Wikipedia says: “Its only modern use is in the measuring of milk temperature in cheese production. It is used in some Italian dairies making Parmigiano-Reggiano and Grana Padano cheeses and in Swiss Alp cheeses. In the Netherlands the Réaumur thermometer is used when cooking sugar syrup for deserts and sweets.”
I cannot verify.
Cool. I never knew there was an actual measure for this. 
My personal favourite unit of measurement is the ‘warp’ of herring. One warp == four herring.
Zombie time:
A peculiar (and inexact) unit of time measurement is the wake-up, used strictly in prisons and the military. It refers to a fraction of a day otherwise devoted to out-processing (before release from incarceration, discharge from service, or transfer to a new duty station).
It is traditional for short-timers to answer the question “How long you in for?” with “x days and a wake-up.”
When I was a student there was the microK----, the unit of obnoxiousness, named after Dr. K-----, one of the profs. One full K----- was unthinkable. The microcentury is, IIRC, 53 minutes, about the length of a lecture.
ignosecond: I first heard it defined as the interval of time between slamming the locked car door shut and your brain screaming that the keys are in the ignition but can also be roughly defined as the time between the moment one does something inherently stupid and the moment one realizes that it’s too late to stop the results of that action.
Alcohol has some interesting measurements: for beer there is the snorkel, nip, bomber,growler, anker firkin, kilderkin among others. For spirits, there is a hint, a drop, a dash, a pony, a splash, a pony, a jigger, a hooker, a snit, a jack.
Four years and four pages, and I’m surprised no one has mentioned a Sagan, equal to at least four billion of anything.
Well, there was the time one of our flying instructors put on a parachute and then, the weather being cold, put on a jacket on top of that. Someone pointed out that, if he actually had to bail out, that might not end well. Instructor agreed, that would certainly be an “Oh shit!” moment.
So that could hypothetically be a real use for the ignosecond measure. (This would be from the time one tries to pull the ripcord until the time one realized it’s underneath your jacket.)
I didn’t see this thread four years ago, but here’s one of my favorites. A measure of sheet resistance, the electrical resistance of a layer of metal, expressed in:
ohms per square
I pick up after my dog and refer to the “blivets” I then bring home and sometimes forget to throw them in the trash and they remain in my running pants pocket too long. I got the term from a colleague while working for Columbia University’s alumni association when she told me that a blivet is 5 pounds of shit in a three pound bag. I use the term all the time!
I just did a piece of art where I drew the contents of “Grandpa’s Hardware Junk Drawer” spread out on a pencilled grid.
Inspired by this thread, my grid was measured out in ciceros.
C’mon, you know, ciceros! “1⁄6 of the Historical French inch, which was divided into 12 Didot points”. I was always intrigued by them, because you could set up a QuarkXpress document in inches, millimeters, picas or ciceros. Yet I could never find a printing professional that remembered ever using ciceros.
That is cool!
I need to remember that.
Yes, the zombie is picking up speed.
I first heard your unit called the “ohnosecond.” As in “Oh No!”
Commonly measured just after you’ve clicked [Send] on an email and *then *looked at the addressee(s). :smack: