Your favorite units of measurement

[The Franco]

You might say to yourself once reading the title of this thread "But luis, what the hell is the point of this?" Well, as an engineering major I run across units of measurement that sound so ludicrous and made up that it's a feat of wonder that the scientific community has adopted them in the S.I. system.

But my two favorites are inductance, which is measured in Henry's and then conductance, which is measured in Siemens (which is pronounced in a way as to make me do a double take in lecture). Henry's just sounds goofy, and I honestly thought Siemens was an accent error - my professor is from Cyprus - until I saw the word spelled out.

So I want to hear some of your favorite units of measurement. They could be something from science, popular science fiction, or even something your friends have adopted as slang. Extra credit goes to topics that someone can look up on wikipedia and go "wow, I thought he was joking, but siemens is a real unit."

 

[werepossum]

I think one of the NASA teams on the Mars lander that became a Mars penetrator was using furlongs per fortnight - that's always been my favorite unit of measurement. Beyond that, one unit of pressure is the Pascal. Light on a surface can be measured in foot-candles, literally the amount of light striking a surface one foot away from a standard candle. And of course fathoms are rather humerous, at least to me.

 

[Kaos Incarnate]

Gotta be the Henry

 

[MichaelH]

Even before I read more than the headline of this thread, I thought "Furlong. Definitely furlong." There's just something about that word -- mouthfeel? arcane ridiculousness? The fact that no one knows what it is? -- that makes people snigger.

 

[Lukeje]

As a chemist I feel obligated to say the 'Mole'... If you don't know what it actually is, it sounds ridiculous when people start talking about measurements in little brown furry creatures...

 

[Anton P. Nym]

"Hogshead." It's just so archaic, yet so descriptive. At a close second place, "league" because it just sounds so steampunk-y.

-- Steve

 

[wilsonscrazybed]

I'll represent my nautical brethren and say the "fathom." Such an ominous and foreboding word when used in the right context.

A fathom is 72 inches btw, that's 1.8288 meters for all you people who don't use the king's measurements.

 

[Anarchemitis]

The Tesla. Magnetinc flux density ftw, man.

 

[SilentHunter7]

facepalms/second^2
Good indicator of where a game/thread/sexual encounter is going.



But seriously, my favorite measurements are measurements of data storage, particularly crumbs and nibbles. Even the occasional dword.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit#More_than_one_bit
Wikipedia article for the people who think I just made those words up

 

[BuckminsterF]

Theres an old Russian measurement called a pood equal to about 16 kilograms

 

[PMantix]

The English unit of mass is the slug, I always thought that was retarded

 

[PMantix]

..but my "favorite" unit of measurement has to be the pound-mass and pound-force combo. Our professor messed up the conversion like 5 times while explaining it to us and just ended up throwing the whole concept out of the class.

I'm still not entirely sure which is which.. but I honestly don't care either!

 

[Frapple]

Giraffes per fortnight.

I'd pay good money to have my speedometer in my car converted to this measurement.

 

[Sib]

Hertz, i dunno why I just like it...hertz-y

Sidenote - I'll probably forget this in a few days so if you ask me again I'm likely to say something different haha

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

The Vietnamese currency is the Dong.

 

[cleverlymadeup]

i do like the mark twain

tho i still remember one time talking with an american about the metric system and she said "i have no clue how the metric system works you have all these different names for stuff" and i go "well it goes in factors of 10 so 10 mm is 1 cm, 100 cm is 1 m, 1000m is 1 k and so forth" and she responded with "yeah that's confusing", to which i responded "well better than 12 inches is a foot, 3 feet makes a yard, 1760 yards make a mile for distance and that's on land nautical it's different and it's also a totally different system for weight, the metric system at least has the same names and increments for each type of measurement" she sadly didn't have a reply to that beyond "well the metric system is confusing"

 

[werepossum]

i do like the mark twain

tho i still remember one time talking with an american about the metric system and she said "i have no clue how the metric system works you have all these different names for stuff" and i go "well it goes in factors of 10 so 10 mm is 1 cm, 100 cm is 1 m, 1000m is 1 k and so forth" and she responded with "yeah that's confusing", to which i responded "well better than 12 inches is a foot, 3 feet makes a yard, 1760 yards make a mile for distance and that's on land nautical it's different and it's also a totally different system for weight, the metric system at least has the same names and increments for each type of measurement" she sadly didn't have a reply to that beyond "well the metric system is confusing"

Yeah, I've never figured out why the metric system is considered confusing. It works pretty well, actually.

 

[Joeshie]

As an engineer, I obviously love me some metric system. It's the only logical system of measurements out there.

 

[Anarchemitis]

As an engineer, I obviously love me some metric system. It's the only logical system of measurements out there.

Seconded. Imperial is weird. But in saying that I'm just asking for trouble. :/