Using MPG is annoying...

It's more than Imperial vs SI, which is the real name for the metric system. Regardless of the units, there is the whole issue of numerator and denominator, with each side vilifying the other like the Big-Endians vs Little-Endians of Gulliver's Travels. Is it distance per fuel or fuel per distance. Both convey the same information, but one is more convenient than the other depending on the task at hand. Fuel per distance, as in MPG, is convenient for calculating the remaining range in the tank. The inverse is easier if you want to calculate how much fuel it will take to get somewhere. What it comes down to is that most people find multiplication easier than division.

As an engineer, I'm used to units and unit conversions. Engineers have an old saying that factors are always specified in the least convenient units. Distance, for example, in furlongs per fortnight. You get used to converting them, but in general the arithmetic is a lot easier in SI.

Tom

 

Not exactly - slightly modified, i.e. speed by SI is [m/s]

 

i like mpg's, the more m's the better!

 

Are you saying US folks were too lazy or too dumb back in 70's to learn metric?

Isn't US the only country stuck with gallons? Wait, not really:

Imperial units - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Actually we've gotten lazier and dumber as a country since the 70's.....

 

That looks like a bad assumption.

If it meant 72 I-MPG, that would translate to 60 US-MPG, which is what many of us believe the Prius would be rated on the old optimistic EPA scale that was retired in 2007. The Canadian scale is similar to that old US scale.

 

The US doesn't us the Imperial system it uses U.S Customary units. It's more tradition bound than the Imperial system. The US gallon is the Queen Anne's wine gallon of 1707, the Imperial system uses the Imperial gallon from mid-19th century. I've always suspected that the Brit beer louts switched to the Imperial system so their pints of beer would be bigger. I salute them.

While S.I. is the most common metric system, it isn't the only one actually used. While working on international projects I learned that some countries really butcher the metric system to the point that it is no longer SI. Using kg as force is one of the more common ones, it's longer SI when you do that.

 

Kilogram-force [kG or kgf] never pretended to be a part of SI. Yet it is widely used - one of examples is a definition of metric Horse Power [PS].

 

Using mass units for force is one of my pet peeves. The other way around bothers me as well. Unfortunately, nature refuses to cooperate with the concept of well behaved units and nice round numbers. Why did she stick us with 365 days in a year and 6.02x10^23 atoms in a mole? It's all very inconvenient.

Tom

 

^ I'm not a engineer or a scientist....but the last time I killed a mole it looked like it should have more atoms in it than that.

Do they make them really really small up there in Michigan?

 

No, but we do have big atoms.

Tom

 

LOL, that's one of the more egregious violations of SI purity and I had never considered it.

 

Hehe.... as I mentioned, Google makes for a great unit converter, in most cases. One can Google for 10000 furlongs per fortnight in mph and it'll give you the answer. One of my favorites is to do 50 mpg in teaspoons per mile.

 

That would be small, a shot of whiskey is about 2.5 moles.

 

Human Body Temperature. Yes it is.

When was the last time you needed to measure the temperature of boiling water?...

 

Instead of Miles per gallon, convert it all to inches and get 13,714 inches^-2!

OR take the inverse and get 0.0000729 square inches which is the cross section of a line of gasoline as long as your trip, containing the volume of gasoline you used to traverse it.

 

Kinda on this note, note the user name of the OP of Tyre Pressure | PriusChat. Using kilopascals for tire pressure for us Americans is also TOTALLY useless. 35 psi? Now that means something to me.

 

Hey, like in soccer, Soccer started outside the USA, but the demensions used all over the world are in yards and not meters, go figure.

 

Soccer as we know it started in England before they were metrificated.