Warning: The link I'm about to give you is addictive!
Taken from a weekly supplement provided to subscribers of Copyediting newsletter:
Last week, as I was preparing the resources page for the document that will be sent as a supplement for the November 13 audio conference on math errors, I was double-checking entries on metric units and conversions in The Associated Press Stylebook. I spotted something I'd somehow missed.
I've been using Google lately for conversions; you can type 5 pounds in kilos in the search field and find out instantly that it's 2.26796185 kilos. But if you're thinking about buying your ancestral farm in Ireland and want to know how many U.S. acres are in an Irish acre, you can't type 5 Irish acres in U.S. acres and get the conversion. You get links to things like the Irish Acres Antiques Store.
No, for that kind of conversion, you need the MEGACONVERTER 2!
I'm not joking. The Associated Press Stylebook has a quiet little mention of this amazing tool under its metric system entry, and boy, can it do things! One Irish acre is 1.61983 U.S. acres, in case you were wondering. There are, as of last week, 45 conversion categories, from Angles to Wire Resistance. I'm sure they'll find something that starts with a Z to measure soon. Our proofreader, Danny Marcus, noted that the category "Length, Ancient" doesn't have cubits listed. I agree with him that this is a serious oversight, especially for editors of construction manuals.
The Megaconverter 2: http://www.blogger.com/www.megaconverter.com/mega2.
Danny also shared two more sites for conversions that even the whopping Megaconverter doesn't have:
The first is for the Consumer Price Index. Find out how much more you could have bought in 1969 with the money you now spend on a latte: http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/research/data/us/calc/.
As if that weren't depressing enough, you can also find out how many milliliters your $3.29 would buy you in England right now by entering that amount in the Universal Currency Converter at XE.com: http://www.xe.com/ucc/.
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