Dear Jim and All,
Yesterday, I visited a site called www.about.com and entered the word
'metric' into their search engine. The site returned many hundreds of
conversion (and other) sites of enormously varying qualities. However its
worth a look if you have some time.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
CAMS - Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist
- United States Metric Association
ASM - Accredited Speaking Member
- National Speakers Association of Australia
Member, International Federation for Professional Speakers
--
on 2001/12/30 10.10, James Frysinger at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I received the 21 December Science magazine from AAAS today. In their
> NetWatch section they cite a conversion site,
> http://www.onlineconversion.com
> about which they say:
> In an epic snafu, the controllers of the Mars Climate
> Orbiter failed to convert English units of force into
> metric ones, one of several mistakes that sent NASA's
> $87 million spacecraft into oblivion 2 years ago
> (Science, 8 Ocotber 1999, pl. 207). Don't let your work
> go down in flames. This handy site performs conversions
> faster than St. Paul. From parsecs to hogsheads, the
> calculator handles some 5000 units of length, temperature,
> weight, speed, volume, time, power, and other measures.
> You can change metric to metric, English to metric, and
> for that retro thrill, metric to English.
> It does all that and more, apparently. It includes cooking measures, clothing
> sizes, motor oil grades, Roman numerals, etc. I invite you to check it out,
> but don't shoot the messenger (me!).
>
> A couple of asides about the above site. It worked fine on my computer (linux
> OS) when I used Mozilla (v0.9.4) but not when I used Netscape (v4.78). Yes,
> Java and Javascript are enabled on both programs. Also, I inadvertently found
> that there is a www.onlineconversions.com (i.e., plural) that is "under
> construction". That's the wrong site.
>
> I received a copy of NIST's TechBeat (http://www.nist.gov/techbeat) yesterday
> as well and it touts a NIST site for cooking conversions. That site is
> http://ts.nist.gov/ts/htdocs/230/235/household.htm
> An anachronistic footnote below this table advises that "For all household
> purposes 1 milliliter may be considered as equal to 1 cubic centimeter." This
> tells me that this table is almost 40 years old (or more) and was devised
> before the liter was redefined in 1964 (abrogating a 1901 definition). During
> that era of non-equality, there was a difference of about 28 parts per
> million between the two.
>
> Jim
