13 units of measurement to blow your mind
We measure everything. Analytics becomes more and more crucial as Big Data conquers the world. We are used to units of measurement such as minutes, meters, dollars, etc.
But there are much more units that may sound stupid, but they are real and were made up for some reason.
13. Beard second
Unit of length for incredibly short distances measuring. It measures the distance that the average male’s beard grows in one second.
1 beard second amounts to about 5 nanometers, that is around 1 cm per month. So a beard grows two times slower than a new born baby grows. If the beard started growing from the moment the boy is born, in the age of 1 year he could become a boy with a beard length equal to half of his body.
12. Pony
A pony is a slang term used for measurement of alcoholic beverages.
1 pony = 29.5 ml (1 ounce)
In US you can buy a “short shot” or a “pony shot”. Pony shots are usually used with martinis, manhattans, and rob roys.
11. Smoot
A smoot is a unit of length named after Oliver R. Smoot. In 1958 he and his fratelity brothers got a task from MIT — to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston in Massachusetts. As Oliver was the shortest, he lied on the Harvard Bridge multiple times so that 4 his fratelity brothers could measure the length of the bridge. The bridge appeared to be 364.4 smoots.
Joking aside, Oliver Smoot was a Chairman of the American National Standards Institute from 2001 to 2002 and his cousin George Smoot won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006.
10. Wheaton
One wheaton amounts to 500,000 followers on Twitter. The unit is named after a Star Trek New Generation actor Wil Wheaton who’s always very active on Twitter.
9. Warhol
Warhol is a unit to measure fame. It appeared in 1968 after Andy Warhol said:
In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
So, 1 warhol amounts to 15 minutes of fame. 1 kilowarhol — famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. 1 megawarhol — famous for 15 million minutes, or 28.5 years.
8. Donkeypower
One donkeypower is about a third of a horsepower and amounts to 250 watts. It’s used to measure the power output of slow vehicles’ engines at the crank (i.e. does not include loss in power through gearbox, sprockets etc en route to drive wheel(s).
7. Poronkusema
Finnish reindeers can move quickly and have super-insulating wool to keep warm — perfect animals for rigorous climate. But unfortunately reindeers can’t walk too far without answering the call of nature. More than that, they can’t walk and pee at the same time, so they have to take a break almost every 6 miles. In Finnish, this distance is known as “poronkusema” or “reindeer’s piss” and is an old-fashioned description of distances in the countryside.
6. Sagan
An astrophysicist Carl Sagan ran 13 episodes of Cosmos series in 1980–1981. During those episodes he repeated “billions and billions” with a great frequency. He said “millions” and “trillions” a lot, too.
Today he is with no doubt associated with the phrase “billions and billions”. As a humorous tribute, a Sagan unit of measurement defines a huge amount of something.
5. Lovelace (not for feminists)
Ada Lovelace is famous for her work on Charles Babbage’s early computer, the Analytical Engine. She’s called a pioneer in computer engineering. But the Lovelace unit (LI) shows how much a computer program sucks.
4. Thaum
A pretty ordinary unit that measures magical strength. One thaum is the amount of magic power necessary to create a pigeon or three billiard balls.
3. Garn
Garn is a unit used by Nasa to measure space sickness. Weightlessness in space has a huge impact on human body, that is why it takes at least 5 years for an astronaut to get ready for launch. Astronauts often get very sick, so did senator Jake Garn during his mission to space. That is why a unit of sickness was named in his honour.
2. Helen
Have you ever heard of the Illiad? Well, Helen is a unit of measurement that measures the force of the theoretical action started by beauty. This is based on the concept that Helen of Troy had a “face that launched a thousand ships”. A face that can launch only one ship has a beauty of 1 milliHelen; a face which sinks a ship has a beauty value of -1 milliHelen.
1. Banana equivalent dose (BED)
Banana is organic material that contains some small number of radiation even if it was grown in green environments. The standard measure of radiation biological effect is a sievert, which is quite a big dose. But one tenth of a millionth of a sievert (0.1 micro sieverts, or 0.01 mrem) is a dose from eating one banana.
Don’t panic! Bananas are not dangerous if you know when to stop. Eating from 1 to 100 bananas equivalents to living near a nuclear station. The fatal dose amounts to 100,000,000 bananas. Having eaten so much one might die within 2 weeks.
There are billions and billions of such strange units of measurement, but have you come across any of them in real life?
