On Thursday 05 January 2006 01:35, Linus Peter Sweers wrote: > We bike in km/h and measure the distance in km. We even mark the trails > in km with a small stripe of paint. Our GPS is set to SI units. My car > speedometer lists km. Our weather instruments measure mm hg for air > pressure. All of my maintenance records are recorded in Metric.
Air pressure should be measured in kilopascals. Some people measure it in millibars (of which there are ten in a kilopascal), but AFAIK the only pressure currently measured in mm Hg is blood, and there's talk of abandoning the mm Hg for that. My bike tire is labeled "INFLATE TO 2.5 BARS". I bought a bike pump, which has a bar scale. The store had some tires with the pressure labeled in kilopascals, so I tried to talk about pressure with the salesman, but found that he couldn't handle bars. > I was a product of the first teachings of Metric in the US in 1976. I > never thought it was hard to use, and I have used the system ever since > (sometimes frustrating my parents). I still have my metric only ruler > from that time frame. Me too, except for my parents. My mother got used to sewing in inches, but my father brought urethane technology from Europe, and measured in metric pretty often. One of my favorite toys was Lego blocks, which are 8 mm wide, and a modular shelf system which we installed has 1 m modules, so I got used to round metric sizes even before the metric system was introduced in school. phma
