MichaelW

Any good, quick, clean ones on you use?

Could we have a Fahrenheit/centigrade scale alongside the Winter forum. I'm sure you could find someone to sponsor it.

Machka 

First of all ... why?

Secondly ... if I ever need to figure out the imperial unit for something, I use Google.

J.C. Koto

+1 very easy to use. For instance, to find out what 42 degrees F is in Celsius you can type into google "42 f in c" and it provides the answer right on top. Also works well for miles to km i.e. "42 miles in km" or inches to cm "42 in in cm" etc..

Marcus_Ti

Or better yet, just know the conversion.

Machka 

It works for all sorts of measurements.

cyccommute 

Or, better yet, know a reasonable approximation. You hardly need to know that 37C is 98.6F. You only really need to know that 100F is around 40C. Same with distances. 12" is 1/3 of a yard and a yard is almost a meter so 1/3 of a meter is 30 cm. Good enough for most uses.

I did an organized tour this summer in Belgium and the Netherlands this summer. The tour leaders did a good job of giving both temperature and distance in both systems. However the 'Merikans on the trip had all kinds of troubles when they were away from the leaders. If they saw a temperature sign, they couldn't tell if the temperature was hot or cold. They were also using cue sheets that were marked in kilometers and were endlessly getting confused about the distance. After a couple of days of this, I gave a tutorial on how to navigate the metric system. All you really have to remember about temperature is that 20C is about room temperature and 37C is body temperature. If you are riding and you see a thermometer that says 30, it's a warm day. If the thermometer says 40, it's hot.

For distance, our cue sheets said things like "0.1 Turn left" and "1.6 km Bear right at small church". A tenth of a kilometer isn't a tenth of a mile. It's only 100 meters or 300 feet. 300 feet is a US city block so the turn is right now! (0.1mile is 528 feet, almost twice the distance) and 1.6 km is about a mile.

Once people got the ranges in their heads, they could use them to estimate the measurements which is all that is really needed.

And, yes, Google works for all kinds of measurements.

Machka 

As a Canadian who was in school during the big switch from imperial to metric ... I'm "measurementally" bilingual. Or at least sort of "measurementally" bilingual.

They made the switch when I was in Grade 4, so I had learned distance, temperature and a few other things in imperial. I can picture an inch, a foot ... I even have a reasonable idea how far a mile is. But I'm a little hazy on things like pints and ounces ... I can't visualise that sort of thing.

And since I moved to Australia, I've become even more metric than I was as a Canadian.

cyccommute 

Oddly enough I'm metric bipolar. I use metric all the time at work. But that's mostly for volume, mass and temperature. I can tell by sight what a liter of water or any fraction looks like as well as temperatures...but only at work. Mass is a little different because of density. At home or out in the world, I have to think about metric volumes and temperatures. I don't use distance measurements all that often so I'm sketchier on those measurements.

A cup and a pint are about 250 ml and 500ml, respectively. Those aren't exact (off by about 27 ml) but close enough. As to "ounces" is that liquid ounce or dry ounce? Liquid ounce usually assumes something that is mostly water so 16 liquid ounces would be about 500 ml or 500 g. Dry ounces are harder to visualize because of the density of the material being weighed. An ounce of flour is going to be larger than an ounce apple, for example. A pound is about 0.5 kg (give or take) so a 5 lb bag of flour is roughly 2.5 kg. An ounce of flour...hang on, I'm trying to estimate this in my head...500 divided by 16 is...where's that damned calculator...about 30 g (?). There's that damned calculator...yup, 31g.

Leebo

A pint? Just look at the beer glass in your hand?

Leebo

And what the heck is a stone as regard to weight? British for rods, pecks and cubits?

demoncyclist

A stone is 14 pounds.

MichaelW

An average man is about 12 stone.
14 means too many pints
16 is too many pints and pies.
18 stone: who ate all the pies.

fietsbob

EZ enough to Google them .. put it in your bookmarks bar.

flatlander_48

I'm a mechanical engineer and I have unit conversion apps on my laptop, iPad and iPhone. That works out well as I'm never without the capability. I lived in Taiwan for several years, so I'm pretty decent with rough metric/imperial conversions. However, I will usually use one of the programs for better accuracy. Besides, being attached to a network is not required...

JohnDThompson 

$ man units
UNITS(1) UNITS(1)

NAME
units - unit conversion program

OVERVIEW OF `UNITS'
The `units' program converts quantities expressed in various scales to
their equivalents in other scales. The `units' program can handle mul‐
tiplicative scale changes as well as nonlinear conversions such as
Fahrenheit to Celsius. Temperature conversions require a special syn‐
tax. See the examples below.

The units are defined in an external data file. You can use the exten‐
sive data file that comes with this program, or you can provide your
own data file to suit your needs.

You can use the program interactively with prompts, or you can use it
from the command line.

[. . .]

chasm54

American pints aren't pints. Imperial pints are 20 fluid ounces...

Machka 

I used to use this program ... Online Conversion - Convert just about anything to anything else

John Redcorn

Also american pints of liquor at the store (not beer at a bar) aren't even an American pint, they're 375ml which = about 12.7 floz.

SkyDog75

American pints and English pints were the same until the English changed theirs in 1824.

Marcus_Ti

Either way, pints are stupid form of measurement

SkyDog75

Agreed, except maybe for a serving of beer.

chasm54

All measurements are arbitrary. Chains and furlongs make a lot of sense.

Camilo

So you couldn't find an app for your phone? There's a million for android, I imagine the same for IOS.

Not to mention all the other advice (i.e. approximations) that have been given.

mprelaw

F>C F-32 x 5/9.

C>F. C x 9/5 +32. C to F is so easy that you can do it in your head----multiply by 9, divide by 5, add 32. Lot easier to divide by 5 than by 9.