Can we all please standardise our units?

[Fat Tone]

There are frequently threads on here discussing fuel consumption. mpg means one thing to Americans and another to Brits. It is difficult to make comparisons with ones own experience, and sometimes even to be sure apples are indeed being compared to apples.

It would help greatly if whenever mpg is quoted, the gallon is also defined.

Perhaps even better if we all move over to l/100km?

Thoughts? Agreement?

T.

[Nowhere]

Obviously ( ) I'm voting for l/100km. It's an international standard, and MURC is a international forum. And many of MURCers living in two/three places where gallons are still used are of engineer/etc. flavour, so SI isn't that alien...

[Brian Ellis]

All for metric throughout and especially for l/100 km (note the space between the 100 and the km!!!)

[Jessterw]

In addition, English words shall be typed-out in their 'proper' form hence forth. That means adding those pesky U's back into our (Americans) 'or' words in many cases.

Football/soccer/ruby shall be referred to by their official 'rules' names; association football, Australian rules football, rugby football, and so on.





Yes, I jest

[Brian Ellis]

In addition, English words shall be typed-out in their 'proper' form hence forth. That means adding those pesky U's back into our (Americans) 'or' words in many cases.

Agreed: that way the spelling will match the pronunciation!

[Elie]

yes I agree, metric all the way!

Now for spelling sake, here in Canada type..."Tire" not "Tyre" or "colour" not "color"

So what should it be?

[Jammrock]

Nothing will be standardized because the old farts in congress won't convert to metric and the retards who standardize the school ciriculum in the US won't change and force congress's hand.

[Byock]

I remember as a kid in Elemetary school being told to pay attention to Metric because when I was in High School, it would be the standard.

[Fluff]

I agree. Just a question in horse racing does everyone still use furlongs as a description of length? I have no idea how long that is...

I vote for metric. Especially with engineering standards. Drop ANSI go ISO. In the future. It will save lots of money and duplicate parts and having to buy two sets of spanners.

Why are computer screens still in inches, and hard drives?

[Claymonkey]

You know if I thought in Metric I'd happily write that way. I'd honestly prefer a metric standard here but I don't know if it will ever happen. When I comment in such threads I'm honestly not thinking about 'standards' and just pour out the details in my head anyway. Which happen to be gallons and miles in a US system. My apologies for pissing you guys off but it's how we think over here. I'll TRY and mentally convert but i make no promises

[Fluff]

I think of imperial in terms of people. Height / Weight etc. It would feel odd for me to describe a person as being 180 cm.

[Nowhere]

Fluff, with monitors and disks it comes down mostly to type/size, not exact size...my 17 inch monitor doesn't have 17 inch vieveable and (as far as I remember from some article on wiki...) 3,5 and 5,25 inch bays in computers actually DON'T have that size, they're just called the closest imperial value to some metric value which is used in specs...

PS. And I OTOH can't even imagine how long the imperial units of lenght/high are...everything is perfectly fine with 180 cm (commonly said "meter eighty" over here (directly translating from the way it is spoken))

edit: apparently it's even more bizzare/complicated:

Floppy disk sizes are almost universally referred to in imperial measurements, even in countries where metric is the standard, and even when the size is in fact defined in metric (for instance the 3½-inch floppy which is actually 9 cm).

3.5" bays, like their larger counterparts, are named for diskette dimensions; their actual dimensions are 4" wide by 1" high.

So...while the "small" drive bay is in fact 4" wide, it is called after 3,5" floppies which were really 9 cm...a mess.

Also some weird stuff with 5,25" bays:

Half-height or 5.25" drive bays are approximately 1.75" high by 5.75" wide

After meeting in a bar in Boston, Adkisson asked Wang what size he thought the disks should be, and Wang pointed to a napkin and said "about that size". Adkisson took the napkin back to California, found it to be 5¼-inches (13 cm) wide

Again named after floppy size...but I'm not sure which is "true" (Google calculator tells me that 5,24" isn't 13 cm...and the word "approximately" also hints something )

[VJ]

I was wondering when someone would quote grandpa Simson: "My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it".


Oh, in general aviation, fuel consumption is expressed in kilgrams per hour...


Jörg

[Fat Tone]

Oh, in general aviation, fuel consumption is expressed in kilgrams per hour...
Jörg

I think we can forgive that. Gallons are a unit of volume, which is temperature dependant. Kilograms is an indication of mass (assuming gravity is constant in your universe). Helicopters still use loads of fuel when hovering and not covering any distance.

[Brian Ellis]

What gets my goat is when systems are mixed willy-nilly. One current unit in the industry I used to work for was µg/in². Preparing for an exhibition in the UK, I needed another panel to back the stand, so I ambled along to the joiner's shop and asked the bloke there what size the white hardboard panels were, to be told 6 feet x 1 metre!