Many people have made use of, orinvented,units of measurement intended primarily for theirhumor value. This is a list of such units invented by sources that are notable for reasons other than having made the unit itself, and that are widely known in theAnglophone world for theirhumor value.
| Unit | Dimension | Definition | SI Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| furlong | length | 660 ft | 201.168 m |
| firkin[a] | mass | 90 lb | 40.8233 kg |
| fortnight | time | 14 days | 1,209,600 s |
Most countries use the International System of Units (SI). In contrast, thefurlong/firkin/fortnight system of units of measurement draws attention by being extremely old fashioned and off-beat at the same time.[1]
One furlong per fortnight is very nearly 1 centimetre per minute (to within 1 part in 400). Besides having the meaning of "any obscure unit", furlongs per fortnight have also served frequently in the classroom as an example on how to reduce a unit's fraction. Thespeed of light may be expressed as being roughly 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight (or megafurlongs per microfortnight).[2]
In theZork series of games, the Great Underground Empire has its own system of measurements, the most frequently referenced of which is the bloit. Defined as the distance the king's favorite pet can run in one hour (spoofing a popular legend about the history of thefoot), the length of the bloit varies dramatically, but the one canonical conversion to real-world units puts it at approximately two-thirds of amile (1 km).[b] Liquid volume is measured in gloops, and temperature in degrees Q (57 °Q is said to be thefreezing point of water).[3]
In issue 33,Mad published a partial table of the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" developed by 19-year-oldDonald E. Knuth, later a famedcomputer scientist. According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness ofMad issue 26, or2.2633484517438173216473 mm.[4]
Volume was measured in ngogn (equal to 1000 cubic potrzebies), mass inblintz (equal to the mass of 1 ngogn ofhalva, which is "a form of pie [with] aspecific gravity of3.1416 and a specific heat of .31416"), and time in seven named units (decimal powers of the average earth rotation, equal to 1 "clarke"). The system also features such units aswhatmeworry,cowznofski,vreeble,hoo, andhah.
According to the "Date" system in Knuth's article, which substitutes a 10-clarke "mingo" for a month and a 100-clarke "cowznofski", for a year, the date of October 29, 2007 is rendered as "Cal 7, 201 C. M." (for Cowznofsko Madi, or "in the Cowznofski of our MAD"). The dates are calculated from October 1, 1952, the date MAD was first published. Dates before this point are referred to (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) as "B.M." ("Before MAD.") The ten "Mingoes" are: Tales (Tal.) Calculated (Cal.) To (To) Drive (Dri.) You (You) Humor (Hum.) In (In) A (A) Jugular (Jug.) Vein (Vei.)
As a humorous tribute toCarl Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", asagan has been defined as a largequantity – technically at least four billion (two billion plus two billion) – of anything.[5][6]
Parsecs are used inastronomy to measure interstellar distances. A parsec is approximately 3.26light-years or about 3.086×1016m (1.917×1013 mi). Combining it with the "atto-" prefix (×10−18) yields attoparsec (apc), a conveniently human-scaled unit of about 3.086 centimetres (1.215 in) that is used only humorously.[7]
The beard-second is a unit oflength inspired by thelight-year, but applicable to extremely short distances such as those inintegrated circuits. It is the length an averagebeard grows in onesecond. Kemp Bennett Kolb defines the distance as exactly 100 angstroms (10 nanometres),[8] as does Nordling and Österman'sPhysics Handbook.[9]Google Calculator uses 5 nm.[10]
An Australian term for a very small distance, as in "he missed crashing into the truck by a bee’s dick". It is derived from the presumed small size of amale bee's penis.[11]
Television stationWKBW-TV inBuffalo, New York developed the "Jimmy Griffin Snow Index" to measure the potential severity of a snowstorm. It is named after former Buffalo mayorJames D. Griffin, who in 1985 earned the nickname "Six Pack Jimmy" after suggesting residents grab a six-pack ofGenesee beer to wait out an upcoming snowstorm. The index is measured in cans of beer, with roughly one can for every 4 inches (10 cm) of expected snowfall (the index is not perfectly linear at its lower levels as originally introduced); thus, Griffin's six-pack would be recommended for a storm bringing two feet of snow.[12]
One mickey is thesmallest resolvable unit of distance by a givencomputer mouse pointing device. It is named after Walt Disney'sMickey Mouse cartoon character.[13] Mouse motion is reported in horizontal and vertical mickeys. Device sensitivity is usually specified in mickeys per inch. Typical resolution is 500 mickeys per inch (16 mickeys per mm), but resolutions up to 16,000 mickeys per inch (600 mickeys per mm) are available.
AMuggeseggele is a humorousAlemannic German idiom used inSwabia to designate a nonspecific very small length or amount of something; it refers to ahousefly'sscrotum.[14][15]
A measure of distance equal to about7⁄8 of amile (1.4 km), defined as the closest distance at whichsheep remain picturesque. The Sheppey is the creation ofDouglas Adams andJohn Lloyd, included inThe Meaning of Liff, their dictionary of putative meanings for words that are actually just place names.[16] It is named after theIsle of Sheppey in the UK.
The Smoot is a unit of length, defined as the height in 1958 ofOliver R. Smoot, who later became the chairman of theAmerican National Standards Institute (ANSI), and then the president of theInternational Organization for Standardization (ISO). The unit is used to measure the length of theHarvard Bridge. Canonically, and originally, in 1958 when Smoot was aLambda Chi Alpha pledge atMIT (class of 1962), the bridge was measured to be 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus one ear, using Mr. Smoot himself as aruler.[17] At the time, Smoot was 5feet, 7inches, or 170cm, tall.[18]Google Earth andGoogle Calculator include the smoot as a unit of measurement.
The Cambridge (Massachusetts) police department adopted the convention of using Smoots to measure the locations of accidents and incidents on the bridge. When the original markings were removed or covered over during bridge maintenance, the police had to request that someone reapply the Smoot scale markings.[19] During a major bridge rebuild, the concrete sidewalk was permanently divided into segments one Smoot in length, as opposed to the regular division of six feet.[20]
A wiffle, also referred to as a WAM for Wiffle (ball) assisted measurement, is equal to a sphere 89 millimetres (3.5 inches) in diameter – the size of aWiffle ball, a perforated, light-weight plastic ball frequently used bymarine biologists as a size reference in photos to measurecorals and other objects.[21][22] The spherical shape makes it omnidirectional and perfect for taking a speedy measurement, and the open design also allows it to avoid being crushed by water pressure. Wiffle balls are a much cheaper alternative to using two reference lasers, which often pass straight through gaps in thin corals.
A scientist on the research vesselEV Nautilus is credited with pioneering the technique.[23][failed verification]
Abarn is a seriousmetric unit of area used by nuclear physicists to quantify the scattering or absorption cross-section of very small particles, such as atomic nuclei.[24] One barn is equal to1.0×10−28 m2. The name derives from the folk expressions "As big as a barn," and "Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn", used byparticle accelerator physicists to refer to the probability of achieving a collision between particles. For nuclear purposes,1.0×10−28 m2 is actually rather large.[25] The outhouse (1.0×10−6 barns) and shed (1.0×10−24 barns) are derived by analogy.[26][27][28]
The nanoacre is a unit of real estate on avery-large-scale integration (VLSI)chip equal to 0.00627264 sq in (4.0468564224 mm2) or the area of a square of side length 0.0792 in (2.01168 mm). VLSI nanoacres have similar total costs toacres inSilicon Valley.[29]
This unit is similar in concept to the attoparsec, combining very large and small scales. When abarn (a very small unit of area used for measuring the cross sectional area ofatomic nuclei) is multiplied by amegaparsec (a very large unit of length used for measuring the distances betweengalaxies), the result is a human-scaled unit of volume approximately equal to2⁄3 of ateaspoon (about 3 mL).[30][31]
Similar to the barn-megaparsec, the Hubble-barn uses the barn with theHubble length, which is the radius of the visible universe as derived by using theHubble constant and thespeed of light. This amounts to around 13.1litres (3.46 USgallons, 2.88 Imperialgallons).
This facetious engineering unit is defined as 250watts – about a third of ahorsepower.[32]
A pirate-ninja is defined as onekilowatt-hour (3.6MJ) per Martian day, orsol. It is equivalent to approximately 40.55 watts. It is used in the 2011 novelThe Martian byAndy Weir. Weir said in a 2015 interview that theCuriosity rover team at theJet Propulsion Laboratory uses the similar unit 'watt-hours per sol' in their meetings, and the team told Weir that they should just call them milli-pirate-ninjas.[33]
The Friedman is approximately six months, specifically six months in the future, and named after columnistThomas Friedman who repeatedly used the span in reference to when a determination of Iraq's future could be surmised.[34][35][36][37][38][39][40]
A jiffy is a unit of time used in computer operating systems, being the interval of time betweensystem timer interrupts. This interval varies from system to system, but is typically between 1 and 10 milliseconds.
According toGian-Carlo Rota,[41] the mathematicianJohn von Neumann used the term microcentury to denote the maximum length of a lecture. One microcentury is 52 minutes and 35.7 seconds— one millionth of a century.[42]
A unit sometimes used in computing, the term is believed to have been coined byIBM in 1969 from the design objective "never to let the user wait more than a few nanocenturies for a response".[43] A nanocentury is one-billionth of a century or approximately 3.156 seconds.Tom Duff is cited as saying that, to within half a percent, a nanocentury isπ seconds.[44]
The New York second ("the shortest unit of time in the multiverse") is defined inTerry Pratchett's novelLords and Ladies as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind one honking.[45] The idiomatic expression "in aNew York minute", used in various contexts to mean an instant or a very short time, is of similar origin, referring to the busyness of New York and impatience of its residents.
An "ohnosecond" is the second after one makes a terrible mistake, such as deleting the wrong file or sending a text message to the wrong person, where the person in question can do nothing but say "oh no".[46] The term is believed to originate from Elizabeth Powell Crowe's 1993 novel,The Electronic Traveler.[47]
A Scaramucci (or Mooch) is 11 (sometimes 10) days and is named after the length of White House Communications DirectorAnthony Scaramucci's tenure under President Trump.[48][49][50][51]
In nuclear physics, ashake is 10 nanoseconds, the approximate time for a generation within a nuclear chain reaction. The term comes from the expression "two shakes of a lamb's tail", meaning quickly.[52]
A tatum is the "lowest regularpulse train that a listener intuitively infers from the timing of perceived musical events". It is named after the jazz pianistArt Tatum,[53] who was notable for his high-speed playing.
Banana equivalent dose, the amount of radiation exposure gained from eating an average banana.[54] A single BED is considered to be negligibly small, posing no health risk.
These units describe dimensions which are not and cannot be covered by the International System of Units.
InSteven Levy's bookHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Levy mentions howRichard Greenblatt prioritized his work over bathing, leading to a strong stench. Therefore, Greenblatt's coworkers conceived of the blatt as a joke, though the milliblatt was used more, as the blatt was so powerful it was "just about inconceivable".[55]
The canard is a unit ofquackery created by Andy Lewis in the need for a fractional index measuringpseudoscience.[56] It is proposed as anSI unit to replace the old "Crackpot Index"[57] that was presented in 1998.
Quack words include 'energy', 'holistic', 'vibrations', 'magnetic healing', 'quantum'. These words are usually borrowed from physics and used to promote dubious health claims.
The scale is from 0 to 10, with 0 being 'no quackery' and 10 being 'complete quackery'.[58][verification needed]
PhysicistPaul Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise yet taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit of a dirac which was one word per hour.[59]
The Garn is a unit used by NASA to measure nausea and travel sickness caused byspace adaptation syndrome. It is named after astronautJake Garn, who was frequently sick during tests and on orbit.[60] A score of one Garn means the sufferer is completely incapacitated.[61]
Invented by mathematicianJordan Ellenberg, theHawking Index (HI) is the percentage of a book's readers who will finish it. Books with a lower HI are less likely to be completed. It is named afterStephen Hawking, whose bookA Brief History of Time scores 6.6% on the scale.[62]
Helen of Troy (from theIliad) is widely known as "the face that launched a thousand ships". Thus, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship. Other derived units such as the negative helen (the power tobeach ships) have also been described.
The unit ofbogosity, i.e. how bogus a person, claim, or proceeding is, derived from the fictional field ofquantum bogodynamics, is the Lenat, named afterDouglas Lenat, a computer scientist and professor who failed one of his students on an exam because they answered "AI is bogus" on all of the questions. The Lenat itself is seldom used, as it is understood to be too large for normal conversation; its most common form is the microLenat.[63][64]
The Lovelace (Ll) is the unit of the lack of quality of anoperating system, i.e., a measure ofsystem administrators' opinions about how badly the system "sucks". The unit was coined by members of the system administrator profession who hold a basic tenet that "software that does not suck does not exist". According to theUsenet alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ, one Lovelace is considered a rather large quantity. SI prefixes are commonly used to denote practical quantities.[citation needed]
AMegaFonzie is a fictional unit of measurement of an object's coolness invented byProfessor Farnsworth in the 2003Futurama episode "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV". A 'Fonzie' is about the amount of coolness inherent in theHappy Days characterFonzie.[65]
DuringWorld War II, scientists working for the BritishDepartment of Miscellaneous Weapons Development encountered a particularly obstructive Royal Navy officer called Commander Pouter, for whom the unit of Obstruction was named, due to his implacable opposition to any work being carried out in the field for which he was personally responsible.
Subsequently, the micropouter was used, as it was hoped that no individual of a similarly difficult disposition would be encountered, and the pouter was too large a unit for everyday use.[66]
Tom Weller suggests the Rictus scale for earthquake intensity (a takeoff of the conventionalRichter scale), measuring media coverage of the event.[67]
| Rictus scale # | Richter scale equivalent | Media coverage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0–3 | Small articles in local papers |
| 2 | 3–5 | Lead story on local news; mentioned on network news |
| 3 | 5–6.5 | Lead story on network news; wire-service photos appear in newspapers nationally; governor visits scene |
| 4 | 6.5–7.5 | Network correspondents sent to scene; president visits area; commemorative T-shirts appear |
| 5 | 7.5+ | Covers of weekly news magazines; network specials; "instant books" appear |
This is a unit of fame, hype, or infamy, named for the American puzzle creator and editor,Will Shortz. The measure is the number of times one's name has appeared inThe New York Times crossword puzzle as either a clue or solution. Arguably, this number should only be calculated for the Shortz era (1993–present).Shortz himself is 1 Shortz famous.[citation needed]
Invented bySan Francisco Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub, this rates county fairs by the quality of their musical acts. Fairs are rated a scale of one to four Springfields, "in honor ofRick Springfield, arguably the greatest county fair free act in history."[68]
| Animal | SGU Units |
|---|---|
| Corgi | 0.05 |
| Canada Goose | 0.14 |
| Duck | 0.2 |
| Penguin | 0.2 |
| Half a giraffe | 0.5 |
| Peacock | 0.55 |
| Elephant | 1.25 |
The standardised giraffe unit (SGU) is proposed by theEuropean Space Agency'sNear-Earth Object Coordination Centre as a standardised unit for animal size reference.[69] The agency defines the SGU in terms of other animals as shown in the adjoining table.
In theDiscworld series of comic fantasy novels byTerry Pratchett, the thaum is a basic unit of magical strength, defined as the amount of magic needed to create one small whitepigeon or three normal sizedbilliard balls.[70]
This is a unit of fame orhype, derived from the dictum attributed toAndy Warhol that "everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes". It representsfifteen minutes of fame. Some multiples are:
First used byCullen Murphy in 1997.[71]
The Wheaton is a measurement ofTwitter followers relative to celebrityWil Wheaton, equal to 500,000 followers. The unit was invented byJohn Kovalic in the May 21, 2009 edition of hiswebcomicDork Tower.[72] The comic includes references to units named for other celebrities, such asNeil Gaiman,John Hodgman,Jonathan Coulton, andFelicia Day.[73][74]
Minutes per Big Mac (alternatively,minimum wage minutes per Big Mac) refers to how many minutes one has to work in a country or region at average wage (or, correspondingly, atminimum wage) to afford oneBig Mac, ahamburger sold byMcDonald's, in that country or region.[75][76][77]
Specifically noting the bridge's length of 364.4 Smoots (+/- 1 ear), the plaque, a gift of the MIT Class of 1962, honors the prank's 50th anniversary.
