Tell me how to cook real Goulash!

Subject: RE: Tell me how to cook real Goulash!
From: GUEST,Joerg
Date: 30 Aug 00 - 10:00 PM

It's really very interesting to me - what you are talking about here is not the metric system itself but its convention of taking one unit and then modifying it by that T,G,M,k,h,d,c,m,u(micro),n,p,f,a stuff, which only means shifting of a decimal point and doesn't seem very sophisticated.

The same could have been done with - referring to the meter - yards. But there aren't milliyards or kiloyards or nanofeet or megainches - there are miles (=??.????? yards - don't know by heart, sorry) and feet (=.????? yards - still don't know, still not very sorry) and inches (=.0????? yards = .????? feet - it's now becoming as difficult to be sorry as it is to know all that by heart).

That was done with the intent to simplify things that only seem to be complicated but aren't. That's clever, not stupid. It is stupid to simplify things that are indeed complicated and things like these exist, yes, they do, but that doesn't apply for something as simple as telling some physical quantity as length - THAT'S(!) EASY(!). And I promise to at least try to support every effort of making easy things still easier - i.e. as easy as they are.

Of course - if there's a need to print "1l, 1000ml" on a bottle, I'm asking myself what the whole effort (=work) was good for. If the people are unable to understand how many millilitres a litre is - why abolish our good old german 'klafters'? But how many klafters per dozenseconds is one mph, bert? Still too simple for you?

The whole work was done to allow us to talk about beef, onions, bread, cream (?), Spaetzle (??) and whatever when we are talking about goulash - without having to compute the difference between an ounce and a deka. Let's be thankful that this work has already been done and talk about goulash (those who did that work maybe thought of bouillabaisse when they did it but they did it for things like these, believe me).

Good appetite.

Joerg