The other day we showed you some excellent online tools for converting from one unit of measurement to another, but as a commenter pointed out (thanks Nate!) we missed a rather awesome one. It’s called Sensible Units, and while it can be used like any other conversion utility there’s one thing that really makes it stand out from the crowd.
The whole site uses JavaScript to make the conversions fast and painless. Just type the value you want to convert into the box along with the corresponding units, and you should see a drop-down menu appear once you start typing the units. You can select one of the units from the list, or continue on your merry way typing it out manually.
Once it recognizes a number and unit it will automatically process the conversion, and show the results along the right side. By default it converts the measurement into real-world objects. For example, if you are trying to convert 100 pounds it will tell you how many microwaves and MacBooks that is equivalent to in terms of weight. Or, as you you can see in the screenshot above, when converting hard drive space it tells you the number of Vista installations and Wikipedias that the amount space can hold.
If for some odd reason you want to actually convert a measurement into “real” units you can just switch to the Units tab. When you’re on both the Objects and Units tab make sure you keep an eye out for the “See All” link to appear in the upper-right corner. This will show you the full list of units available for the measurement you specified.
Sensible Units Homepage
Thanks to Nate for the tip!
I just used it and it’s a wonderful reference source to put numbers in perspective. I know I’ll use it a lot in the future. In the past I had used Google conversions, but no perspective.
Thanks for a useful site.
Glad you liked it. It’s actually quite amazing how many different types of objects they have for the different types of units. I looked through the JavaScript code, and some of the units it will show you is pretty funny. For example, enter in 99999999999999 miles. I don’t know how they came up with all of those.
I’ve tried this sensibleunits.com link from here and from several other sources. It points to a real estate service.