Yesterday I launched a website called The Ultimate Unit Converter. It's a unit conversion tool that anyone can contribute to (a bit like wikipedia). This came about because I had previously made SensibleUnits.com and didn't have time to implement all the great suggestions people would send me.

Many years ago I used to post on the old BA forum (although I was mostly a heavy lurker), and was always impressed by the intelligence and knowledge of posters there. Hopefully I'm now right in thinking that some of you might be interested in contributing to this project. It would be fantastic if you could add any scientific units that are missing (any non-length units, for a start!), and also submit any real objects that you think might make useful comparisons. Cheers!

P.S. My sincere apologies if this counts as spamming or such.

Looks interesting though a bit less useful than Google's calculator function.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Google's calculator is great if you know exactly which units you want to convert between and you don't mind typing out the whole thing. If you want to convert scientific units to real objects or you want any kind of autosuggestion or you don't know exactly what you want your output to be then it's no use. This is not intended to replace what Google does.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Could I convert, say, the SI unit "gram" to an actual gram of something? If so, do I get to pick what the something is?

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I think he means that you could convert a 15 kilometer wide meteor to an amount of school busses or State of Texases.

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Oooo is there a 'sticks of dynamite' converter? Everything on History channel and most shows on Discovery convert things to 'sticks of dynamite'.

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Online Conversion has been doing an absolutely fantastic job for many years.

At what velocity? And if it's the State of Texas, I don't they'll be moving much faster than 700 mph...

I'd think sticks of dynamite is more intuitive for the average person than kilotons of TNT...

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But there's no "football field" converter. Most lengths on History channel and on Discovery are converted to 'football fields.'

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Wow, I never knew that 1 light-year is the equivalent of 1.9 x 10^14 Olympic-size swimming pools put end-to-end.

Wow, it converted 200 meters to 200 metres!

Oops, my touchstone failed: it said "1.609344 kilometres are equal to: 1.000002 miles" Something's messed up!

Google's calculator calls that 1 mile.

I think that conversion was defined the wrong way around in his program, trying to use 1 cm=0.3937" which is wrong.

1.609344 km = 1609.344 m = 1760 * 0.9144 m = 1760 yards = 1 mile by definition through the definition of the yard as 0.9144 m

Just checked, using 1cm=0.3937" is wrong in the wrong direction and makes it 0.999998 mile.

I have no idea what goes wrong with his program other than obviously using insufficient precision for the number of digits presented.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Is there an online source of major unit conversions which is carried out to full precision, including +/- amounts after a certain decimal place?

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After careful consideration of NASA's Constellation Program, I believe Directv3 is the only viable means of achieving the objectives of NASA's Vision for Space Exploration.

"...only nuclear power can now halt global warming." - James Lovelock, independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and an open member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy

I still prefer non-web applications for this type of thing as I am not always connected
The best software freeware converter I have found is Convert for Windows

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Matthew Ota

The yard is exactly 0.9144 m, but I always thought it was the inch that was official: 1 inch = 2.54 cm. The reciprocal of that is 0.3937007874015748031496062992126 according to usoft calculator so maybe the conversion factor is set up as 0.393701

Will it convert .9999.... to 1?

*runs and hides*

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

According to the wikipedia article about it, it was the yard that got defined as 0.9144 m, which resulted in the 2.54 cm inch.
For any actual use it doesn't matter.

I think I know were the number in the result came from, but I have not idea where that formula came from, it is really messed up.
(1/0.3937*36*1760)/160934.4 = 1.000002000004000008000016000032000064 . . . cute decimal expansion BTW.
With units
((1/(0.3937 in/cm))*((36*1760)in/mile))/160934.4cm = 1.000002... mile^-1

1.000002 is definitely a possible answer I will include from now on in any multiple choice exam I get to write where the question is how many miles is 1.609344 km
0.999998 will be another.
The last three will be 1, 3.14159 and rhubarb.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I think I have found the discrepancy, in this wiki article: United States customary units. It says we're talking about the inch international measure, whereas the U. S. Survey inch is defined so that 39.37 inches is exactly 1 meter. That's obviously what the conversion website is using, right?

Since it supports furlongs per fortnight, it should also include Knuth's "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures."

I suppose I could do that, but it would take, like, effort.

Fred

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Yes, but apparently it's also using it wrong, since 1.609344 km=0.999998 US survey miles and it actually shows the result as 1.00000248549 miles.

Actually I think the real problem is that he's using 32bit reals to do the calculations.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

That's what the metric system needs: more Yiddish.

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That's the one I use at work.

I use a spreadsheet I made.

The units are selected via drop down box, then it runs the conversions based on the values next to those units on a list below the table.

It's sort of ugly, but covers all the basic needs.

Attached Thumbnails

 

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