One that my wife and I have used for some time is the “Roti”. This was after my wife made the mistake of ordering a roti from a West Indian restaurant and asking for it to be “a little hot”. One bite later, and I watched in amazement as her face turned colours faces are not intended to assume. :eek:
One “Roti” = the hottest (as in most spicy) thing you can imagine eating and surviving. Foods in the real world are measured in fractions of a Roti - as in “these hot pepers, grown by the inmates of a Guatamalan insane asylum from hot pepper stock stolen from Cthulhu cultists and watered with rattlesnake venom, are about three-quarters of a Roti”.
I like “Titanic” and “Hoover Dam”. They can be used for damn near every measurement. Height, weight, width, amount of concrete, elegance, tragedy, whatever.
I swear one time I overheard some stupid show (probably on the Hitler channel) about how many “Titanics” of concrete it took to make the “Hoover Dam”! I nearly died laughing!
Well, no. George, the Nobel Prize winner, is a different Smoot. Evidently it was one of the most frequent questions he was asked upon his return from Stockholm. I know. I was one of the ones who asked . . .
Just reading about Antarctica, I came upon an interesting unit of measurement. The southern ocean current that circles the globe and helps keep the southernmost continent really cold has a rate of about 125 sverdrups (one sverdrup is one million cubic meters per second, or about the total flow of all rivers into the seas).
As in, the number of cans of beer you drink in a certain length drive. (old days, before DUI laws) ie, it’s only a 3 can drive.
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My brother cooked chicken on the grill in cans. The number was slightly variable, depending on how much chicken, and how thirsty he was. IIRC, it tended to be three or four.
I’ve never really understood the people who take a unit of height and rotate it 90 degrees to turn the Empire State Building into a unit of length.
In Spain the two-cup bottle is usually called a Benjamín; the same word is used to describe the smallest of any group of sizes, or the youngest of a group of living beings.
Other bottle sizes include the missile and the magnum, the magnum being larger than the missile.
Wow, I guess It’s All About The Benjamins must have a totally different meaning in Spain, an uplifting hymn that even the smallest, most diminutive of us in both size and social standing ultimately matter…
Heh. Every time I’ve seen “all about the Benjamins” used it was without giving context and talking about the Benjamins… Franklin. This is why I love the Dope!
And from me, the pharmacist, comes the femtoliter. It’s a cubic micron, used in determining blood cell volume (which can be important). If you ever get a lab printout and see “fl” on it, that’s what it is.
We all found “femtoliter” much more amusing than “cubic micron”.
My BFF joked about walking into a drugstore and asking for a scruple, a minim, or a dram of something. I replied that doing so would probably get him thrown out of the store.
Haven’t read the whole thread, but peppers are rated in Scoville units, also devised by a pharmacist. The hottest breed varies from year to year, and last I heard, there’s a commercially available pepper that has topped 1 million units. :eek:
At least 6 peppers are >1m Scovilles by my count, probably even more than that. But many peppers at that level are just slight variations on the last hottest one, so they might be differentiated by Scoville range rather than any specific differences…
Not terribly cool, but units of temperature.
You’ve heard of:
[ul]
[li]Fahrenheit[/li][li]Celsius[/li]
And if you paid attention in school:
[li]Kelvin[/li]
There is also:
[li]Réaumur - about 80% of Celsius[/li][li]Rankine - essentially Fahrenheit’s Kelvin[/li][li]Rømer - Herr Fahrenheit’s inspiration[/li][li]Newton - °C / 3.03[/li][li]Delisle - inverted: 0°D = boiling, 150°D = freezing[/li][li]Centigrade - what people call Celsius when trying to seem smart.[/li][/ul]
Huh. I always thought that Celsius was the “fancy” way of referring to Centigrade (actually, the truth is that Centigrade is the old-fashioned term for Celsius - so of course it seems natural to people who are old enough to have had textbooks that used the older term (or teachers who persisted in using the older term) long after official usage had changed).
Nowadays, I mean, like people who want to use the more unusual word. Some older people may use it because it’s what they learned, but I see that it went out of official use in 1948. It of course means a scale of 100 degrees, but could pedantically refer to a made up thermometer if you set the scales right, or in other fields for a small change in angle.
Centigrade also might be more British, in my observations.
When I was a kid, our local newspaper had a columnist who would answer various questions about history or science that were sent to him by children, and one day, the question was, “Who invented the Fahrenheit scale?” I was a teenager at the time, and a friend of mine who had once been featured in this column said, “Duh, Mr. Celsius.”
A slug is the natural unit of mass in the foot-pound-second system. One pound force will accelerate a one slug mass at 1ft/sec^2. One lbm (pound mass) is about 1/32.2 slugs.
The interesting thing about that one is that a diary I had about the place when younger felt it necessary to include information about Réaumur, and conversion formulae for it, Celsius and Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit’s the oddball; Réaumur and Celsius are both zero at freezing point of water and Réaumur is 80 at boiling point. So for forty-plus years of my life I have known how to convert between all three temperature scales… and I have never seen a temperature quoted in Réaumur nor an instrument calibrated in it.
I nearly died laughing!
