unit juggler

ptechnology.com:

google also does all kind of conversions

I've been using this one for years:

Unix-like systems had a command-line utility 'units' that did this very nicely at least since 1979.

You have: furlong You want: nanometer * 2.01168e+11 / 4.9709695e-12

Jeroen Belleman

Yes, and I would think that the Google conversions keep up with any changes to standards or conversion references.

Sometimes there may be contexts of weights or measures you have to be familiar with before blindly accapting the onversion results. For instance, medication dosages.

Yep, and it's a good reason to keep a terminal window open on MacOS. The only annoyance is that it has the units descriptor file off somewhere where it's hard to find...

There's a convert feature in the MacOS calculator, but it's a lot of clicking, two-hand touchtypists prefer the shell command.

Easier to use the right units from the start :-)

I can convert from miles per gallon to furlongs per pint in my head!

Maybe we should all convert to counting in octal. ;-)

Jeroen Belleman

Hexadecimal is more popular these days.

And there are 3.78 litres in a gallon. Aren't there?

On a sunny day (Mon, 1 Feb 2021 10:38:24 +0000) it happened Clive Arthur wrote in :

Dunno what others are using, but often the program 'units' in Linux works # units Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2018-10-20

You have: furlongs per fortnight You want: m/s * 0.00016630952 / 6012.8848

You have: 22 gallons You want: liters * 83.279059 / 0.012007821

You have: dollars You want: euros * 0.8719708 / 1.1468274

You have: ohms You want: amperes conformability error

apt-get install units (on a raspberry pi)

I'll have to check, give me a few ohm-farads...

No, you must be thinking of US /liters/ which are about 20% bigger than litres.

You can add your own conversions to those preloaded.

RL

Here is a converter for some more unusual units:

Neither of these include such wonderful units as the Banana equivalent dose, the micromort and the Garn.

That's a hoot! Thanks!

I rather like nanocenturies; there are pi seconds in a nanocentury, to a reasonable approximation.

The micromort is genuinely useful in everyday life, partly because there is no equivalent :)

The banana equivalent dose is as useful as an Olympic sized swimming pool. or double-decker bus.

Actually, I think the banana equivalent dose is a lot more useful than that. It gives people an idea of how silly radiation scares can be:

So when someone tells you about the dangers of radiation from CRT monitors (remember them?), you can say that a year's worth of screen time gives you the same radiation as eating ten bananas. The total dose of radiation at Fukushima Town Hall was about 1000 BEDs. When someone gets their knickers in a twist about a radiation leak from a nuclear power station, ask them how many bananas it was. Usually you find it's not nearly as bad as when it is expressed in scary technical units like sieverts.

See also and

The standard for length and area here is the FF, football field. American football of course.

Base 12 has been proposed, so dozen is a basic increment.

DEC's computers (PDP8/9/11 etc) were programmed in octal. The PDP-11 instruction set was basically 3-bit fields. I can still assemble some instructions in my head.