unit conversion standards
Not every unit conversion is "multiply by a number". Meters to centimeters is plain multiplication, but Celsius to Fahrenheit is not even proportional, and kilometers per liter compared to liters per 100 km flips the very meaning of "more is better". Three different mathematical relationships hide behind a single word.
This is not an approximation, it is the internationally agreed legal definition of the inch; any converter returning a different value for this input is wrong by construction.
This comes from F = 100 × 9/5 + 32; without the "+32" the result would be 180°F, a value with no physical meaning for water's boiling point.
The math is 100 divided by 8, not 8 multiplied by some fixed number; a car that improves from 8 to 6 L/100 km jumps to 16.67 km/L, a bigger leap than the 2-liter difference would suggest under a linear reading.
There are fourteen categories: length, mass, temperature, data, time, speed, area, pressure, volume, energy, power, angle, frequency and fuel economy. Each one holds several units, from nanometer to nautical mile, from bit to exbibyte, from pascal to atmosphere, and conversion only happens between units of the same kind, because turning meters into seconds makes no sense.
Because in 1959 the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other countries with an imperial measurement tradition signed the international yard and pound agreement, which fixed the inch at exactly 25.4 millimeters by legal definition, not by measurement. Every foot (12 inches) and every mile (5,280 feet) has derived from that exact constant ever since.
Because the formula F = C × 9/5 + 32 has a fixed offset (+32) that does not scale along with the value. Doubling 10°C to 20°C does not double the 50°F that corresponds to 10°C into 100°F, the actual result is 68°F; the offset makes the Fahrenheit scale start from a different point than zero, so any direct proportional comparison gets it wrong.
No, the relationship between the two is a reciprocal division: km/L = 100 divided by (L/100 km), and vice versa. There is no single "factor" that works across the whole range of values, because the curve is not a straight line, it is a hyperbola, which is why improving the consumption of an already efficient car yields fewer extra km/L than the same liter improvement applied to a less efficient one.
KB uses base 10 (1 KB = 1,000 bytes), the same convention as the metric system, while KiB uses base 2 (1 KiB = 1,024 bytes), the standard defined by IEC 60027-2 to reflect how computer memory is addressed in powers of 2. The gap grows at larger scales: 1 TB (10¹² bytes) and 1 TiB (2⁴⁰ bytes) already differ by nearly 10%, enough for a "1 TB" hard drive to show up as less than 1 TiB of space in the operating system.
m = km × 1000| Unit | Value | Actions |
|---|---|---|
| 1E12 | ||
| 1E9 | ||
| 1,000,000 | ||
| 100,000 | ||
| 1,000 | ||
| 1 | ||
| 39,370.079 | ||
| 3,280.84 | ||
| 1,093.613 | ||
| 0.62137119 | ||
| 0.5399568 |
Conversion is mathematical and local. Nothing is sent to a server.