When in Rome - Imperial Units

Keep the fun and games in here for now please :-)
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Fred
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When in Rome - Imperial Units

Post by Fred »

Like it or not, the USA holds a minority population in the world. More importantly, it's a minority in the civilised world (excluding india/china etc for good measure). The rest of us, mostly, use metric units. This site and the code I have anything to do with are included.

When I'm in the USA, I try to make an effort to run with local units. I specify distances in fractions of an inch, inches, feet, yards, miles. I specify volume in quarts and us gallons. Weight in pounds. etc. It's polite, and efficient if you're posting, to post your stuff in metric units. A lot of stuff doesn't matter as it is easy to move back and forward on the distance and volume stuff, etc, anything linear, but a few do matter as they require extra effort to process.

Please, for the love of the god of speed, if posting temperatures, use degrees C, I would rather you used degrees K than degrees F. If you want to include F for some valid reason (native on your gauges etc) then please, do the legwork and convert for the rest of us when you post. Not doing so means one of two things:

1) Your information will get ignored by anyone without sufficient time and with more important things to do than go looking up arcane units for your benefit when you haven't bothered to put in any effort.
2) People with better things to do with their time will end up wasting it looking up arcane units for your benefit, thereby disadvantaging EVERYONE ELSE.

Same goes for other units without an obvious, straight forward and well known conversion, such as:

*) inches of mercury
*) lb/hour

It's just polite.

If you don't, expect me (and potentially others) to tell you to go away and do the conversion. I won't be mad about it, I'll just not bother to do what it takes to understand your posting and therefore won't comment on your issue or setup.

If I should do that, as I did recently, and you (or, even worse, some third party without any knowledge of the relationship between me and you) feel the need to remind me that I could do the conversion, even though you know full well that I already know that, I'll move your post to the deleted section (if that is all it contains) or edit it to remove the offensive and rude content. It's pretty obvious that I know how to use google calc and the internet in general. I run and administer this site, remember? So providing such information is clearly a shit-stir and not welcome if not in a friendly and/or jovial context. I don't have time for such bullshit.

So, you've been warned! Carry on as you were, if you want. /rant.

Fred.
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