The Measurement Joke Book
Humans love a good inside joke, and scientists/academics are no exception. Our converter supports several historically bizarre units.
The Smoot
In 1958, MIT fraternity members used Oliver R. Smoot to measure the Harvard Bridge by having him lie down repeatedly.
- 1 Smoot = 5 feet 7 inches (1.7018m). The bridge length is 364.4 Smoots ± 1 Ear.
Furlongs per Fortnight
A completely absurd unit of speed created by taking an obscure length (the Furlong, 1/8th of a mile) and dividing it by an obscure time (a Fortnight, 14 days).
- Yield: An incredibly slow speed of exactly 0.000166 meters per second (approx 1 cm per minute).
The Barn
During the Manhattan Project, physicists needed a unit to measure the cross-sectional area of atomic nuclei. Because a uranium nucleus was considered "as big as a barn" for a neutron to hit, the unit was born.
- 1 Barn = $10^{-28}$ square meters.
The Jiffy and Shake
- Jiffy: In electronics, exactly 0.01 seconds (10 ms).
- Shake: Arising from the phrase "in two shakes of a lamb's tail", nuclear physicists defined 1 shake as 10 nanoseconds ($10^{-8}$ seconds).