
How much is that in
Double Deckers?
It's evident that our beloved readers share our penchant for improbable and unorthodox units of measurement, because we've had a load of emails pointing us in the direction of XKCD, where the Cadbury Creme Egg has officially become the measure of how much sugar there is in a fizzy drink. Good stuff, although the idea of …
@Homer
I fess up - it was pure trollism. Medieval measurement systems in the 21st century get my blood boiling... I'm fed up with having constantly to mentally convert stuff back into 'proper', and of particular anguish to me are temperatures given in ancient Sumerian. They make my rage boils bleed.
I am sick and tired of people 30+ years younger than me (52) saying that they are too old to know about proper measurements. The last time I knew my weight in pounds+stone was about the time I did my O levels. I know exactly how many KG I weigh (and I'm not telling).
I know my height in feet and inches because a police officer told me it a couple of years back. Very impressive. She was half an inch off.
People managed to change to temperatures in C from Fahrenheit a while back. Ask anyone in the pub for the temperature that water boils at and you will find very few that say 212. Why can't we get rid of the other antiquated rubbish as easily?
Except the Telegraph - still preferring Fahrenheit, a good Scandinavian concoction.
I agree. Even I, uncomfortably near pension age, learnt metric or SSI units before going to secondary school and 'O' levels. I was shocked, when accompanying a late thirties or early forties English woman to a skiing shop in Davos to rent kit: when asked her height and weight, she could say it only in feet and inches and in stones: she claimed to be a "remedial maths teacher" in Birmingham.
That, to me, explains a lot about English educational problems. To me, she should not have even known the Imperial measures, let alone used them. What is she teaching those poor children?
To be honest, considering the English Language is a bastardisation of many different languages I find it the British thing to do is use numerous different units for things. Height and Personal Weight in Imperial, Cooking/Item Weight in Metric. Temperature In Celsius, except Ovens.. which I do not acknowledge any temperature unit, only Gas Mark. Distance and speed in Miles.
Though I don't know why you really care, because frankly I'm happy for someone to use what they want as long as they are capable of converting between those units. I think you'll find many people in the UK refer to units in the way I do.
That's the problem with kids today - they only learn how to multiply up to their ten-times tables.
I don't get the obsession with base10. When I was young I used to think that it was based on the number of fingers people had, but of course it isn't. Otherwise we'd use base 11 - a symbol for zero (no fingers) and then a symbol for each finger&thumb. It's a bit weird that we need two significant places to count all the bits on our hands.
Its even more weird for the french of course, who count to 60 like any good Sumerian and then start adding bits on like roman numerals. They seem to be the least metric of all. They remember themselves when they get to one hundred but I think its too late by then.
So why do we still have 6*60 degrees in a circle, 2x12x60 minutes in a day, 60 seconds in a minute, 7 days per week, around 30 days per month? Oh yes, that's right. It works! Inches and feet are actually quite good measurements because they are distances which are quite useful. If we can through in a bit of interesting history with it, so much better for education.
Metric is just so devoid of any soul, any sense of history or culture. Centimetres are just too small to be terribly useful. Meters are a bit large (you usually have to use fractions of them), decimal places are just ugly approximations (I'll have a third of that pi please...) and miles are just great, whereas kilometers work best as "kliks" in war films and sci-fi which never becomes reality.
Centigrade rather makes sense, seeing as "can I go outside an slide on the ice on the pavement" seems like a rather useful baseline.
Agreed --- the imperial units were devised because they were useful units, whereas metric is based on an inaccurate attempt at measuring the world's circumference, attached to one of the less useful number bases (OK, ten's a bit better than eleven, but not nearly as useful as twelve, which divides up much more conveniently).
I'm glad the French Revolutionaries failed in imposing a decimal calendar and decimal clock, although I can't help suspecting that someone in the European Commission has a long-term plan to re-introduce them, as they seem so keen on forcing powers-of-ten based measures throughout their vassal domains.
When I was a child I argued for more pocket money because the price of Mars Bars had gone up.
I may have been onto something.
I hung around for a while with a bloke on the expat circuit who worked for Mars and I can spill the beans here.
I asked about the "New Bigger Bar" that turns up occasionally. The way this works is that they gradually reduce the size of the Mars Bar over time and preserve the price. Then, when the thing gets too small, you get the "New Bigger Bar" and a stonking price hike.
Clever, huh?
Incidently, he confirmed something else. Back in the day, Mars Bars really were harder and more chewy than they are now. The old paper wrapping didn't preserve them as well as the modern plastic/foil one, so they had to be a harder mix of ingredients to provide decent shelf life without forming that white surface of sugar that you used to find on them if they'd been sitting around too long.
I pointed out that I rather preferred the old, chewy bar to the modern soft thing. That piqued his interest and he went back to raise a "Mars Bar Classic" suggestion with his peers.......I live in hope.
The US still use imperial measures, and even worse, their pint is 16 fluid ounces instead of the rest of the world's 20 fluid ounces, so a gallon of "gas" is 6.4 UK pints rather than 8 UK pints, which makes comparing the prices of fuel in the US & UK rather more complicated than most people realise
No they do not. As you yourself point out, they do not use Imperial liquid measures. Americans also can not work out how to write dates properly, knowing neither common sense nor ISO nor easy sorting in a computer programme i.e. they seem to like mm/dd/yyyy, to the immense confusion of myself and all my many current and former colleagues in Europe (including UK), Australasia and Hong Kong. They do not even have the manners to adjust to their foreign markets and, for that matter, too many of their foreign customers have not got the balls to demand the yanks sort it out. Still, they speak a germanised English with hispanic undertones, so what should we expect?
Glad to see that, at least in weights and measures, the British show themselves to be more up to date, practical and adaptable than the oh-so-modern-and-with-it USA types. Note that the Imperial measures, even down to the naming, often come from Roman (ancient Italian) and other such alien sources, for you "keep it English" types, hence abbreviations such as "lb" and "£" and, not so long ago, "d" (penny for the youngsters reading this).
Anyway, Hershey making these eggs? Ugh. So USA versions are as inedible as the rest of that firm's products, no wonder they make them smaller.
Now, on to getting rid of pints and having litres and half litres of beer, a man's size.
chocolate made from (a glass and a half of?) milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders, and powdered cocoa husks (ingredients listed in order of quantity - or at least, what may well go in to making it, depending on what's in the vats at the time).
which was supposed to be a dig at crappy english chocolate, but having eaten merkin chocolate i'd say it's a better description.
According to the food standards of the great chocolate producing centres in Quirm and Borogravia, Ankh-Morpork chocolate is formally classed as "cheese" and only just escapes being labelled as "tile grout" on grounds of colour.
makes me chuckle every time i have chocolate, which is sadly not as often as i'd like
Voicing a personal opinion on one of the food groups warrants an ad hominem attack in your mind? Nice. I'd rather have a conversation with a milk chocolate lover than someone like you.
As a side note, I should have added mine was in reference to the Creme Eggs that are sold in the USofA. Other countries mileage may vary.
>>Voicing a personal opinion on one of the food groups warrants an ad hominem attack in your mind?
No, you stated as fact "With that said, the outer shell of these things is not now, and never has been, chocolate." That marks you as ignorant as well as a snob.
And please, I know you think it's cool to throw around the phrase "ad hominem" because, as a pretentious nitwit, you want to look clever, but please learn what it means rather than parrot stuff you read on the internet.
Thanks.
Multiple names, John? For shame ...
My comment stands. So-called "Milk Chocolate" is a confection which includes chocolate as an ingredient. It is no more chocolate than bread is wheat flour, or beer is sprouted barley, or wine is grape juice, or bacon is dead pig.
I realize that they no longer teach Latin and logic at the highschool level. I suggest you rediscover the meaning of ad hominem. Your current concept of the phrase appears awry.
It's an acquired taste, but I really like the 100% stuff Hotel Chocolat do. It's a shock to the system at first bite, but the after taste is phenomenally good. Trouble is that once you've tasted that, every other chocolate seems weak and pointless by comparison.
Weirdly, I can't stand coffee at all in any concentration. Nor Creme Eggs in any size...
I wish Ms. Bee were still here to smack you down, you sexist prat ;-)
No, I'm not a "girl", I'm a male of the species. I enjoy 80%+ ... I like cocoa flavo(u)r, and I'm not fond of sugar (or hazelnuts, or other common parings, except berries and/or vanilla). It might help that I'm over 50 years old, and tastebuds change with time. I'm also fond of ultra-hoppy beer ... and broccoli.
Note that I never called <40% "crap". Rather, I clearly said it wasn't Chocolate. As I later clarified, I view so-called "Milk Chocolate" as a confection.
All the downvotes crack me up ... It's a crying shame that so many commentards can't read for comprehension. This could have been a good sub-thread.
I wish Ms Bee was still here too :'(
It wasn't really sexist, it was based on experimental data. No more sexist than saying men are taller than women, and women buy more shoes ;-)
We were all under 40, so maybe we need to larger sample. If someone would like to send us another big(ger) box....
Just back from a West Coast stateside visit. The US had several types of creme eggs: chocolate cream, caramel, and traditional. They even had Mini Eggs (Rayley's, Incline Village, Nv).
I took some UK ones over and in scientific taste tests we all agreed the Hershey's ones were pretty close to the ones sold in the UK.
But, yes, the usual Hershey's stuff is horrible.
Pint - we had plenty of beers in the mountains to accompany than chocolate eggs during our visit
I may be able to shed some light on the contents. A friend and I are constructing a grapesploder: A high-voltage capacitor bank intended for the entertaining elimination of fruit. During an earlier test at two kilovolts, 300j we found it exploded a 100w light bulb with ease - and yet the UK creme egg did nothing. After much testing we determined that the filling is a near-perfect insulator, even at two kilovolts. It barely conducted a few miliamps. This very high resistance would indicate it has a minimal water content, quite possibly in order to improve shelf life. In short, whatever that goo is, it's not water-based.
Some water but it's the high level of dissolved sugar (gluc & fruc from sucrose + invertase) that reduces the availability of the water in the filling to such an extent that it is inimicable for bacteria and mould.
Chocolate shell is virtually water free - add a drop or two of water to some melted chocolate if you want to see why.
Personally I have always found creme eggs sickenly sweet and consume about 1 every couple of years and then remember why I've avoided them for the last 24 months.
Actually it is water based, but as pure water will not conduct electricity (it is the ions in solution that provide the free electrons that conduct) and sugar dissolved in water produces no ions, sugar water in any concentration will not conduct unless there is a ion source also in the mix
It's worrying (for values of "worry" that include mild peeves) that the usually mathematically-strict XKCD should mix Old English with Metric measures, and worse, not clarify, in an article about British confection, whether the Old English units are British Imperial or American Customary Units. XKCD, hand back your maths-nerd credentials at once!
I'm sorry to say, Lester, but you are obviously something of an amateur when it comes to cream egg eating.
Some of us have been eating the 2012 batch of cream eggs since they appeared in shops, at the start of the year. And during the last 30 days or so my consumption has only increased. If there's less than 6 eggs in the fridge, then I need to go and stock up - you can never tell when you might need to accompany a cuppa tea with a cream egg, and it's a terrible thing to be caught short unexpectedly.
Cream eggs are for life, not just for Easter.....
Amateur indeed.
Costco sells the 48 pack box, which I think I purchased sometime in February. I had 3 Eggs left from the 2011 box, but the goo gets a little hard after about 9 months and they are not as enjoyable. Frighteningly, I am almost halfway through the 2012 box already.
Egghead icon of course.
In other news, Cadbury has been forced to ramp up production of its Creme Egg line after a well-known nerd comic strip triggered a worldwide rush on the product. Xkcd.com, a comic strip noted for nerd humour, recently posted a strip describing Cadbury's Creme Eggs as a measure of sugar content in drinks. A Cadbury spokeswoman described the spike in Creme Egg sales as "highly profitable" and thanked xkcd for the free advertising. She said the strip's publication, and its further reproduction in other media, may have resulted in more than $US20 million in Creme Egg sales, and noted that Cadbury shares rose by nearly 3 percent as a result of the increased revenue.
Coming up after the break: Doctors in the UK and USA are reported to be "extremely concerned" after an unexplained dramatic increase in the number of diabetics diagnosed in the last 48 hours. Stay tuned for these important messages...
Maybe it's because I live 7,000 feet above sea level (less pressure, things expand) but every egg I've ever had has leaked. I can tell you that whatever the filling is made of it creates an almost inseparable bond between the egg and the foil wrapper. While the egg is tasty, the foil definitely is not.