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19 Weird Measurements To Use That I Shared During A Humorous Lesson With My Class
As part of my professional life, I teach subjects in mechanical engineering and machining trades. During one of the pandemic lockdowns, I was running a class on metrology, the science of measurement, and for a humourous lesson, I started showing weird measurements that are recognized, so using "banana for scale" I hope everyone gets as much laughter and confusion as my students did.
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Banana For Scale
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a banana is at least 7 inches, or 177.8 millimeters, but no longer than 8 inches, or 203.2 millimeters.
Beard-Second - 5 Nanometres
Inspired by the light-year but defined as the length an average physicist's beard grows in one second.
Mickey - 0.1mm
The smallest detectable movement was registered by a computer mouse and was named after Mickey Mouse.
Pyramid Inch - 1.00106" Or 25.426924mm
This unit of measurement has been determined by Pyramidologists as being 1/25 of the sacred measurement the Cubit.
Shake - 10 Nanoseconds
This dandy was developed by nuclear engineers and astrophysicists from the old saying "two shakes of a lamb's tail".
By my calculation, that would mean that a lamb's tail shakes at nearly half the speed of light
Banana - 78 Nanosieverts
Once again our friend the banana is utilized. This time the unit of measurement is the severity of radiation one might be exposed to.
Smoot - 67" Or 1.70m
This distance was developed based on the height of Oliver Smoot, a Harvard fraternity pledge in 1958. The fraternity used Oliver to measure the Harvard Bridge. It worked out to be 364.4 Smoots +/- one ear. Oliver Smoot would later become the chairman at ANSI and president of ISO. Both organizations are responsible for standardizing measurements and engineering.
Jiffy - 0.01 Seconds
The jiffy was designated from the world of computers. The allocated time is the duration of one tick of the system's timer interrupt. Earlier computers, like 8-bit Commodores, had a jiffy at 1/60 of a second.
Warhol - 15 Minutes
This measurement is owing its origin to Andy Warhol who stated "everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes".
I heard fifteen minutes is the average.. of course some people are famous most of their lives and many are never famous.
Nibble - 4-Bits
The nibble is half of an 8-bit byte, which is 1 hexadecimal digit.
Big Mac Index
The magazine, The Economist, came up with this oddball measurement which compares nations purchasing power parity to the cost of a Big Mac hamburger.
Which allowed the Hamburgler to pull off the heist of a century via interest rate swaps by manipulating international burger prices, similar to the LIBOR scandal except that the Hamburgler got away with it because nobody ever suspected a thing.
Sagan - 4 Billion
A humourous tribute to Carl Sagan and the phrase "billions and billions" that he was often known to say. So a Sagan is used to describe a large amount, with 4 billion as the accepted minimum.
Micro-Century - 52 Minutes 35.7 Seconds
This is attributed to mathematician John von Neumann. This is the maximum length of a lecture, which also works out to be one-millionth of a century.
Garn - Level Of Incapacitation Due To Nausea
NASA developed this measurement to register the amount of nausea and motion sickness related to space travel. Jake Garn, a NASA astronaut, was known to become sick during tests and when in orbit with great frequency. The value of one Garn means the person is basically incapacitated.
Rictus - Level Of Media Coverage
Tom Weller, the author of Science Made Stupid, coined this term as a parody of the Richter scale for earthquakes. His "Rictus" scale, which measures from 1 thru 5, is designed to measure the amount of media coverage an event garners.
Megalithic Yard - 0.9074 Yards Or 0.8297 Metres
Scottish professor of engineering, Alexander Thom, concluded this measurement was the common unit used after analyzing over 250 megalithic sites in England and Scotland.
Furman - 1/65536 Of A Circle
This is named after mathematician Alan T. Furman who adapted the CORDIC algorithm for 16-bit fixed point arithmetic.
Barn-Megaparsec - 2/3 Teaspoon Or 3.33ml
This is the combination of the Barn (b) used in nuclear physics and the megaparsec (Mpc) which is used to measure the distance between galaxies.
Barn - 1.0×10−28 M2
Developed by nuclear physicists in reference to "you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn" when discussing the probability of the collision of particles in an accelerator.
Is that 10 to the negative 28th power per meter squared? The title format makes it confusing.