No, it wouldn’t, measuring fuel efficiency in km/l would give us values in the 5-30 km/l range.
But l/100km is measure of fuel consumption, which directly translates to the cost of operating the vehicle. When you’re shopping for a car, how much it will cost to own is usually a bigger concern than how far you can get on X amount of fuel. If you look at it this way ‘fuel used per travelled distance’ make sense.
But really, this isn’t an issue with SI units but rather how you chose to measure fuel efficiency, if I’m not mistaken km/l is commonly used in Asia.
I still have my K&E scale (they’re called scales, not rulers) marked in tenths and hundredths of an inch. At least up until relatively recently every aerospace engineer had one of these. These old K&Es are very handsome pieces of equipment. Wooden base, with ivory edges marked with the scales. And very accurate.
My car gets 11.7 km a litre. 50 litres is circa 550 km.
If I need to drive 30 km, I need about 3 litres. (remembering that a litre is a realtively small quantity - although my margin of error here is over 10% in the real world it doesn’t make a noticeable difference)
See - easy.
Miles to the gallon is also realtively easy - but a gallon is a relatively large quantity, so I would think it makes it harder to think.
I find litres to 100km needs two calculations, first I have to work out how many km to a litre, then how many litres I have consumed, or how many I need to buy
Yep my dad grew up with the “old” currency. I am pretty reasonable with mental arithmetic, but I still don’t know how people ever got their heads round it.
it’s all arbitrary. one is slighly less arbitrary. the fact that it’s embraced nearly universally tempers the arbitrariness even more. i think America is being overly stubborn in retaining the imperial units. China overhauled its traditional units of measurements (been around a lot longer than America) in 1976. America could have done the same and no one would have been any worse for wear. In fact, we would be +1 mars rover because of it, no?
Maybe not water, but I have done lots of “back of the envelope” calculations in gardening, painting and the like that make metric very easy to deal with.
Hmmm…I need to fill an area 20m x 20m x 25mm with sand, how many cubic metres should I buy? (10) Then I know my trailer can carry 3 cubic metres, how many trips?
I need to paint my wall, its 2.4 m x 15 m - 1 litre of paint covers 5sq m, how much paint do I need. (2 four litre tins should do it) - just try working through the same math with feet, inches, gallons and pints
Both quite simple calculations right?
I’ve done similiar things with liquid volume also (yes really) and for me there was just something intuitive about the measurements… I mean things like milli, centi, deci, deca, kilo are great right?
And let’s not even get into the tonne vs ton vs tonne discussion - 1,000 kilograms is a very easy figure to work with as opposed to those stupid pound thingys.
Really, then, what does “going metric” really mean? If it’s just non-important stuff like changing highway signs, gasoline units of measure, and ordering by the kilo in the deli counter, then we’re not we’re no worse for wear by not switching. We’re already free to use any units that we want to. If you really want a metric kitchen, go buy metric measuring cups and metric cook books. If you want to calculate your aquarium volume, use metric scales and calculations. Food is already marked in metric units. You can already do your own height and weight in metric units. Bank thermometers already show F and C.
How else would we go metric? New federal laws that make it illegal to teach US units? That would be disasterous. Just make it illegal to put US units on packaging? I think we’d have freedom of expression issues. Outlaw books with US units? Heck, even the few cookbooks I bought in Ontario had both metric and Imperial units.
We’re already much more metric than the world in general gives us credit for.
You can buy capacitors these days that are measured in Farads. Don’t blame farads, blame the common crappy little capacitors that can’t hold charge for the life of them.
Yeah, the 1 cubic centimeter = 1 milliliter = 1 gram of water is great and often useful. The calorie used to extend it by equally 1 gram of water raised by 1 degree, but the Joule is in fact much more useful being 1 watt over 1 second.
Eh? If you start off with the distance you need to travel, it’s easy… say I’m going to Sault Ste. Marie, which is 680 km from Toronto (via Sudbury, not Tobermory and the ferry). My car uses 12L/100 km (I’m loaded down). So… 680 km = 6.8 units of 100 km… multiply 6.8 * 12 and I need 81.6L of fuel.
I just gotta add to this thread my favorite units for speed (ie. distance divided by time):
FATHOMS per FORTNIGHT !
(credit goes to the author of "The know-it-all, who decided he wanted to be the only person on the planet to know a common fact , but in an uncommon way…so he converted the speed of light from ‘miles per hour’ to ‘fathoms per fortnight’.
not quite so useful, but you gotta admire the originality…
Here we use mainly liters per mil (Swedish unit for exactly 10km), and it makes a lot of sense to me. You want to minimize the fuel consumption, so the lower the better. Obviously, that’s the same as the British measurement divided by ten.
The thing is, if you want your system of units to be at all sane, then you need certain relationships between the units. One unit of capacitance, for instance, should be one unit of charge divided by one unit of electric potential. Unfortunately, the fundamental physical constants of electromagnetism are not human-scale quantities, so if you’re going to make your electromagnetic units sane, some of them will also not be human-scale. A volt is a reasonable size for a unit, and to a lesser extent an ohm or an amp as well, but the others, not so much.
The alternative is to pick all of your units so they’re all human-scale, but then you end up with ridiculous conversion factors you need to remember. For instance, if you multiply the speed of a motor shaft (measured in radians per second) by the torque produced by the motor (measured in newton-meters), you get the power of the motor (measured in watts). But if, instead, you want to measure the speed of your shaft in rotations per minute, and the torque in foot-pounds, and the power in horsepower, you’re going to need to also multiply by some crazy number that I’m sure that American engineers have memorized, but which nobody should ever need to memorize, since in a sane system of units, it’s just 1.
Notice his third dimension was in millimeters, so an analogous calculation would be something like how many cubic feet in 10 yards by 10 yards by 2 inches? (not saying the volume would be the same as the metric one; just that that’s a similar sort of question). I’m quite sure you can do it, but I would still say the metric calculation would be easier.
For that particular item yeah - you would need to go feet x feet x inches/12 (which, for many people would blowout their mental arithmetic) and then how is sand sold? I’m pretty sure its not be the cubic foot right? But (in New Zealand at least) cubic metre is a pretty standard measurement to buy any such item in (from compost, to fuel for the wood burning to sand)
no litres of paint per square metre is not a common measurement - BUT every paint store I have been to can tell me what area I can expect one litre to cover - heck - some paints even have it on the tin. And with metric its a really simple calculation to make that even the most simple of math bumpkins can work out - for feet and inches you have to worry about converting to the correct unit. For metric, its just moving about decimal points (or even guessing is gonna get you close)
Well, first, 25mm is pretty much 1 inch, so no, it’s not that much easier in metric. Feet x Feet x Inches / 12. And, as for the question in the next post, yeah, it’s sold in cubic feet or cubic yards.
As I said above, Sand is sold as cubic feet or cubic yards. So yeah, that’s how it would be sold.
As for “converting feet and inches to the correct unit”, why would we do that? You didn’t do it for meters. You said it was 2.4m tall. Not 2m, 40cm. We’d say the ceiling was 7.5 feet high, not 7 feet 6 inches. Or, more accurately, we’d say it was 8 feet tall, since there’s no reason for a super accurate answer here, and we’d rather have a little too much paint than just barely not enough. And then we’d be multiplying 8x45. And any paint store can tell you how many feet a gallon of paint will cover.
And one more thing: No, I didn’t notice his last dimension was mm, rather than m. That’s another issue with meters, specifically: The abreviations aren’t obvious at a quick glance. The same problem shows up when people label things as 6’ instead of 6". That’s what happened to Spinal Tap.
So your tape measure doesn’t show 6 feet 5 inches then? It shows 6.4167 feet?
Why didn’t I convert for metres - because there is no need to… 0.4 metres is the same as 40 cm is the same as 400 mm…for feet it’s not as intuitive - unless of course you wanna tell me that 6’7" is the same as 6.7 feet.