Small mercies

by Christian Rudolph

18 May 2026 Tags: humorous stories critique academic life metric system

In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
Whereas in the American system, the answer to “How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?” is “Go fuck yourself,” because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.

Josh Bazell, Wild Thing

Surrealism of imperial measurements
© RudolphLAB, 2026

Every year, without fail, Final Year Project students arrive in the lab and struggle with preparing media, buffers and solutions – particularly anything involving molarity. It is a rite of passage. How fortunate they are that science uses the metric system. The quote above illustrates what the alternative looks like.

Alessandro Rossini has taken the point further, a summary which I greatly enjoyed.

Update 26/05/2026:
Saturday Night Live had a humorous sketch about the problem as well a while ago, which I enjoyed as well.