You forgot the firkin. In the fff system of measurement, the firkin is the mass of one firkin of water. A firkin is 90 pounds (Yes I realize pounds don’t measure mass, but I didn’t make this up.
Stilb and cunt hair, stolen by you guys above.
And of course “40 rods to the hogshead” that cars used to run on, which was the style at the time.
Nit. It’s not really used anymore and “deprecated”, everyone calls it “candelas per squared meter.” Or just “candelas,” if the disambiguation is clear and no pedants are listening in.
My favorite is from Moby Dick, Ch. 95: “longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg”
It seems to me that measures like, at least sixteen fanwankeries.
Penny: Oh, my God, the George Smoot?
Leonard: You’ve heard of him?
Penny: Of course I haven’t.
Sheldon: George Smoot is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, one of the great minds of our time. His work in black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation cemented our understanding of the origin of the universe.
Penny: It’s kind of a funny name, though, Smoot.
Sheldon: It’s like talking to a chimp.
I also like furlongs per fortnight (downthread) as well as rods per hogshead (Simpsons). I also enjoy abusing Google with these arcane units.
Huh. An interesting one, the hogshead. Apparently, it’s a corruption of “oxhead”, which was in common use in Scandinavia. According to the Norwegian Wikipedia, one oxhead was the equivalent of 1,5 ames, 2 barrels, 6 anchors, or 240 pots. Clicking on from there, an ame also equates to 1/3 of a boat or 60 jugs, in addition to the aforementioned anchors and pots. A jug is also equivalent to 2 stops or 32 virgins.
All links in Norwegian, unfortunately, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
We get this all the time from the big states like Texas and Delaware.
I’ll have to take your word for it; not my area of expertise.
I like the millihelen, which is beauty sufficient to launch one ship.
I guess this would be thicker than ‘the skin of your teeth,’ although in theory I suppose it could go either way. :eek:
I was in a meeting once at my old job where people were rating various problems by the number of PhD’s it would take to solve them. So we had a 3 PhD problem, and a few 2 PhD problems.
A metric fuckton, which is a none-too-precisely defined unit of a ridiculously large quantity of something or other.
I hadn’t even noticed that the OP got the wrong Smoot. The unit of measure is based on Oliver Smoot, George Smoot is his cousin, and (as I mentioned in a previous post) quite accomplished in his own right.
Sorry Cal, but in practice you are wrong. The largest cunt hair is the black one, the middle sized on is the red, and the finest unit of cunt hair measurement is the blonde one.
Actual true life example of this unit of measure in use:
I was working construction in 1970, helping build a hospital. 4 of us (with the aid of a crane) are setting a 40’ long 12’ high wall form in place.
The object is to have the crane set the form almost in place and then using a sledge move it into final position.
Form gets set we holler down to the other end “How’s it look?”
“Bring it to me a cunt hair”
Not quite sure how much it has to move we yell back “What kind”
“A big black one”
Wham! goes the sledge
“Hows that?”
“Again, this time a red one”
Wham!
“How about now?”
“Just a blonde one”
Wham!
“Perfect”
Back in the day the Playboy Adviser fielded a question about the upcoming Apollo-Soyuz space missions, measurement units, and would they use a cunt hair. IIRC Playboy was of the opinion that if during docking an American astronaut said “Move a cunt hair to the left Ivan” the Russians would automatically know what to do.
Hah! I learned something today. Ignorance fought.
Evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen defined the “macarthur” as the unit of taxonomic extinction:
ma = 721.3(log S[sub]1[/sub] - log S[sub]2[/sub]/∆t log e)
The unit is named after Robert MacArthur, co-author of The Theory of Island Biogeography, who according to Van Valen discovered extinction for ecologists.
Van Valen himself was notorious for publishing extremely short papers, which gave rise to the unit called “van valen,” which was the smallest publishable unit of data.
So… a 3 PhD problem is so easy it’s stupid, because it took 3 PhDs for a guy to figure out that getting PhDs sucks?
Interestingly, one furlong per fortnight is almost exactly equal to one centimeter per minute. (The exact figure is 0.9979 cm/min.)
I’ve always like the Mho, which is the unit of conductivity - yes, the inverse of the Ohm.
Never neglect the far more useful negative millihelen, which is the quantity of ugliness necessary to sink one ship.
Yes, but if you take into consideration the coolness factor from the alliteration, cm/min is about 0.047uFonzie and F/f is about 22 DecaFonzies. 
:eek:I don’t how I managed to get that wrong! It’s even right in the link. I need to copy and paste shit more and type less stuff out manually! 