(11-07-2012, 10:33 AM)Dean_P Wrote: mm... Really??? have you been out of the country so long that you don't even talk in inches anymore? 
Hey man, I was a science major back in the day. I've been metric-ing for decades!
I'll tell you what gives me headaches - the metric equivalent of horsepower. My company sells products that include medium size engines with HP ratings... but we sell all over the world so we need to maintain both Imperial and Metric specifications for all of our toys.
Converting back and forth in length and weight is easy, but horsepower... ugh.
Allow me to quote the venerable Wikipedia:
Quote:Metric horsepower (PS, cv, hk, pk, ks, ch)
The various units used to indicate this definition (PS, cv, hk, pk, ks and ch) all translate to horse power in English, so it is common to see these values referred to as horsepower or hp in the press releases or media coverage of the German, French, Italian, and Japanese automobile companies. British manufacturers often intermix metric horsepower and mechanical horsepower depending on the origin of the engine in question. Sometimes the metric horsepower rating of an engine is conservative enough so that the same figure can be used for both 80/1269/EEC with metric hp and SAE J1349 with imperial hp.
DIN 66036 defines one metric horsepower as the power to raise a mass of 75 kilograms against the earth's gravitational force over a distance of one metre in one second; this is equivalent to 735.49875 W or 98.6% of an imperial mechanical horsepower.
In 1992, the PS was rendered obsolete by EEC directives, when it was replaced by the kilowatt as the official power measuring unit.[citation needed] It is still in use for commercial and advertising purposes, in addition to the kW rating, as many customers are still not familiar with the use of kilowatts for engines.
Other names for the metric horsepower are the Dutch paardenkracht (pk), the French chevaux (ch), the Swedish hästkraft (hk), the Finnish hevosvoima (hv), the Norwegian and Danish hestekraft (hk), the Hungarian lóerő (LE), the Czech koňská síla and Slovak konská sila (k or ks), the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian konjska snaga (KS),the Bulgarian "Конска сила", the Macedonian Којнска сила (KC), the Polish koń mechaniczny and Slovenian konjska moč (KM) and the Romanian cal-putere (CP) which all equal the German Pferdestärke (PS).
Yeah, that's a nightmare!
Don't get me wrong, "one horsepower" is an objectively idiotic unit of measure in the year 2012, but by virtue of age it has meaning. All the other equivalencies I have to deal with are maddening.
Oh, and then there's how American cookbooks allot ingredients by
volume (inconsistent) but other countries measure ingredients by
weight... yeah, there are benefits to living overseas!
