OK, I’m proposing that the Erm be adopted as the standard unit of doubt or uncertainty; anything rating as high as ten Erms on the Mangetout scale can be considered catastrophically unbelievable, whereas seven or eight erms would only be dangerously suspicious.
I’m looking for suggestions for the names of standard units of stupidity, clumsiness, piety and any other things you may care to think of…
Please give generously.
Certainly the thumb should be the international standard for a film’s entertainment value.
A Norm is the unit of difficulty of a woodworking or other home improvement project.
0.1 Norm Changing a lightbulb
1 Norm Assembling an Ikea cabinet
10 Norm Putting a rec room in an unfinished basement
100 Norm Building your own house
1000 Norm Re-creating St Paul's Cathedral in your backyard.
Whoops is the unit of failure in iceskating.
my current novel is 7" x 4.5" x .5"
why do you ask?
The ecch is the SI unit of measure for disgust.
0.1 ecchs might be a snotty tissue on the floor instead of in the wastebasket.
1 ecch could be registered by a sink full of your roommate’s dirty dishes that haven’t been so much as rinsed in a week and a half.
10 ecchs is what those dishes would score when the mold count gets high and at least one species of fly has begun to colonize the pile.
100 ecchs is an entire house that looks like this.
1000 ecchs is–eeeew. I don’t even want to discuss it.
The six pack has long been the unofficial unit of distance on Australian roads. Of course where I work, we have a very religious truck driver who measures his routes’ distances in Hail Marys.
The tsk for measuring annoyance at other people’s noisy children. One tsk is aproximately the level of annoyance achieved by a crying toddler on a train. A whimpering small baby might only be about 400 centitsks, whereas a group of older kids running loose in a restaurant would perhaps measure 5 or 6 tsks. Kilotsks and Megatsks are usually reserved for childhood beauty pageants.
And of course the D’oh for stupidity.
I’m not sure this qualifies, but the last year I’ve been thinking about a new ruler for time and space based on these criteria:
Lowest number is 1, which equates to the smallest possible unit of time (or space)
Highest number is 100 (or 1,000 or 1,000,000 or other; I haven’t decided), which equates to the largest possible time (or space)
Scale is logarithmic.
I know all four of the mins and maxes (planc time, space, max universe size at largest expansion, universe lifetime), and it should be a simple to convert from standard units.
Probably a silly exercise, but I figure you could more easily compare things of relative size (and time).
a few
(real <1900) Kings yard length of his shoulder to finger
marriage longevity - drink count :
ie if its a sex based marriage or one is using the other we base it on drinks ,
shot of vodka - love @ first sight married in 2 weeks
Pint o guinness - long marriage
index finger and thumb it was this big (the girls talking about girth) / how much it hurt
heads , to measure height ie he was so many heads taller shorter than you
The grrr is the measure of the incompetence of the officials in a sporting contest.
For example:
1 grrr would indicate 1 or 2 minor errors favouring the opposition
5 grrrs would indicate many bad calls favouring the opposition. Some officials sight impaired or idiots.
10 grrrs, the maximum, indicate “we were robbed blind, surely those bastards are on the take!” e.g Munich Olympics basketball gold medal match.
The ho is the measure of fun to be had.
1 ho, good times.
2 hos, twice as good times.
3 hos, merry christmas.
The “Rudy”. A measure of how far apart the bars on security grates for windows need to be placed. Invented by George when we were discusing his order of burgler bars for his house. I asked him how far apart he wanted the bars welded onto the frames. He said “let me show you the size guy I want to keep out” and grabbed a coworker named Rudy. He put Rudy in a headlock and said “measure this one”.
I thought the standard unit of measure for novels was the page. (Ha! Ender, mine was funnier.)
Plus a link!
-Rue.
I like the milliHelen as a measure of Beauty. A milliHelen is a unit of beauty sufficient to launch one ship. Obviously invented by a technonerd familiar with the classics, or one forced to take a classics course to fulfill his distribution requirements. I wish I’d thought of it,
(No nasty comments. I’m a technonerd familiar with the classics. Proof will be given upon request.)
A buttload should be an overabundance of almost any physical object, somewhat akin to a plethora or even, dare I say, a passel.
fingers and toes from the last boy scout
I’d cut x number of fingers off it god would let me fuck her
Not so much a scale, but the Tyler number describes the ratio of posts in a thread containing the word foreskin. Most threads have a Tyler number of zero. Interestingly, this thread’s Tyler number is now non-zero, although I don’t expect it to get very high.
Foreskin??!?!!?!
Um…I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at there, geepee. You sure you’re posting to the right thread? To the right forum? Or to the right message board, for that matter?
The duh is a unit of obviousness. As the number of duhs rises for any statement, esp. a long statement, the total obviousness of the statement + other background information given (i.e., the homeostatic obviousity of the surroundings, or Oh) can become dangerous. If an intelligent human being is exposed to an Oh of 1kduh, many of his or her brain cells commit hari-kari apoptosis in protest or from frustration. Idiots (defined as in-duh-viduals with a high D’oh quotient, where the measurement of stupidity can be put into factorial form [“D’oh!”]) are often immune to brain damage from highly obvious statements. This may explain the enduring presence of morons in the gene pool; idiocy may carry with it a selective advantage in some circumstances, i.e., in high-Oh (or even “Oh!”) environments.
[sub]Psst. bnorton - go look for posts from the infamous and now banned Jack Dean Tyler.[/sub]
Just look at that Tyler number. We’re probably in the top 2% of all threads.
The OOOH.
a time dialation factor regarding the tendancy of time to fly when having fun.
The UGHH. (An anti-oooh)
Time dialation factor to stretch out time when you’re bored.