PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!
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Actually, you're summary has me agreeing with @Rhywden more.
The statement you made is wrong.
I work in the pipeline business, and they find it pretty important to measure mass and not volume. They don't want to miscalculate how much they shipped because the volume changed (maybe the delivery point of the pipeline is lower in altitude). They also don't want to short their customers, or short themselves.
But you say,
That's stupid because oil companies sell by the barrel, which is volume which is
doesn't depend on stuff that the number you actually measure does depend on
Alcohol and water have different densities at different temperatures and pressures. Which is why you can throw a mix in the freezer and end up with a slushie, and not a brick.
Measuring % by weight makes sense, because gravity is uniformly applied to both water and alcohol.
Therefore the % alcohol isn't dependent on the temperature or elevation if you base it on weight.
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@xaade said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
I work in the pipeline business, and they find it pretty important to measure mass and not volume. They don't want to miscalculate how much they shipped because the volume changed (maybe the delivery point of the pipeline is lower in altitude). They also don't want to short their customers, or short themselves.
That's an example of a situation where there's a good reason to use weight instead of volume: you're measuring a large amount of it and the difference would be significant. That doesn't apply to alcohol content in beverages; as I already said, the measurement isn't accurate enough to begin with for it to make a significant difference.
@xaade said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Alcohol and water have different densities at different temperatures and pressures. Which is why you can throw a mix in the freezer and end up with a slushie, and not a brick.
Measuring % by weight makes sense, because gravity is uniformly applied to both water and alcohol.
Therefore the % alcohol isn't dependent on the temperature or elevation if you base it on weight.All of that is true, but the overall difference is going to be negligible and will be dwarfed by typical variation in the actual production.
Anyway, here's a good reason to use ABV instead of ABW: The density of water at 20°C is 0.998 g/cm3. The density of ethanol at 20°C is 0.789 g/cm3. If you make a mixture of equal parts ethanol and water (aside: to you, does that mean equal volumes, or equal masses? To me, it means equal volumes), it'll be much closer to 50% ABV than it will be to 50% ABW.
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@anotherusername Why are you talking about this boring shit? Who cares?
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@blakeyrat it's more interesting than a topic about porn with no pictures.
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He's complaining about someone using another method of measuring % alcohol, by arguing that it makes no difference which method is used.
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@xaade Do you people lack the part of your brain that says, "wait, nobody cares about this boring shit, I better not post it."
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@xaade maybe some usamerican can explain the whole deal between your famous "dry law" and the drinking wine during the sacristy thing. You weren't allow to drink alcohol except during religious offerings?
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@Eldelshell said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
@xaade maybe some usamerican can explain the whole deal between your famous "dry law" and the drinking wine during the sacristy thing.
...?
Are you talking about prohibition during the 1920s?
And the answer is: churches don't use real wine, and haven't for ages, they use grape juice.
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@xaade I'm actually kind of curious: when someone starts with "mix equal parts of...", do you assume they probably mean equal volumes or equal masses?
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@blakeyrat said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
And the answer is: churches don't use real wine, and haven't for ages, they use grape juice.
Most protestant churches maybe, but catholic churches use wine. In fact, they have to use wine. Nothing else is acceptable; their magical "literal body and blood of Jesus Christ" transformation won't work with anything else.
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@blakeyrat said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
And the answer is: churches don't use real wine, and haven't for ages, they use grape juice.
"Drink of this juice, for it is my blood"
- Jesus "Welch's" Christ
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@blakeyrat said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Are you talking about prohibition during the 1920s?
Yep, got lost in translation.
And the answer is: churches don't use real wine, and haven't for ages, they use grape juice.
OK, maybe around there or it's a protestant thing, but around here they use real 15% alcohol wine of the best quality...
The Wikipedia agrees with you:
These denominations include Pentecostals, Baptists, Methodists, some Churches of Christ, and other Evangelical groups.
Lame! Go Catholics!
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
but catholic churches use wine.
They also worship a dude in a huge hat. Who cares what they do.
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@blakeyrat said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Who cares what they do.
Caring about what all the other people were doing was the whole point of the prohibition.
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@Eldelshell said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
@xaade maybe some usamerican can explain the whole deal between your famous "dry law" and the drinking wine during the sacristy thing. You weren't allow to drink alcohol except during religious offerings?
American culture is founded in Puritan beliefs. Much of our religious craziness can be traced back to them. They weren't completely against alcohol, hence them being fine with wine in church, but the were against drunkenness. Their specific rule was that life should be lived for the glory of god, not yourselves.
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@blakeyrat said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
@xaade Do you people lack the part of your brain that says, "wait, nobody cares about this boring shit, I better not post it."
You post videos where you complain about how bored you are playing an indie game.
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@Jaime the ironic part is that catholic priests had (have?) a rep for being drunkards.
Apparently they have this rule that, once the bottle of wine has been transformed into the literal blood of Christ, you can't just dump what's left of it down the drain. So any leftover wine has to be consumed, and the priests are more than happy to oblige. And strangely enough, the wine-turned-blood retains a wine-like intoxicating quality.
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
@Jaime the ironic part is that catholic priests had a rep for being drunkards.
Not ironic, that's exactly the type of behavior that caused the original group of people to form the Puritan movement. Some people left and became protestants, those who hated these behaviors and tried to reform from within were known as Puritans.
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@Jaime The ironic part is that the exact type of alcohol misuse that was happening in the churches was what the prohibitionists objected to, and prohibition gave churches a free pass to continue using it.
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@anotherusername But they were different groups of people. The ones that pushed for prohibition would not have tolerated drunkenness in their church and the ones who got drunk would never have pushed for prohibition.
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
I'm actually kind of curious: when someone starts with "mix equal parts of...", do you assume they probably mean equal volumes or equal masses?
Depends on whether it's a science experiment, or a household chore. With liquor, it depends on the state.
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@blakeyrat said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Do you people lack the part of your brain that says, "wait, nobody cares about this boring shit, I better not post it."
Yes. That's why we're here.
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@Eldelshell said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
@xaade maybe some usamerican can explain the whole deal between your famous "dry law" and the drinking wine during the sacristy thing. You weren't allow to drink alcohol except during religious offerings?
I worked in the liquor section of Walmart. I also spent some years as Catholic.
Some forms of dry-law says you're not allowed to manufacture or buy on Sunday. This doesn't mean you can't consume on Sunday. Leading to the "famous" image of the town drunk going to the gas station on Saturday to load up on beer. It also depends on the state. Louisiana says no hard liquor sales, which isn't beer.
Since the context here is wine, I'll repeat that you are allowed to consume on Sunday. Also, some Catholic churches offer Saturday mass, circumventing that problem.
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@Jaime said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
The ones that pushed for prohibition would not have tolerated drunkenness in their church
Only in their church? Like they wouldn't have tolerated it in their house, or their store, or their restaurant?
The whole point of the prohibition laws was to control what happened in other people's houses, or stores, or restaurants, or (I'd presume also) churches.
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@xaade said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Depends on whether it's a science experiment, or a household chore.
Well, if it's a science experiment I'd hope that they'd be specific enough to say "equal volumes" or "equal weights" instead of just "equal parts".
But for the purposes of this discussion, assume you're making something that you intend for human consumption. Like... say... salad dressing. Does "equal parts" mean equal volumes or equal weights? Or is "equal parts" just a phrase that you'd never find in a process such as that?
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
But for the purposes of this discussion, assume you're making something that you intend for human consumption. Like... say... salad dressing. Does "equal parts" mean equal volumes or equal weights? Or is "equal parts" just a phrase that you'd never find in a process such as that?
I don't remember if cooking/baking instructions ever use "equal parts", but in mixing alcoholic drinks, it always refers to equal volumes.
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@Dragnslcr said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
in mixing alcoholic drinks, it always refers to equal volumes
Well, there you go.
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I know what you're going for, but it's intellectually dishonest.
If you are concerned with how much liquor is in a drink, weight is more accurate.
If you are concerned with mixing things for a recipe, then you don't care about accuracy, but precision. You care about making sure the mix is the same under similar circumstances.
Under most circumstances, the difference is trivial.
However, we're not arguing which is more common, but rather if measuring by weight is VALID. And it IS.
Your argument amounts to.
"See, hardly anyone does it that way, so it must be invalid."
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Well, if it's a science experiment I'd hope that they'd be specific enough to say "equal volumes" or "equal weights" instead of just "equal parts".
Usually, in chemistry, where mixing is a common, they measure by moles, which is related to number of molecules, which is related to mass, which is related to weight.
Rarely have I mixed anything by volume in a lab where precision or accuracy was a concern.
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Only in their church? Like they wouldn't have tolerated it in their house, or their store, or their restaurant?
The whole point of the prohibition laws was to control what happened in other people's houses, or stores, or restaurants, or (I'd presume also) churches.Their.... country?
More seriously, or less seriously... YMMV.
This is why you don't push for socialism.
No one should control what happens in other people's bank accounts.
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@xaade said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
@anotherusername
If you are concerned with mixing things for a recipe, then you don't care about accuracy, but precision. You care about making sure the mix is the same under similar circumstances.Good bakers measure most ingredients by weight. Many baking components can get compacted or fluffed to the point of ruining the product. It's much easier to reproduce "100 grams of sugar" than "1/4 cup of sugar". Doing it by weight also allows you to put the bowl on a scale and just keep adding stuff and zeroing the display after each ingredient.
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@xaade said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
If you are concerned with how much liquor is in a drink, weight is more accurate.
A simple conversion from specific gravity to approximate ABV or ABW can neither create nor destroy accuracy.
@xaade said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Your argument amounts to.
"See, hardly anyone does it that way, so it must be invalid."No, my argument amounts to "see, everyone's been doing it the easy way, and this other way provides literally no additional benefit for the extra difficulty".
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@Jaime right, that's true for dry ingredients; but liquids don't change density enough to make any significant difference.
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
@Rhywden I'm not confusing anything. I know the difference perfectly well. The fact that you think I'm confusing them just indicates that you haven't grasped any part of my argument whatsoever.
Look, let's review.
who the fuck uses alcohol by weight?
it's a perfectly cromulent unit because it's not dependent on pressure or temperature
it's not supposed to be, but the number you actually measure will be, so that's not a good reason
you're confusing the method of measurement with the units
watI don't do this often, but holy crap you are dumb.
ABW doesn't depend on temperature or pressure. If you measure the specific gravity, you can find ABW if you know the temperature and pressure where the specific gravity was measured. You have to correct your local measurement based on your local environment to get the invariant value. Then if someone takes my beer to the moon where the pressure is lower and it's warm in the moon-base, the alcohol will expand a bunch and it'll be a much higher ABV, but exactly the same ABW. If a moon man measures my moon man and corrects his measurement of the specific gravity for his local environment he'll get the same ABW figure. Because it doesn't depend on temperature or pressure.
If you measure ABV in Alaska on top of a mountain, then ship your vodka to Kansas, and you label it with ABV, poor Captain Kansas has to know the temperature and pressure on top of your Alaskan mountain. He's using it for tiki torches and under a certain ABV it won't burn, and above a certain ABV it'll explode. (idk, example. roll with me here). He reads the ABV on your vodka, and that helps him not at all unless he knows the temperature and pressure when the ABV was measured. If you measure ABV, your measurement is not precise.
People do it that way anyway, but we also put lead paint in our houses until the 70s, so people do dumb stuff all the time.
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@anotherusername It's still way more convenient to measure 120 grams of butter than it is to measure 1/4 cup of butter. If adding to a mix, just sit the bowl on the scale, zero, add butter until readout says 120.
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@Jaime Ooh, ooh! Walnuts. How much is half a cup of whole walnuts if you only have chopped? Gotta be less than half a cup, right? What's the packing efficiency of a walnut?
Quick get a spatial mathematician! This is a good way of measuring things! Volume 5eva!
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@AyGeePlus Is the taste contributed by those walnuts proportional to the volume of the walnut/air mixture, or to the weight of walnuts? I'd say doing it by weight would be more accurate.
The only time weight screws you up is solids that absorb water without changing volume. However, most of the time, getting those things wet ruins them.
I should drop this topic before you guy realize I'm Nathan Myhrvold's evil twin.
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@AyGeePlus said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
ABW doesn't depend on temperature or pressure. If you measure the specific gravity, you can find ABW if you know the temperature and pressure
YES, BUT NOBODY DOES THAT. They just use a simple conversion factor that works at one temperature and one pressure. So in practice, it's highly likely that any number that you see that's marked as ABW does depend on temperature and pressure.
@AyGeePlus said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
If you measure ABV in Alaska on top of a mountain, then ship your vodka to Kansas, and you label it with ABV, poor Captain Kansas has to know the temperature and pressure on top of your Alaskan mountain. He's using it for tiki torches and under a certain ABV it won't burn, and above a certain ABV it'll explode. (idk, example. roll with me here). He reads the ABV on your vodka, and that helps him not at all unless he knows the temperature and pressure when the ABV was measured.
How much actual difference will it make, really? Give me the hard facts; I'd really like to know.
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@anotherusername Then people are labeling their shit wrong, which is not a surprise. It's also not a reason not to measure ABW. Those people have decided they don't want to be that accurate about ABW, which is their prerogative. Maybe their hygrometer sucks. Who knows. It doesn't matter to them.
Given that a) we have to measure alcohol content b) sometimes(not often, but sometimes) the extra precision does matter, why the hell would we use ABV for anything? It offers no advantages, only disadvantages.
(Of course this doesn't make a practical difference, but when the extra precision is needed ABV is useless. I'm not saying ABW is a lot better, but I am saying that it is better. )
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@AyGeePlus said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Then people are labeling their shit wrong
Not if the total difference is less than a reasonable +/-% expectation of its accuracy.
@AyGeePlus said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
why the hell would we use ABV for anything? It offers no advantages, only disadvantages
"No advantages"? Ease in measuring is a big advantage. There's a reason why cocktail recipes are all "4 parts this, 3 parts that...".
Also... it makes it much easier to figure the alcohol content of mixtures. The ABV of a half-and-half mixture (by volume!) is almost exactly halfway between the two components' respective ABV values. Any other volumetric recipe can similarly have its ABV calculated as a weighted average of its components. That doesn't work for ABW because the densities of water and ethanol are different; you'd have to switch over to mass and weigh everything to figure out what the ABW of your mixture was.
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I get why cocktail recipes are that way, but why should we label booze that way? You want an indication of strength.
We should use ABV for the people for which just pretending all liquids weigh 1 gram per cc is too inaccurate, and actually using a scale is too much work. For places where accuracy less than 10% is fine (including my mouth) it doesn't much matter, and for people where accuracy is actually important they're doing math and measuring shit anyway, so measuring real shit isn't a huge burden.
I mean, a half-and-half mixture by weight is precisely halfway between the two liquid's ABW. If precision matters, use a scale. Volume is easy to measure loosely and hard to measure precisely. Lookin' at you meniscus + surface tension.
"ABV measures are more convenient if everything is already in ABV and I have a volumetric recipe". I mean, yes?
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Ease in measuring is a big advantage.
But who is doing the measuring that matters in the case of this particular law?
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@AyGeePlus said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
We should use ABV for the people for which just pretending all liquids weigh 1 gram per cc is too inaccurate, and actually using a scale is too much work
Ethanol weighs a bit less than 0.8 grams per cm3. A 20% difference is not exactly trivial.
@AyGeePlus said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
Volume is easy to measure loosely and hard to measure precisely. Lookin' at you meniscus + surface tension.
That's about as "hard" as remembering to tare the scale correctly so you're not measuring the weight of your container. OMG so hard!
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You take your vodka really really strong, I see. At typical concentrations it's more like a 5% difference, or a little less.
@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
That's about as "hard" as remembering to tare the scale correctly so you're not measuring the weight of your container. OMG so hard!
And there's droplets on the container left over when you pour out, and the meniscus is a function of the thing you're measuring in, its diameter, and so on. After you've wet the sides of the container the meniscus will be different and your second measuring will be slightly different. Weight is weight, period.
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@anotherusername So, let me recap: You were complaining that it's stupid to measure alcohol content by weight and then proceed to argue that ABV and ABW are amounting to the same thing.
If there's no marked difference (your words) what exactly is your major malfunction?
I don't know about you but in my experiments I actually like mass fractions rather more than volume fractions - they're easier to use. That's also why quite a number of acids and bases use mass fractions.
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@anotherusername said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
@xaade I'm actually kind of curious: when someone starts with "mix equal parts of...", do you assume they probably mean equal volumes or equal masses?
"A pint's a pound the world around, now fuck you make me cupcakes"
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You keep comparing cocktails like they matter to a brewery.
It's so much easier to mix by weight the larger your operation.
You don't even have to look in the container.
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@Lorne-Kates Yeah, they just make their pint glasses a different size in the north.
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@Jaime said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
It's still way more convenient to measure 120 grams of butter than it is to measure 1/4 cup of butter
Not in the US. A stick of butter is a half a cup, or a quarter cup if you buy the new short sticks. They have marking lines for various portion-of-cup or tablespoon amounts, so you can just cut a stick down to size for whatever you need.
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@Jaime said in PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS in UTAH!:
It's still way more convenient to measure 120 grams of butter than it is to measure 1/4 cup of butter.
But the 1/4 cup will literally be printed on the wrapper so you can just cut at the line.
