SPetty wrote:Today I learned that a quarter pound stick of butter (4 ounces) is a half cup (8 ounces) when measuring by volume. What's kind of boggling about it is that you consider butter to be a fairly dense food (solids are more densely packed than liquids, right?), yet it weighs less than an equal amount of water?
Indeed, butter floats which means it is lighter than water, but still the numbers do not seem to match.tollbaby wrote:fat is lighter than water... that's why it floats
One quater pound (453.6/4) = 113.4 grams of butter of density .911 is 124.5 mLs.
A fluid ounce is 29.57 mLs (so a fluid ounce of water weighs more than one ounce=28.35 g) so the volume of a quater pound of butter should be only 4.2 fluid ounces, more than 4 certainly, but still far from 8.
Although there is such things as a "dry quart" and a "dry pint" there is no "dry ounce".
But since a dry pint is 550.6 mL, the volume of one quater pound is 0.226 "dry pint" thus less than a quater "dry pint", while 4.2 fluid ounces are more than the quater of a (fluid) pint of 16 fl oz.
Do not always assume solids are less packed than liquids. Most usual metals (iron, copper, zinc, to say nothing of aluminum, of course) float on mercury. Gold, on the other hand, would sink... until it is attacked by the mercury to form amalgam.
) you'll see the humor in it too! 
