It’s hard to beat the smoot. It has such historicity and usefulness.
I’ve always liked the barn:
During Manhattan Project research on the atomic bomb during World War II, American physicists Marshall Holloway and Charles P. Baker were working at Purdue University on a project using a particle accelerator to measure the cross sections of certain nuclear reactions. According to an account of theirs from a couple years later, they were dining in a cafeteria in December 1942 and discussing their work. They “lamented” that there was no name for the unit of cross section and challenged themselves to develop one. They initially tried to find the name of “some great man closely associated with the field” that they could name the unit after, but struggled to find one that was appropriate. They considered “Oppenheimer” too long (in retrospect, they considered an “Oppy” to perhaps have been allowable), and considered “Bethe” to be too easily confused with the commonly-used Greek letter beta. They then considered naming it after John Manley, another scientist associated with their work, but considered “Manley” too long and “John” too closely associated with toilets. But this latter association, combined with the “rural background” of one of the scientists, suggested to them the term “barn”, which also worked because the unit was “really as big as a barn.” According to the authors, the first published use of the term was in a (secret) Los Alamos report from late June 1943, on which the two originators were co-authors.[2]
Oh, that is lovely!
How about buttload?
Wow. I never would have imagined that buttload was a real thing. I don’t know whether to be amused or disappointed. 
A unit of measure mentioned in past threads. No need to repeat here.
I’ve used that one, many years ago when I was a young guy working in a screen printing shop. It would generally be something like pulling the first impression and showing it to the foreman to make sure it looked okay before you actually ran the job. And he might say something like “Move your blue screen up just a (that unit of measurement).”
The part that makes the Smoot interesting to me is that, after his graduation from MIT, Smoot eventually ended up as head of the National Institute of Standards.
I’ve never heard that factoid before, but that is hilarious!!
Really. That makes me smile.
Here’s a fun little fact: while it’s usage has shifted over the years to include true but triviall things, originally “factoid” meant someone that is accepted as true even though it isn’t. The suffix -oid generally means something that resembles a thing, but isn’t that thing: android (man-like), asteroid (star-like), ovoid (egg-like), factoid (fact-like).
Some common factoids: you can see the Great Wall of China from space; you only use 10% of your brain; the taste bud map.
What I learned recently was that the term was coined by Norman Mailer. He defined them as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper”.
On the subject of units:
It’s been said that Helen of Troy possessed such beauty that it caused the launch of a thousand ships. Some time more recently, I saw a suggestion that a unit called the millihelen should be defined as a unit of beauty sufficient to cause the launch one ship.
I still wonder how many millihelens a B quark has.
(and yes, damnit, I still call them “Truth” and “Beauty”, not “Top” and “Bottom”)
Smoot also has two famous Smoot-relatives.
George Smoot, Nobel prize and Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? winner.
Reed Smoot, co-author of the Great Depression aggravating Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act.
Also famous for this iconic scientific paper with his colleagues Alpher and Gamow.
Which of course leads to the concept of the negative milliHelen, the unit of ugliness necessary to sink one ship.
That seems to me like it might have been a feature, not a bug: In the same way that “ohm” lends itself to \Omega as a symbol, the “bethe” could have \beta as its symbol.
Maybe call it an inverse milliHelen?
So, the nelehillim ? Sounds like an obscure biblical people, or an unpublished LotR race.
There is also HelenOS, an experimental μK/multi-server design project sort of similar to the GNU HURD, wich touts itself as the operating system that launched a thousand tasks, or somesuch.
October 1, 2024 - former US President Jimmy Carter turns 100 years old.