light in vacuum in
1/299,792,458th of a second." That seems like a silly number to choose, except that we're trying to nail down our first definition to something we can replicate later.

But I can do the same for feet. One foot is the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/983,571,087.90472 of a second.

It's a great way to describe a foot or meter to an alien in another galaxy, or to some anthropologists 10,000 years from now so they can make a replica, but both definitions are impossible to relate to and completely useless to daily life.

So I understand why you think things you are unfamiliar with are dumb, and why you think your arbitrary system with its exceptions (that seem obvious to you) is better. But to an outsider I'm sure both systems seem really flawed by this point.

 

Hey hey hey! That post is dangerously interesting and informative. Remember that this is the demote thread.

 

But they did win the war, well they think they did lol as I said stupid yanks

 

Its not as arbitrary as you make it out to be. It has its origins in trying to be a universal system and was based around water. A meter cubed of water has a mass of one ton. Or a litre weighs a kilo. A litre also making up 10 cubic cm.

However water isnt constant enough to act as a reference point for the purposes metrology. The reference needed to be refined further hence the distance between the north pole and paris. But the earth isn't that constant either. So we now use the universal constant of light. Each refinement signifies human technological advancement.

The ultimate goal for reference measurements is to remove any dependence on objects which change over time and use naturally occurring constants such as radiation patterns of cesium or light in a vacuum.

We are currently stuck with a lump of crap for the kilogram reference but that may change soon.

But for all the unusual multipliers and divisors of natural constants, for every day use, 10 cubic cm of water is close enough to a kilogram which is also a litre.

The kilogram horror of horrors is also the reference used for determining the weight of an American pound.

The imperial system isn't dumb because it's unfamiliar. It's dumb because it's this:

 

I've always rather liked the physics based definition of a "second":

"The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom."

I have no idea what that means but it sounds amazing.

 

Thank you for clarifying that.

 

GAH! I've been using 9 192 631 771!