[OT ?] rant (was : Re: Conversions From standard to metric units)

On 03/04/2009 5:37 PM, Emmanuel Charpentier wrote:

Le vendredi 03 avril 2009 ?  14:17 -0400, stephen sefick a ??crit :

I am starting to use R for almost any sort of calculation that I need.
 I am a biologist that works in the states, and there is often a need
to convert from standard units to metric units.

<rant>
US/Imperial units are *not* standard units.

But they are fun:  you should see the arguments 
you can have about whether imperial fluid ounces 
are the same volume as US fluid ounces. (They're 
not: US ounces are bigger.  But not big enough so that their gallons catch up!)

Duncan Murdoch


The former "metric system"

is now called "Syst??me International" (International System) for a
reason, which is *not* gallocentrism of a "few" 6e7 frogs, but rather
laziness of about 5.6e9 losers who refuse to load their memories with
meaningless conversion factors...
</rant>
                                        Emmanuel Charpentier
                                        who has served his time with
                                        pounds per cubic feet, furlongs
                                        per fortnight, BTU and other
                                        figments of British/American
                                        sadistic imagination, thank you
                                        very much...
</rant> # Again, didn't work the first time...

                                                 Is there a package in
R for this already?  If not I believe that I am going to write some of
the most often used in function form.  My question is should I include
this in my StreamMetabolism package.  It is not along the same theme
lines, but could loosely fit.  The reason that I ask is that I don't
want to clutter CRAN with a small package containing some conversion
functions because I am to lazy to source them into R every time that I
use them, but I also don't want the StreamMetabolism package to turn
into StephenMisc Fuctions.  Thoughts, comments, or suggestions would
be appreciated.