46-543: The smoot / ˈ s m uː t / is a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha by Oliver R. Smoot , who in October 1958 lay down repeatedly on the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts , so that his fraternity brothers could use his height to measure the length of the bridge. One smoot is equal to Oliver Smoot's height at
92-534: A 2015 interview that the Curiosity rover team at the Jet 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. The Friedman is approximately six months, specifically six months in the future, and named after columnist Thomas Friedman who repeatedly used the span in reference to when
138-471: A WAM for Wiffle (ball) assisted measurement, is equal to a sphere 89 millimetres (3.5 inches) in diameter – the size of a Wiffle ball , a perforated, light-weight plastic ball frequently used by marine biologists as a size reference in photos to measure corals and other objects. 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
184-483: A book they start. Invented by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg , books with a lower HI are less likely to be completed. It is named after Stephen Hawking , whose book A Brief History of Time scores 6.6% on the scale. Helen of Troy (from the Iliad ) 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
230-407: A determination of Iraq's future could be surmised. A jiffy is a unit of time used in computer operating systems, being the interval of time between system timer interrupts. This interval varies from system to system, but is typically between 1 and 10 milliseconds. According to Gian-Carlo Rota , the mathematician John von Neumann used the term microcentury to denote the maximum length of
276-413: A humorous tribute to Carl Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", a sagan has been defined as a large quantity – technically at least four billion (two billion plus two billion) – of anything. Parsecs are used in astronomy to measure interstellar distances. A parsec is approximately 3.26 light-years or about 3.086×10 m (1.917×10 mi ). Combining it with
322-437: A lecture. One microcentury is 52 minutes and 35.7 seconds — one millionth of a century. A unit sometimes used in computing, the term is believed to have been coined by IBM in 1969 from the design objective "never to let the user wait more than a few nanocenturies for a response". A nanocentury is one-billionth of a century or approximately 3.156 seconds. Tom Duff is cited as saying that, to within half
368-401: A much cheaper alternative to using two reference lasers, which often pass straight through gaps in thin corals. A scientist on the research vessel EV Nautilus is credited with pioneering the technique. A barn is a serious metric unit of area used by nuclear physicists to quantify the scattering or absorption cross-section of very small particles, such as atomic nuclei. One barn
414-484: A percent, a nanocentury is π seconds. The New York second ("the shortest unit of time in the multiverse") is defined in Terry Pratchett 's novel Lords and Ladies as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind one honking. The idiomatic expression "in a New York minute ", used in various contexts to mean an instant or a very short time, is of similar origin, referring to
460-492: A storm bringing two feet of snow. One mickey is the smallest resolvable unit of distance by a given computer mouse pointing device. It is named after Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse cartoon character. 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. A Muggeseggele
506-411: A unit of a dirac which was one word per hour. The Garn is a unit used by NASA to measure nausea and travel sickness caused by space adaptation syndrome . It is named after astronaut Jake Garn , who was frequently sick during tests and on orbit. A score of one Garn means the sufferer is completely incapacitated. The Hawking Index (HI) is a unit given as a percentage, of how many people will finish
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#1732780161435552-466: Is a distant relative of Nobel Prize in Physics winner George Smoot . Public knowledge and interest in the story began when Holiday investigated the marks on the bridge years later, and published an interview with Smoot. The prank's fiftieth anniversary was commemorated on October 4, 2008 as Smoot Celebration Day at MIT, which Smoot attended. In 2011, smoot was one of the 10,000 new words added to
598-618: Is a humorous Alemannic German idiom used in Swabia to designate a nonspecific very small length or amount of something; it refers to a housefly 's scrotum . A measure of distance equal to about 7 ⁄ 8 of a mile (1.4 km ), defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque. The Sheppey is the creation of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd , included in The Meaning of Liff , their dictionary of putative meanings for words that are actually just place names. It
644-570: 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 the Anglophone world for their humor value . Most countries use the International System of Units ( SI ). In contrast, the furlong / firkin / fortnight system of units of measurement draws attention by being extremely old fashioned and off-beat at the same time. One furlong per fortnight
690-498: Is a unit of real estate on a very-large-scale integration (VLSI) chip equal to 0.00627264 sq in (4.0468564224 mm ) or the area of a square of side length 0.0792 in (2.01168 mm). VLSI nanoacres have similar total costs to acres in Silicon Valley . This unit is similar in concept to the attoparsec, combining very large and small scales. When a barn (a very small unit of area used for measuring
736-437: Is equal to 1.0 × 10 m . The name derives from the folk expressions "As big as a barn," and "Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn", used by particle accelerator physicists to refer to the probability of achieving a collision between particles. For nuclear purposes, 1.0 × 10 m is actually rather large. The outhouse ( 1.0 × 10 barns ) and shed ( 1.0 × 10 barns ) are derived by analogy. The nanoacre
782-690: Is named after the Isle of Sheppey in the UK. The Smoot is a unit of length, defined as the height in 1958 of Oliver R. Smoot , who later became the chairman of the American National Standards Institute ( ANSI ), and then the president of the International Organization for Standardization ( ISO ). The unit is used to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge . Canonically, and originally, in 1958 when Smoot
828-415: Is named after the length of White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci 's tenure under President Trump. In nuclear physics, a shake 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. A tatum is the "lowest regular pulse train that a listener intuitively infers from
874-556: Is proposed as an SI unit to replace the old "Crackpot Index" 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'. Physicist Paul Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise yet taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined
920-415: Is said to be the freezing point of water). In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the " Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth , later a famed computer scientist . According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of Mad issue 26, or 2.263 348 451 743 817 321 6473 mm. Volume
966-450: Is seldom used, as it is understood to be too large for normal conversation; its most common form is the microLenat. The Lovelace (Ll) is the unit of the lack of quality of an operating system , i.e., a measure of system administrators ' opinions about how badly the system "sucks". The unit has been coined by members of the system administrator profession who hold a basic tenet that "software that does not suck does not exist". According to
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#17327801614351012-584: 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. The speed of light may be expressed as being roughly 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight (or megafurlongs per microfortnight). In the Zork series of games, the Great Underground Empire has its own system of measurements,
1058-503: The Hubble constant and the speed of light . This amounts to around 13.1 litres (3.46 US gallons , 2.88 Imperial gallons ). This facetious engineering unit is defined as 250 watts – about a third of a horsepower . A pirate-ninja is defined as one kilowatt-hour (3.6 MJ ) per Martian day, or sol . It is equivalent to approximately 40.55 watts. It is used in the 2011 novel The Martian by Andy Weir . Weir said in
1104-590: The Usenet alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ, one Lovelace is considered a rather large quantity. SI prefixes are commonly used to denote practical quantities. A MegaFonzie is a fictional unit of measurement of an object's coolness invented by Professor Farnsworth in the 2003 Futurama episode " Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV ". A 'Fonzie' is about the amount of coolness inherent in the Happy Days character Fonzie . During World War II , scientists working for
1150-399: The " atto- " prefix (×10 ) yields attoparsec (apc), a conveniently human-scaled unit of about 3.086 centimetres (1.215 in) that is used only humorously. The beard-second is a unit of length inspired by the light-year , but applicable to extremely short distances such as those in integrated circuits . It is the length an average beard grows in one second . Kemp Bennett Kolb defines
1196-681: 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
1242-644: The 100th anniversary of MIT's move from Boston to Cambridge . The bridge is marked with painted markings indicating how many smoots there are from where the sidewalk begins on the Charles River bank in Boston, with a number every ten smoots. The marks were repainted each semester by the incoming associate member class (similar to pledge class) of Lambda Chi Alpha before they were suspended due to repeated infractions of MIT's alcohol rules. Lambda Chi Alpha alumni, along with current students of MIT, have maintained
1288-514: The British Department 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
1334-495: The Computer Revolution , Levy mentions how Richard 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". The canard is a unit of quackery created by Andy Lewis in the need for a fractional index measuring pseudoscience . It
1380-504: The bridge, to the degree that during bridge renovations in the 1980s, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police department requested that the markings be restored, since they were routinely used in police reports to identify locations on the bridge. The renovators at the Massachusetts Highway Department also scored the concrete surface of the sidewalk on the bridge at 5-foot-7-inch (1.70 m) intervals instead of
1426-426: 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". The term is believed to originate from Elizabeth Powell Crowe's 1993 novel, The Electronic Traveler . A Scaramucci (or Mooch) is 11 (sometimes 10) days and
Smoot - Misplaced Pages Continue
1472-609: The conventional 6 feet (1.83 m). The Lambda Zeta (MIT) chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha, which created the smoot markings, continues to repaint the markings once or twice per year. Starting in 2011, Google Earth enabled the ability to measure distance using smoots, with the standard length of 5 feet 7 inches. MIT's student-run college radio station WMBR broadcasts at a wavelength of two smoots (3.40 m), i.e. 88.1 MHz. List of humorous units of measurement Many people have made use of, or invented , units of measurement intended primarily for their humor value. This
1518-494: The cross sectional area of atomic nuclei ) is multiplied by a megaparsec (a very large unit of length used for measuring the distances between galaxies ), the result is a human-scaled unit of volume approximately equal to 2 ⁄ 3 of a teaspoon (about 3 mL). Similar to the barn-megaparsec, the Hubble-barn uses the barn with the Hubble length , which is the radius of the visible universe as derived by using
1564-552: The distance as exactly 100 angstroms (10 nanometres ), as does Nordling and Österman's Physics Handbook . Google Calculator uses 5 nm. 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 a male bee's penis. Television station WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York developed the "Jimmy Griffin Snow Index" to measure
1610-497: The fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary . A 2016 April Fools' Day article by the MIT Alumni Association announced that MIT would recalibrate the smoot to 65.7500 inches (1.67005 m) and the ear to 2.48031 inches (62.999874 mm), and the bridge would thus be 372 smoots, give or take 11 ears. On May 7, 2016, Smoot served as grand marshal of the alumni parade across the bridge, celebrating
1656-457: 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. 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. A wiffle, also referred to as
1702-424: The markings. Markings typically appear every 10 smoots (56 ft; 17 m), but additional marks appear at other numbers in between. For example, the 70-smoot (390 ft; 120 m) mark is accompanied by a mark for 69 . The 182.2-smoot (1,017 ft 3 in; 310.1 m) mark is accompanied by the words "Halfway to Hell" and an arrow pointing towards MIT. The markings are recognized as milestones on
1748-427: 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 the foot ), the length of the bloit varies dramatically, but the one canonical conversion to real-world units puts it at approximately two-thirds of a mile (1 km ). Liquid volume is measured in gloops, and temperature in degrees Q (57 °Q
1794-459: The negative helen (the power to beach ships) have also been described. The unit of bogosity , i.e. how bogus a person, claim, or proceeding is, derived from the fictional field of Quantum bogodynamics , is the Lenat, named after Douglas 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
1840-487: The potential severity of a snowstorm. It is named after former Buffalo mayor James D. Griffin , who in 1985 earned the nickname "Six Pack Jimmy" after suggesting residents grab a six-pack of Genesee 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
1886-484: The site itself, but the "±" is recorded on a 50th-anniversary plaque at the end of the bridge. Oliver R. Smoot was selected by his Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity pledgemaster because he was deemed shortest—which made measuring the bridge the most labor-intensive—and he was the "most scientifically named." Smoot repeatedly lay down on the bridge, let his companions mark his new position in chalk or paint, and then got up again. Eventually, he got tired from so much exercise and
Smoot - Misplaced Pages Continue
1932-401: The time of the pledge, 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m). The bridge's length was measured to be 364.4 smoots (2,035 ft; 620.1 m) "± 1 εar" with the "±" showing measurement uncertainty and spelled with an epsilon to further indicate possible error in the measurement. Over the years the "±" portion and "ε" spelling have been left out in many citations, including some markings at
1978-462: The timing of perceived musical events". It is named after the jazz pianist Art Tatum , who was notable for his high-speed playing. Banana equivalent dose , the amount of radiation exposure gained from eating an average banana. 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. In Steven Levy 's book Hackers: Heroes of
2024-411: Was a Lambda Chi Alpha pledge at MIT (class of 1962), the bridge was measured to be 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus one ear, using Mr. Smoot himself as a ruler . At the time, Smoot was 5 feet , 7 inches , or 170 cm , tall. Google Earth and Google Calculator include the smoot as a unit of measurement. The Cambridge (Massachusetts) police department adopted the convention of using Smoots to measure
2070-467: Was carried thereafter by the fraternity brothers to each new position. Smoot graduated from MIT in 1962, and then attended Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. , where he obtained his Juris Doctor . He served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute from 2001 to 2002, and then as president of the International Organization for Standardization from 2003 to 2004. He
2116-430: Was measured in ngogn (equal to 1000 cubic potrzebies), mass in blintz (equal to the mass of 1 ngogn of halva , which is "a form of pie [with] a specific gravity of 3.1416 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 as whatmeworry , cowznofski , vreeble , hoo , and hah . According to
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