I think that this should rank as perhaps the most significant IT contribution of 2007.

And tonight, I shall be mostly travelling home at an average speed of 0.0004% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.

How did we live before this!

If you put 1 Hilton, it calculates 30 degrees Celcuis, but -20.889 Farenheit, which seems a bit cool for the Hilton 1

the standard volume measurement is the Am.

Have none of you ever drunk at the Technique and Ferret?

We all know that the amount of beauty required to launch one ship is the milliHelen, based on the metric unit the Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships.

I've searched your conversion device from top to left and bottom to right, and find no trace.

Please remedy this with all speed; launch date is set for Tuesday week.

How many vultures will I need?

And are they Gift Vultures or Rook Tokens?

Apparently, a Norris is only 0.1 kilonewtons - clearly false! Chuck could kill Newton a hundred times over.

What's that? Yes, that's mine. Ta.

Whilst attempting to calculate the office temperature in Hn (a disappointing 0.1) I found myself stuck in the text box, unable to escape and no amount of tabbing or clicking would let me escape.

As it's Friday afternoon, I can't be arsed to give a critique of your JavaScript so I'll just go back to measuring my stationery and converting it to ln.

Nice work.

your foot is 12.0009 inches

Your 12 inches is 0.999 feet.

Sack the software programmer!!!

What's more, if you put in 30 degrees Celsius, it calculates 1 Hilton, which seems correct, but 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Consistency anyone?

What about Furlongs per Fortnight? Why have you decided to let these extremely useful Imperial measurements die out?

Love it. The VOASIAV is priceless

Where's millilitre and litre? Or are they too French to use?

... is that there aren't any for the ever-increasing number of things we need to measure.

For example, I feel the lack of a standard measurement of bullshit is making political reporting increasingly difficult. Hacks have to rely on writing similes, irony and even, on occasion, sarcasm and downright wit. To improve the lot of the journo, I would therefore like to propose the following:

The Metric unit should be the Eurocrat ("Eu."), where 1 Eu. = 1 "Straight Banana".

For the Imperial unit, I would like to propose our very own bullshitter extraordinaire, The Rt. Hon. Rev. A. Blair ("Bl"), one of which is equivalent to one "OMG! Armageddon in just 45 minutes! Panic!". In keeping with other Imperial units, it's clearly far too unwieldy, so damned near every measurement will be smaller than 1.

This leaves us with the Reg unit, for which I propose 1 Darling ("Dg") as the equivalent of one "Losing the personal records of around 25 million members of the British Public is not considered a major breach of personal data." This is still a nice, large baseline which makes it a good fit for modern levels of public and private sector purveyors of bovine fecal matter, while still being quite a bit less than an Imperial Blair.

I note that I can't sell the code to Iran.

What if it's accidentally distributed on a CD via HMRC's internal post?

Coat chosen to check if the CD's are in there.

A tweak is needed methinks, although if you tweaked a bulgarian funbag would the volume increase?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7109545.stm

"An Inmarsat BGan terminal is the size of a coffee-table book. It may well be that the Alphasat with its new processors will be able to reduce that further."

About 14.28 inches from memory

To get me to enable JS?

"the converter has been checked and rechecked by a crack team"

... or was it checked and rechecked by a team on crack?

Brilliant!!!

Does El Reg provide an API to integrate this new essential tool into other Web site?

Before I can email this to all and sundry to ensure they use the new measures, it would be cool to have some links that explain the units of measurements.

All in all, a fine piece of work. Never was a joke milked so well for all it's worth :-).

It's rather important to me to know precisely how many Bulgarian Airbags of Newcastle I drank last night, but my barkeep will only tell me in pints.

...for those who find the effort of typing a couple of words in the 'Search' box a bit too much?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/28/additional_reg_standards/

... deploy this as a handy WebApp for my iPhone please?

Ta!

I love this! Units are so much easier when they mean something.

The speed of sheep is funny, but too obscure. The traditional units are:

-- tortoise (0.02 m/s for typical pet) - "the drunken C-lister moved only slightly faster than a pet tortoise"

-- walk (1.5 m/s brisk) - "the lava came towards us about as fast as we could walk away from it"

-- jet (299 m/s A380) - "to get into a low orbit, Branson need to travel 25 times faster than a passenger jet"

You also need some better units of energy as a Norris Linguini composite unit is hard to grasp. The traditional newspaper story units are:

-- match (1kJ) - "the new LA diet contained the daily energy equivalent of two matches"

-- kettle (380 kJ is enough for a good pot of tea) - "recycling Chris Moyles saved the energy of 63 boiled kettles every day!"

-- car (65 GJ) - "that's enough energy to run a car for a year!"

-- hiroshima (63 TJ) - "Krakatoa exploded with the force of 12,000 hiroshima bombs"

Force is a tricky one as we have little direct sensation of small forces a little sensation of large ones. But recent pub conversations have used:

-- door (30N on average)

-- golf (7kN force of driver on ball)

-- jet engine (338kN Roll Royce Trent 900)

Nice work, but where are the units of time? Microfortnight?

Square and cubic furlongs and fathoms might be nice too.

Speed of applying paint : how many square furlongs per fortnight make one sistine?

How many fathoms per millifortnight = 1 titanic?

I'm often asked what kind of mileage my 1967 Chrysler New Yorker gets.

My answer: 17.77 Gunter chains per hogshead

You can almost actually HEAR the blinking....followed by a dialtone as the questioner's frontal lobe reboots.

Well, 30 C is actually 86 F indeed if my quick mental calculations are up-to-date... So no lack of consistency there, at least. Now, how much is one Hilton, I have no clue. Would she please come over so I can measure it sometime?

As any fule kno....

With each converter, yu shud provide a link to the definishun of the standard...

Hope this hleps. Hleps (?) sorrie ... dystypia kikin in agin.

Grate stuf, tho

...I second Microfortnight for inclusion somewhere. This vital measurement of time -must- be preserved and promoted!

Sheep in a vacuum. Big deal. What about the speed of a swallow carrying a coconut across the ocean? Now go away with your newfangled standards or I shall taunt you again.

On this side of the Atlantic Pond, we measure such things in units of RCH --- the Red ... err, umm, Crotch... Hair.

I will accept funding for research into the correct conversion factors.

Great work it doesn't matter if it's accurate that would be inaccurate as it must be compatible with "news" measurements(Olympic swimming pools, London buses, Football pitches).Well done.

outstanding!

any chance we can have a quality metric?

Isn't Brontosaurus a deprecated designation for what is now officially Apatosaurus? Aww, hell. you're right, who cares.

One of my favourite units is the attoparsec. Very nearly 1 inch. Though it does seem pointless to introduce another unit for the much the same thing.

It's the standard unit of measurement in the live sound industry, often used to measure flight case weights.

1 Metric F*ckload = 50kg