That sounds BOOOoooOOOoooGUS!
Two fun ones I don’t see mentioned: The Scoville Scale, used to measure the hotness of cili peppers (Scoville Heat Units)
The Garn Scale, used by NASA to determine your likelihood of getting sick in weightlessness, named after Senator Jake Garn, who got sicker than anyone had ever seen.
This is amazing! I doff my cap to the man!
That Georgian farmer was smart, and in the very best way: Maybe he didn’t get much formal schooling , but he had the right combination of common sense and intelligence to invent a whole new concept, and use it effectively.
I respect a guy like that. And I’m going to make use of his new unit of measurement. I assume that it works best in the countryside, but even in the city, it’s a good idea.(Hey, my house is around the curve…2 looks after the traffic light.)
This is fantastic. I, too, am surprised it’s not used widely and often. The nautical equivalent would be a “reach” – how far down a river you can see before it curves. That IS used by sailors and boatsmen – sometimes they’re even shown on charts as dotted lines, occasionally with names.
The dog, for heat-needed to keep you warm. As in three-dog night. I was amazed to find that out after all these years of mama telling me not to come.
People in the US do use this expression, I was told. But I doubt anyone uses a “unit” of dog other than that. No more than “cats and dogs” is a unit of rainfall.
Wiki does has a
List of unusual units of measurement, and a
List of humorous units of measurement
The “unusual” ones are fascinating in that they give an insight to the practical thinking of what to most people are abstruse or bizarre endeavors (choose your adjective).
The whimsical ones of course use wonderful puns and cultural references.
But surely there are others not in English?
Or maybe this thread is where such a list begins…
I believe that standard only applies to short people.
Not if you have Newfies. I’m too tired at the moment to calculate a Newfie.
Unless I was just whooshed.
Another one has come to mind, from the same chapter of If At All Possible, Involve A Cow as the Smoot: the “Bruno”.
Not as useful as the Smoot-marks, one Bruno is defined as, “a unit of volume equal to the size of the dent in asphalt resulting from the free fall of an upright piano. Determined to be 1158 cubic centimeters when the experiment was first performed in 1972.” Recent article.
If it was a Newfie joke, I’d have mentioned Black Horse beer.
No mention to date of the “chain”, which is 66 feet. I learned about it first in the novel The Man with the Golden Gun.
Also the “perch”, which is not standardized enough to be cool.
Regards,
Shodan
The UK uses “Wales” and “The Isle of Wight” similarly. I wonder if that’s a fairly universal thing? What do other countries use?
One of my all-time favorites - the Ohnosecond. Defined as the time elapsed between hitting the send (or delete) key and realizing that you REALLY didn’t mean to do that!
A time that Google, in its infinite wisdom, extended to 10 seconds–the amount of time before GMail actually sends a message, and thus the amount of time an “undo” option is displayed.
A “Texas” should be defined as: “a thing that thinks it’s bigger than it really is.” …Oh, it is mentioned under the “unusual measurements” page, but not in the same manner.
As in: “Texas is the biggest state, and 37% the size of an Alaska.” Or: “Texas is bigger than than France… with 40% the population.”
Ahem.
The acre’s kinda cool all by itself. An acre’s long side is one furlong - the best compromise distance to drive an ox- or horse-drawn plough so as not to waste unnecessary time turning it but to allow reasonable rest breaks so as not to tire the beasts excessively. Plough a chain’s width of these furrows, and you’ve done a good day’s work for the ploughman and his team, so you knock off until the morrow.
Farscape
Microt; a second, or minute, depending on the intent of the speaker
Arn; hour
Cycle; year
Dalek
Rell; one second
Hitchhiker’s Guide
Bad news; obeys it’s own physical laws
R34 a velocity, clearly too fast
Altarian Dollar
Triganic Ningi
Triganic Pu
Flanian Pobble Bead
I learned that from Grace Hopper. Somewhere around here I have a ‘nanosecond’ (11.78 inches of phone wire) that she gave me at one of her talks.
To my dad that would be a Skillion.