Today’s post comes from occasional commentor, Phil. Phil tends to leave about eight comments all at once, much like the deranged stream of consciousness you would expect of a man only allowed access to the Internet once a week.  I am not suggesting he is in an institution of some kind of course, but this time he emailed me rather than leaving a five hundred word entry in the comment of an old post. It made me smile, and I agree with him, so I am sharing it with you all. Take it away Phil…

Being at a loose end I thought I’d make a baked potato using the oven for a change. Wondering how to do it, and being appallingly lazy, I looked on ‘tinternet and found “How to bake a potato”, subtitled “How to bake a potato, step by step, with pictures”.  You can see the website here.

Take a look and you’ll see it really is a marvellous little website.

Encouragingly, it said oven-baked potatoes are more nutritious and you get crispy skin. The pictures of the result looked delicious. I was going to make one big baked potato but it said use several smaller ones because then you get more yummy skin. Excellent. So I did as it said, and everything was going swimmingly, until it said “preheat the oven to
350 degrees F.”

I looked at my oven. There was no F. It went up to 250 degrees C. What
is 350 degrees Fahrenheit in Centigrade?

I thought, “I’m not going to give in to technology.” I looked in my diary for the conversion factor, but it wasn’t there. It had conversions for length, volume, velocity, etc., but not temperature.

With a sense of shame I returned to the computer for the conversion. First I found a page that said “subtract 40, multiply by 5, divide by 9″. I tried to do that, but wasn’t sure of the result, so I looked yet again and found some Javascript page that performed the calculation.

How much electricity did the great whirling machine of the Internet use because I didn’t bother to look in a cooking book? More than my oven did? Why on earth are Americans still using this baffling and illogical Fahrenheit scale? I’d like to convert every mention of degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius and see how they get on.