This week's collection of whimsical and curious stories will consider a topic that is generally very much underappreciated (except by physicists, engineers, and Germans): units of measurement. However, rather than complaining about the irrational inconvenience of silly metrics such as feet, inches, miles, and Fahrenheit, we will focus on their even more outrageous (but less commonly known) cousins.
Measuring distance:
The Mickey - One Mickey is the distance a computer mouse has to travel to cause a one-pixel movement on your screen. This will of course depend on your equipment making this rather useless
The Sheppey - One sheppey is defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque (about 7/8 miles, 1.41 kilometres, or 5.22xe-14 parsecs). The sheppey was of course invented by Douglas Adams for the "Dictionary of Objects for which no Name exists" (Link)
The Smoot - One smoot is set at 1.7m (or five feet and seven inches, for our American readers). This is of course the height of Oliver Smoot who, while being a student at MIT in the 1950s, proceeded to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge using his own body height. The bridge turns out to be 364.4 smoots long (plus or minus one ear) (Link). This is mostly interesting because he later became Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
Oliver Smoot measuring Harvard Bridge
Measuring area:
The Barn - A barn (which is a unit actually in use) quantifies the scattering cross-section of fast-moving hadrons (e.g., protons or neutrons). It describes the difficulty of making two hadrons collide inside a particle accelerator (derived from "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn"). One barn is equal to 1.0×10−28 m2. The barn also has further derivative metrics such as the outhouse (1.0×10−6 barns) and the shed (1.0×10−24 barns) (Link)
Measuring fame:
The Warhol - Andy Warhol famously stated that “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”. This is of course more true than ever in the age of instagram fame. Warhol himself was famous for a duration of around 876 kilowarhols (25 years)* (Link)
The TikTok - Similar to the warhol, the tiktok also measures the duration of fame. One tiktok is roughly 67 miliwarhols (or 1 minute)
Measuring size: Frequent readers of the British press will probably have come to the conclusion that Brits generally seem to measure size in terms of London double-decker buses (e.g., "an asteroid the size of 15 double-decker buses"). Germans use one of their states (the Saarland) to do size comparisons. Your author has yet to find out what Canadians use (given most foreign objects are only a fraction of the size of anything Canadian**).
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*starting c. in 1962 when he first exhibited works such as the Campbell's Soup Cans or the Marilyn Diptych
**one canada is roughly equal to 3.9 kilosaarländer or 3.57xe+5 double-decker buses
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