List of strange units of measurement
Strange units are sometimes used by scientists, especially physicists and mathematicians, and other technically-minded people such as engineers and programmers, as a means to show their (dry) sense of humour.
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2 Microfortnight 3 Nanocentury 4 Attoparsec 5 Furlong/fortnight 6 Seemeilen/Woche 7 Nanoacre 8 Hubble-barn |
FFF
While most countries have "Le Système International d'Unités" (SI), this seems to be one more reason to delve into the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of units of measurement which draws its attraction from being conservative and off-beat at the same time.
The three F's stand for:
- the length unit, a "furlong" (being 1/8th of a mile);
- the mass unit, a "firkin" of water (a firkin being 1/4th of a barrel, about 10 gallons);
- the time unit, a "fortnight".
Microfortnight
One very convenient unit deduced from this set is the 1-millionth part of the fundamental time unit of FFF, which equals 1.2096 seconds, and is a typical example of computer nerd humour. As the story goes, "The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights."[1]
The joke is in having a rather large, out-of-use unit (fortnight) combined with a fractional SI prefix (micro) to counteract that.
Another example which shows this principle is the nanocentury. Another derived time unit, reducing a rather large time span (century) by preceding it with a fractional prefix (nano). As Tom Duff at Bell Labs correctly pointed out: "How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 × 107, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, &pi seconds is a
nanocentury."[1]
It is also recorded, for example, that one CS professor used to characterize the standard length of his lectures (a little less than an hour) as a microcentury.[1]
A unit of length, maybe even more hilarious, is the attoparsec. It comes in disguise, it even has a proper abbreviation, "apc". It is, however, rarely used in the real world.
Parsecs are used in astronomy to measure enormous interstellar distances; a parsec is approximately 3.26 light-years or 3.085×1016m. Combining it with the "atto" prefix yields attoparsec, a conveniently human-scaled unit of 3.085 centimeters (about 1-7/32 inches) that has no obvious practical use.
Interestingly, 1 attoparsec/microfortnight is nearly 1 inch/second (the actual figure is 1.0043 inch per second).
1 inch/second is in the same order of magnitude as the furlong/fortnight. 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 units' fraction.
It is perhaps remotely notable that using the FFF system the speed of light may be expressed as being roughly 1.8 megafurlongs per microfortnight. [1]
A German counterpart is the Seemeilen/Woche, German for nautical miles per week. The joke consists of deliberately "blowing up" the fraction's numerator and denominator, instead of using the most simple form; 1 Sm/Woche equals about 3 mm/s, said to be the nominal value for a snail's pace, that fact being part of the joke.
(This is reasonable for the European garden snail, Helix aspersa, whose speed is dependent on the surface and ranges from 1.05 mm/s on a paper towel to 2.8 mm/s on Formica. As of 2004 the record speed in the World Snail Racing Championships in Congham, U.K., set in 1995, is 13 inches in 2 minutes = 5.5 mm/s; the Costa Rican mountain snail Velifera can travel 18"/minute = 7.62 mm/s.)
A nanoacre is a unit (about 2 mm square) of real estate on a VLSI chip. "The term gets its giggle value from the fact that VLSI nanoacres have costs in the same range as real acres [in Silicon Valley] once one figures in design and fabrication-setup costs."[1]
See also: Conversion of units
Nanocentury
Attoparsec
Furlong/fortnight
Seemeilen/Woche
Nanoacre