The Bistromathic drive, as used in Slartibartfast’s Starship Bistromath. It works on the principles of relativity as applied to numbers. Just as Einstein observed that neither space nor time are absolute, with space dependent on the observer’s movement in time, and time dependent on the observer’s movement in space, so too are numbers not absolute. They depend upon the observer’s movement in restaurants.
Bistromathics includes the concept of recipriversexclusion, which means something becoms anything other than itself.
The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved.
The second nonabsolute number is the time of arrival, which is a recipriversexclusion. The given time of arrival for the reservation is guaranteed to be the only time where no guests will arrive. (On a side note, recipriversexclusion is the underlying concept between the “Somebody Else’s Problem” field.)
The third nonabsolute is the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each, the number of people at the table, and what each is prepared to pay for, with the number of people who have actually brought any money being a sub-phenomenon in this field.
A former coworker of mine talked of his times as a physics undergrad:
“Our class had the task of coming up with the most bizarre system of physical units we could possibly imagine, just to prove it was possible to work with anything. For our unit of electric charge, we chose the charge on a hogshead of electrons.”
How they were to pack electrons into a barrel is still a mystery to me…
Moles, anyone? Yes, if you’re into counting molecules, very helpful, but still odd.
And we would often, on long boring deployments onboard aircraft carriers, determine the amount of uranium depleted each hour. The favored unit was atoms/hour.
Did you never watch Star Blazers? they were always talking about how far away enemy ships were in terms of mega-meters. I remember the crew of the Argo was quite happy with the fact that in the second season (the Comet Empire) their guns could hit targets 10 mega-meters away.
If God is really watching us “from a distance” a wall seen from space would be a clear indication that we have problems that we’re incapable of working out on our own.
Other life forms would recognize the wall as “unnatural” and would start sending probes to the Earth to figure out what the wall was all about.
Not to mention the -mH, the degree of ugliness necessary to sink one ship.
The only large acceptable unit for liquid volume in Australia is the Sydney Harbour. Every dam, reservoir, river outflow, lake, bay, bight, cove, inlet, or downpour of rain is measured by the SHful.
According to this cached page, the phrase was ad-libbed by Steve Allen when he was a panelist on the show.
Since casdave mentioned the jiffy, I feel compelled to mention that there are several “official” definitions of that word, with .01 second the one I’ve seen quoted in numerous trivia columns and quizzes.
cincoflex: Here’s a discussion of since Hector was a pup. The person mentioned is probably the brother of Paris of Trojan War fame. Paris’s kidnapping of a certain beauty inspired the coining of the millihelen term mentioned earlier in this thread.
I thought of the “compressing the history of the universe/Earth/human civilization into a day” comparison I’ve seen several times. Example (off the top of my head, so not accurate): “If the earth is created at midnight, the first living creatures don’t emerge until 3 p.m. Dinosaurs show up around 10:45 p.m. With forty-five seconds to go in the day, Australopithecus takes his first steps. Christ is born five milliseconds before midnight strikes again.”
