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> Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you

Yeah. I live in Italy, but grew up in the US. I'm happy with the metric system and wished we had it in the US too, but for certain kinds of measurements, it still doesn't feel quite as natural to me. It depends entirely on how much I use something - temperatures in metric are second nature, because you feel that on your skin every day. Things like people's heights or weights, not so much. How many atmospheres to pump up my road bike tires? I have no idea, I use the pounds per square inch scale on the pump!

I don't try and justify any of this, it's just what I grew up with.



Oddly enough the SI unit is Pascal (Pa) or N/m2, not atmosphere. The technical atmosphere is: around 98KPa, it's not really metric.


kPa. Otherwise it'd be Kelvinpascals. And while pressure is often said to be x atmospheres, they usually use bar, which is an SI-derived unit (equal to 10⁵ Pa), which is close enough to the old usage of atmospheres.

There seem to have been two different atmospheres that were pretty close anyway. One being defined as air pressure at sea level, the other being defined as the pressure of 10 meters of water.


>>kPa. Otherwise it'd be Kelvinpascals.

Great observation! I guess I am way too used to KB and in that very case KPa would be 1024Pa which is even worse. Have an upvote.


That'd be KiPa, then (kibipascals) ;)

Standardised since 1999, I think. But no one really uses it. Kilobytes would technically be kB as well.


The most used unit for pressure used in Germany is bar (= 100 kPa) so that you don't have to deal with really big numbers all the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_(unit)




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