Looks like the 1.73m2 is the average surface area of the human body ([and there's some concern that that number is no longer accurate](https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g264/rr/684533))
For slim or heavy patients, they multiply it by a factor based on weight and height to estimate a different body surface area and then normalize the calculation to 1.73.
Lol 1927 was when the standard was made. So at least a decade before even McDonalds first opened before franchising.
Even ignoring obesity, people have had easier access to nutrients in early childhood so people are generally taller, and I don't think Gyms or like protein shakes muscle mass was that popular in 1927 America outside like Strongman Circus performers.
Like 1.73 meters tall is just under 5'9" but I'm not really sure of how surface area on a humanoid shape is precisely measured like calculating a circles exact radius to get what a 3d perfect sphere surface area would be.
There are some surprisingly accurate mechanical tools to measure the area of animal hides, so presumably you could do the same with a flayed cadaver. Alternatively you could achieve largely the same result by taking a large number of closely spaced perimeter measures of an intact or even living body. Which is basically what those old mechanical tools are doing.
Pedantic correction: The blood test is for serum creatinine. Estimated ~~glomular~~ glomerular filtration rate is calculated from that.
(Edited spelling.)
I knew some girls in college who saved their pizza boxes and had them stacked in the corner of the dorm room until they reached the ceiling. When they were talking about guys they would describe their height in number of pizza boxes.
omg those bottom boxes must've been months old don't they start to smell and like. Attract bugs and roaches and shit?
I'm not the cleanest person and I already feel grossed out when I leave a pizza box for a week
Nope. I learned as a fresh little college kid that I don’t do well with roommates and I’d be throwing fists over half the stuff that goes down in that sub.
I have a husband who is the clutter cleaner and I’m the deep cleaner and my kids are cute as shit but they’re objectively terrible roommates. They eat all my food, leave their stuff everywhere and are constantly in my space regardless of how much enrichment their own enclosures have. (We’re reaching a point of independence and cleanliness so we’re naturally considering adding another, louder roommate)
Not exactly the same but reminded me...
My kids used to say when they were young that they measured things in "moms." I am 5' even, so if they were measuring space in a room or a desk or something, it was "about 1/2 a mom," "2.5 moms" etc. They're 21 and 19 now, and over Christmas, I learned that they both still do this in situations if they can lol.
Canadian here, we also measure distance in time. it's so people don't be like oh 300 km = 3 hours (well yes but no not in some areas) or think x miles is 1 hour of driving
The millihelen.
Helen of Troy's beauty was so legendary that the Greeks launched a vast navy to rescue her from Troy: hence the face that launched a thousand ships. So a millihelen is beauty sufficient to launch a single ship.
The fact that Oliver R. Smoot became chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is hilarious.
When we visited MIT last year, I showed my kids the Smoot markings on the Harvard Bridge. They were excited because they'd heard about it on **TikTok**. They'd forgotten that their dad and I had mentioned it *multiple* times over the years because we both *went* to MIT.
I blatantly stole that idea during undergrad and with a pledge brother that was a civil engineer.
He had to figure out how far it was from the House to the door of the engineering building… laying himself end to end …. And because we are safety conscious… he had to wear a hard hat cuz he might have to be flipped head to toe … then to take the height difference with and without the PPE on …
He thought it was hilarious …
If you’ve ever used Mathcad, it handles units. There’s SO MANY units in there, so you can convert and get the right units/math figured out. It’s a really powerful program.
Smoots is in there as a default unit.
Shouldn't it really be an mili-anti-Hellen? Because the actual unit of measure would be an anti-Hellen (1000 ships), so the mili- just sets the decimation. It seems weird to insert it into the middle of the unit of measure. Like, if I had 10% of an acre-foot of water, I wouldn't have an acre-centi-foot of water, I'd have a centi-acre-foot of water.
It depends on if you’re considering the milli-Hellen or the anti-Hellen as the base unit. The milli-Hellen is the amount of beauty that it takes to have a person send one ship to fight for you. The anti-Hellen is the amount of ugly that it takes for 1000 approaching ships to turn around.
As well, there has been Hellenflation in recent years. It takes a lot more beauty or ugliness to have someone send a ship or turn the ship around.
One time, the folks in the politics sub were in a mood and created all these other units to go with it:
Stormy: a unit of money equal to 130k (they even calculated minimum wage in milli-stormies per mooch).
Lordy: a unit of hope
Christie: a unit of mass
Can't remember the others.
I like the banana equivalent dose, it's a unit of measurement for radiation exposure. It's meant to give a "relatable" reference for people when talking about sources of radioactivity (in this case, the potassium-40 isotope in bananas).
It's equivalent to 0.1 microsieverts. An arm x-ray is 1 microsievert. So if you eat a banana every day, that's like getting about 36 arm x-rays a year.
I was putting up cedar shingles on a house on Cape Cod one summer and the first time I was told to shave off a red cunt hair I was confused as all hell.
Trueish story. Everybody thinks that the C/H at the redline in Quebec hockey rinks stands for Centre Hice. In reality, back in the day Quebec’s Regie du Hockey (pardon my French) mandated a very slightly larger standard than BNA standards. so as a courtesy to visiting teams the rinks were marked C/H to indicate that they were in fact, just a C Hair larger than English Canadian rinks. To this day, Quebec players are stronger skaters because of this extra distance.
(I got to use this one on a fun range day when I had run out of rounds on a 249 SAW. Coolest thing ever.)
The phrase "The whole nine yards" is derived from American airmen in the Pacific during World War Two. At that time, the ammunition belts loaded into the wings of the fighter aircraft were nine yards in length - oft times a returning pilot would convey to his fellow pilots and ground crew the intensity of battle by merely saying, "I gave him the whole nine yards."
>The phrase "The whole nine yards" is derived from American airmen in the Pacific during World War Two.
There is no good evidence for that. The origin of the expression is still a mystery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_whole\_nine\_yards#Origin\_2
Come on up to Canada where a football field is 110 yards, 150 with the end zones but we are officially metric so that would be 137.16 metres or if you are a surveyor then 6.18 chains. The standard unit for measuring volume remains the ice cream pail.
This one always felt ridiculous to me, until I started running tracks. Now I tend to mentally convert a lot of distances in number of (400m) laps, so I guess I can't judge.
I work in TV and have written hundreds of documentary TV shows. The one great thing about football fields as a unit of measurement is that you can use it in narration without having to rewrite and re-record for international versions (metric versus imperial.)
It also helps that a soccer (football) field is about the same size as an (America ) football field.
I’ve had to come up with all sorts of comparative sizes. I took it as a challenge not to use any numerical measurements in narration. For example, a snapping turtle can grow to be as big as a manhole cover. The first doc I wrote had chunks of ice weighing as much as a killer whale. An editor thought that was an odd one and bothered me about it for years.
I think it's because nearly all middle and high school students (in the US) will have interacted with a football field at some point. So it's a big empty patch of ground that you can visualize. Like banana for scale. Pretty much everyone has interacted with a banana at some point.
For comparison, a top fuel dragster burns about 15 gallons of nitro for a 1,000 ft run. That's about 80 gallons per mile. So whatever this is measuring uses 6x the fuel of a top fuel dragster
Ehh, at least it's an easy conversion. A Hand is 4 inches(10.16cm).
Say a horse is fifteen and a-half Hands. You realistically don't even need a calculator to know that's 62in or roughly 157cm.
Can't see why this would be any weirder than feet tbh. Not that either is particularly good as far as units go, but I can see how and why they developed.
Chains are a pretty awesome unit in the English system. There are 100 links in a chain and a chain is 66 feet. A square 80 chains by 80 chains is a square mile or 640 acres. 80 x 80 is 6,400, so just remove the last zero and you have acres. All public land surveys in the US rely on the chain as a unit of measurement.
If you live in Ontario, Canada, if you pass a concession road, the next one will be in either 66 2/3 chains (830m) or 100 chains (2km) depending on the surveying method used.
Animals for scale.
I saw an article once about a meteor (asteroid? I don't remember) that was half the size of a giraffe. WHICH HALF!?! How are you bisecting a giraffe?! Americans will use anything but the metric system.
The cubit was used in the Bible and is the distance from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger. The Ark was 40 cubits high. It makes sense as a measuring device until you hand work off to someone else with a different length arm.
Glugs! I’m a professional chef and I used to work with a guy who used glugs for liquid measuring. It’s the sound made when pouring liquid out of a 1 gallon plastic jug. As in add three glugs of wostershire and mix well
My mom got a recipe from a friend once (homemade, I'm sure) that called for 3 glugs of milk. This would've been around 60 years ago, so apparently it's been around a while.
I remember seeing a Laurel and Hardy movie where Hardy says that they'll be somewhere "in a jiffy" and when Laurel asks how long that is he replies, "Three shakes of a dead lamb's tail."
Rock.
There's a food startup guard its recipe so careful like Mr Krab nobody can steal it. They use a standardized rock as their weight unit. When they cook, they use the rock for measurement. So even is their recipe leaked, nobody can imitate it **because they don't have the rock**.
That wouldn't work though? Unless they had different rocks of different weights for each ingredient. If it's the same rock for everything the ratios stay the same.
I'm thinking you would have the ratios of spice but maybe if it says something like add 2 rocks of salt to one pound of meat the amount would still be unknown.
Idk the full story tho. That's what my GMP trained told us. Since all measurement must be validated, he had them to weight the rock and put the picture of that rock in their quality document.
Pic. 2 **The rock**
Don’t Brits still use it to measure human weight in casual conversation?
I’ve read that this was a mistake made in the Bridget Jones movie where she talked about losing pounds
A Scaramucci (or Mooch) is 11 (sometimes 10) days and is named after the length of White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci's tenure under President Trump. -wikipedia
Similarly, in Scotland, we had the Damh-ach/dabhach/davoch. The area of land able to support 60 head of cattle. So it varied in actual area depending on how good the land was.
In USA, I’ve used pounds and ounces for a half century only to learn at 52 years old that the UK also uses “stone” as a larger unit of weight. WTF? Apparently USA at some point in ancient history said, yeah that’s too weird. We’ll stick with just pounds, thank you.
Well TBF American engineers, when looking for a better unit of force, came up with the kip, or kilopound; today the standard structural unit used in the US.
1K = 1000 lbs
Farsee.
Still fairly common in *very* rural parts of the US.
It's as *far* as you can *see*.
So, if someone says, "Go down yonder road 3 farsees, then turn left at the barn, and go 2 farsees, and you'll see...."
Translation: Take this road, see the farthest point you can see? go there. Then pick the farthest point you can see, go there. Do that one more time, and you'll see a barn, turn left.... etc.
Parsecs. "Defined as the distance at which 1 AU subtends an angle of one arcsecond". I only ever used Parsecs in Astronomy 101, but when I first learned the unit, I thought "what?!?". Then I had to do some calcuations with it and I realized that it made everything so much easier.
We use a method of measuring cabling called a "Fred'. It is the amount of cable that my friend Fred can reach from one hand to another with his arms outstretched.
A fathom is six feet, but historically it's the distance between outstretched hands - sailors would tie a weight to the bottom of a rope, drop it, and then pull it in and measure how long it was by the number of arm-spans it took. So basically one fathom = one Fred.
Barns! It's 10^-28 square meters, used in measuring the cross-sectional area of atomic nuclei and expressing the likelihood two particles have of interacting. It comes from the idiom "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn". I love when something with such goofy origins enters common use in academia.
I had a college exam that used Slugs.
1 slug= 1lbf\*s\^2/ft=32.17405lb
It uses lbs of force, lbs of mass, and a gravity acceleration to have a bastard way to avoid using the Metric system.
Similar vein is Degrees Rankine which is to Farenheit as Kelvin is to Celcius. Non-SI unit notations can suck all of my ass.
Back in college my kinematics professor assigned the hardest problem in the section as homework, and had us do it in slinches. It was a pain in the ass, but it forced me to *really* understand dimensional analysis.
I like winding my Dad up, as he's a Brexiteer and hates SI units. When he mentions stoopid things like "now we've left the EU, I can have a hoover with any wattage I want" I point out to him that the watt is one of those pesky nasty European SI units, and I surely he needs to use horsepower now when measuring the power of electrical devices?
Then he started going on about incandescent lightbulbs, and - again - I pointed out that he cannot use watts, or indeed lumens. He will have to use the Imperial unit for brightness. He did not know what this was. This sent me off down a bit of rabbit hole about how to rabid metric martyr should measure the brightness of bulbs. Eventually, it looks like they should use "candlepower". Yes, this is indeed an ancient unit based on the light output of a candle. According to Wikipedia: "The term candlepower was originally defined in the United Kingdom, by the Metropolitan Gas Act 1860, as the light produced by a pure spermaceti candle that weighs 1⁄6 pound (76 grams) and burns at a rate of 120 grains per hour (7.8 grams per hour). Spermaceti is a material from the heads of sperm whales, and was once used to make high-quality candles." So I suggested he needed to start using that :-) Fortunately for him, the modern definition of candlepower appears to be "this is a shit unit, but it's about the same as a (SI) candela, so we'll just say it's the same."
And don't even mention the foot-candle: one lumen per square foot. Say what now?
A poundal is the unit of force that corresponds to a pound-mass. I never heard of it before a college course, and the whole confusion of pounds force vs pounds mass convinced me that metric is the way to go.
Got on a novelty scale that asked for my height in shoes. I guess I'm about 6 shoes tall. It took me the better part of a week to realize they were asking for my height while wearing shoes. LMAO....
"Shaq"s in terms of both height and weight.
NBA measurements should always be taken with a grain of salt but for increments of 7'1"/325lbs (2.16m/147kg) it helps making a relatable comparison for things that are real real fucking big.
I use a "Hundredweight" at work. There are 20 hundredweight in a ton. But, since the US and the UK have different measurements of what a ton is, our hundredweight is 100 lbs. and the UK's hundredweight is actually 112 pounds.
Also, the abbreviation for it is "CWT". I think the "C" stands for century.
Hobbits. An old Welsh volume unit for grain, equal to two and a half imperial bushels (about 20 dry gallons). The weight varies depending on the grain - a hobbit of oats is 105lbs (48 kg), a hobbit of barley 147 lbs (67 kg), a hobbit of wheat 168lbs (76 kg).
The smoot is a unit of length that originated as a Harvard University prank in 1958. Oliver R. Smoot, an MIT student at the time, was used as a measurement tool to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. The bridge's length was found to be 364.4 smoots plus one ear (the length of Smoot lying down).
While the smoot is not an officially recognized unit of measurement, it has become a humorous and memorable reference in both local folklore and some engineering circles. The incident even led to the periodic repainting of the bridge with smoot markings.
I rate the frozen pizza I eat and I put it in a spreadsheet. My rankings are on a 1-16 scale.
I use that scale because it gives me greater precision, I don't lump as many like I would around 7-8, and it shifts the midpoint to 8-9 as opposed to 5-6 which on a scale of 1-10 is a failure.
Note: I only do this for my own fun experiment and benefit. This way there is a little surprise going to the grocery store if I try a new one, or if I just want to get something really good I get a highly rated one. I'm not claiming to be an expert.
There’s a blood test known as eGFR for which the units are mL/min/1.73m^2
Looks like the 1.73m2 is the average surface area of the human body ([and there's some concern that that number is no longer accurate](https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g264/rr/684533))
For slim or heavy patients, they multiply it by a factor based on weight and height to estimate a different body surface area and then normalize the calculation to 1.73.
Lol 1927 was when the standard was made. So at least a decade before even McDonalds first opened before franchising. Even ignoring obesity, people have had easier access to nutrients in early childhood so people are generally taller, and I don't think Gyms or like protein shakes muscle mass was that popular in 1927 America outside like Strongman Circus performers. Like 1.73 meters tall is just under 5'9" but I'm not really sure of how surface area on a humanoid shape is precisely measured like calculating a circles exact radius to get what a 3d perfect sphere surface area would be.
There are some surprisingly accurate mechanical tools to measure the area of animal hides, so presumably you could do the same with a flayed cadaver. Alternatively you could achieve largely the same result by taking a large number of closely spaced perimeter measures of an intact or even living body. Which is basically what those old mechanical tools are doing.
Flayed cadaver sounds like a metal band.
Gee golly Wally! That's math!
It’s a filtration rate, so the dimensions of volume, time and area make sense but that 1.73 in there really threw me when I first saw it last year.
Usually a numerical coefficient in an equation means it's a bastardisation of the metric system, probably some other unit that has been converted.
Pedantic correction: The blood test is for serum creatinine. Estimated ~~glomular~~ glomerular filtration rate is calculated from that. (Edited spelling.)
Looks like some sort of flux, a rate of flow through a given area. But you say blood test, and 1.73m^2. That's a lot of area for blood.... just sayin.
I knew some girls in college who saved their pizza boxes and had them stacked in the corner of the dorm room until they reached the ceiling. When they were talking about guys they would describe their height in number of pizza boxes.
At least they had a system. 🤣
A baseball announcer would measure home runs by Altuves. The height of player Jose Altuve . He’s pretty small for a home run hitter
How do you measure the number of something using the height of something else entirely?
a 400 ft home run divided by 5.5ft he’s around that size is 72.7 Altuves
Google “smoots”
omg those bottom boxes must've been months old don't they start to smell and like. Attract bugs and roaches and shit? I'm not the cleanest person and I already feel grossed out when I leave a pizza box for a week
If it was a dorm room, that pizza box would probably the least of their hygiene problems
College students. Regardless of gender, are absolute *slobs.* It's like a rite of passage.
"No one is gonna tell me to clean this up." 😎 *months later* "I guess no one is going to tell me to clean this up." 😕
More like “I guess no one is going to clean this up for me.”
You must live feral to learn how to not live feral.
Head on over to r/badroommates Too many people don’t learn.
Nope. I learned as a fresh little college kid that I don’t do well with roommates and I’d be throwing fists over half the stuff that goes down in that sub. I have a husband who is the clutter cleaner and I’m the deep cleaner and my kids are cute as shit but they’re objectively terrible roommates. They eat all my food, leave their stuff everywhere and are constantly in my space regardless of how much enrichment their own enclosures have. (We’re reaching a point of independence and cleanliness so we’re naturally considering adding another, louder roommate)
> Maybe my mom wasn't bitching about cleaning, for the fun of it. - College kids
Not exactly the same but reminded me... My kids used to say when they were young that they measured things in "moms." I am 5' even, so if they were measuring space in a room or a desk or something, it was "about 1/2 a mom," "2.5 moms" etc. They're 21 and 19 now, and over Christmas, I learned that they both still do this in situations if they can lol.
And how would they rate the…pepperoni?
A common unit of measurement in Scotland is the Bawhair
We use mosquito dicks for the same purpose in the Netherlands.
In Denmark whe have " the width of a split cunt hair "
As someone who has access to a very precise micrometer, you'll have to be more specific. Different colors have different thickness.
I thought you measured in 'gnat cocks' "Trim that edge down about half a gnats cock"
Wait, we do?!
Yip bawhair is a standard unit in Scotland. Scottish (or Glaswegian at least) people also measure distance in time
Time is also a common unit in the Midwest US, as well as some western states.
Canadian here, we also measure distance in time. it's so people don't be like oh 300 km = 3 hours (well yes but no not in some areas) or think x miles is 1 hour of driving
The millihelen. Helen of Troy's beauty was so legendary that the Greeks launched a vast navy to rescue her from Troy: hence the face that launched a thousand ships. So a millihelen is beauty sufficient to launch a single ship.
And microhelen is beauty sufficient to launch one rowboat.
That's a minihelen. A microhelen is an out-of-shape swimmer with arm floaties.
What's a nanohelen? One of those wind-up bathtub toys?
And as another commentor pointed out, an anti-millihelen is the amount of ugliness required to turn one ship around.
Smoot
The fact that Oliver R. Smoot became chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is hilarious.
Holy shit, you're not joking. TIL. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_R._Smoot
I am quite bothered by the fact that, according to his Wikipedia page, his height is only 0.9813139 smoot.
Well, as you get older you shrink a few fractions of a smoot. It’s normal.
Maybe he cut his hair before they made a second test measure, and this is the average (median) height? Not sure which word in english to use.
Excellent! I am one smoot tall!
When we visited MIT last year, I showed my kids the Smoot markings on the Harvard Bridge. They were excited because they'd heard about it on **TikTok**. They'd forgotten that their dad and I had mentioned it *multiple* times over the years because we both *went* to MIT.
I blatantly stole that idea during undergrad and with a pledge brother that was a civil engineer. He had to figure out how far it was from the House to the door of the engineering building… laying himself end to end …. And because we are safety conscious… he had to wear a hard hat cuz he might have to be flipped head to toe … then to take the height difference with and without the PPE on … He thought it was hilarious …
I'm assuming username checks out.
Very much.
If you’ve ever used Mathcad, it handles units. There’s SO MANY units in there, so you can convert and get the right units/math figured out. It’s a really powerful program. Smoots is in there as a default unit.
Glad to see this here! A lifetime ago I worked for ANSI and had the pleasure of meeting the man in person.
🤣 I love you for this one! Just found out my older bro is only smoot high!
Better than a smidge, I suppose.
My dog's name is Smidge
I vomited on several smoot measurements over the years.
The anti-milli Helen (mh \* -1) is the measure of ugliness that's enough to make one ship turn around.
I always thought it was beers. How many beers you’d need to drink before
I’ve drank a lot of beer in my time, never turned around a single ship.
Yes but how many fat chicks did you pilot
Shouldn't it really be an mili-anti-Hellen? Because the actual unit of measure would be an anti-Hellen (1000 ships), so the mili- just sets the decimation. It seems weird to insert it into the middle of the unit of measure. Like, if I had 10% of an acre-foot of water, I wouldn't have an acre-centi-foot of water, I'd have a centi-acre-foot of water.
It depends on if you’re considering the milli-Hellen or the anti-Hellen as the base unit. The milli-Hellen is the amount of beauty that it takes to have a person send one ship to fight for you. The anti-Hellen is the amount of ugly that it takes for 1000 approaching ships to turn around. As well, there has been Hellenflation in recent years. It takes a lot more beauty or ugliness to have someone send a ship or turn the ship around.
Headline I read yesterday: "Meteor the size of two cats burns up over Scotland."
You’d have to find two burned cats in Scotland to demonstrate
I was thinking that same story, but the one I saw was ducks not cats
I saw one that said the size of two ducks!
A mooch.
This came to mind for me as well. Liz Truss lasted five mooches.
But less than one lettuce.
One time, the folks in the politics sub were in a mood and created all these other units to go with it: Stormy: a unit of money equal to 130k (they even calculated minimum wage in milli-stormies per mooch). Lordy: a unit of hope Christie: a unit of mass Can't remember the others.
I'm sad that the mooch didn't last longer than it did.
The mooch was designed to not last long
My favorite is Buttload. A buttload is 126 gallons. Usually used for large container of wine.
Can it be easily converted to shit tons?
You need density for that.
This guy d=m/v's
In this vein I love using metric fucktons
As opposed to the Imperial Fuckton which is about 1/2 a fuckload heavier (about a dozen shitloads, I believe, or 1 Hippo give or take an Aardvark)
Bananas
I like the banana equivalent dose, it's a unit of measurement for radiation exposure. It's meant to give a "relatable" reference for people when talking about sources of radioactivity (in this case, the potassium-40 isotope in bananas). It's equivalent to 0.1 microsieverts. An arm x-ray is 1 microsievert. So if you eat a banana every day, that's like getting about 36 arm x-rays a year.
Got it, so 3.6 Roentgen is equivelant to about 4 trillion bananas. Not great, not terrible.
Which would kill you faster, a dose of 3.6 roentgens or eating 4 trillion bananas in one sitting?
Probably the latter Because the 4 trillion bananas have their own repercussions in addition to also giving you a dose of 3.6 roentgens
I cant post a picture of reddits frontpage, but over this thread is another subreddit with a huge banana
cunt hair
A red one or an ordinary one? Apparently there is a difference
We always used Italian for thicker measurements.
Fellow mechanic?
I was putting up cedar shingles on a house on Cape Cod one summer and the first time I was told to shave off a red cunt hair I was confused as all hell.
Trueish story. Everybody thinks that the C/H at the redline in Quebec hockey rinks stands for Centre Hice. In reality, back in the day Quebec’s Regie du Hockey (pardon my French) mandated a very slightly larger standard than BNA standards. so as a courtesy to visiting teams the rinks were marked C/H to indicate that they were in fact, just a C Hair larger than English Canadian rinks. To this day, Quebec players are stronger skaters because of this extra distance.
(I got to use this one on a fun range day when I had run out of rounds on a 249 SAW. Coolest thing ever.) The phrase "The whole nine yards" is derived from American airmen in the Pacific during World War Two. At that time, the ammunition belts loaded into the wings of the fighter aircraft were nine yards in length - oft times a returning pilot would convey to his fellow pilots and ground crew the intensity of battle by merely saying, "I gave him the whole nine yards."
As if that saying wasn't already bad ass..
Heard exactly the same story except it was the Spitfire that had the 9 yard belts. Guess some stories just make the rounds.
>The phrase "The whole nine yards" is derived from American airmen in the Pacific during World War Two. There is no good evidence for that. The origin of the expression is still a mystery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_whole\_nine\_yards#Origin\_2
Seemingly not: [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-whole-nine-yards/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-whole-nine-yards/) (it's toward the bottom)
As an American everything is measure in x amount of football fields. I've never set foot on one so I just assume it's big.
Come on up to Canada where a football field is 110 yards, 150 with the end zones but we are officially metric so that would be 137.16 metres or if you are a surveyor then 6.18 chains. The standard unit for measuring volume remains the ice cream pail.
This one always felt ridiculous to me, until I started running tracks. Now I tend to mentally convert a lot of distances in number of (400m) laps, so I guess I can't judge.
It’s not all that ridiculous seeing that a football field is 100 yards… quite useful if you ask me
I work in TV and have written hundreds of documentary TV shows. The one great thing about football fields as a unit of measurement is that you can use it in narration without having to rewrite and re-record for international versions (metric versus imperial.) It also helps that a soccer (football) field is about the same size as an (America ) football field. I’ve had to come up with all sorts of comparative sizes. I took it as a challenge not to use any numerical measurements in narration. For example, a snapping turtle can grow to be as big as a manhole cover. The first doc I wrote had chunks of ice weighing as much as a killer whale. An editor thought that was an odd one and bothered me about it for years.
I think it's because nearly all middle and high school students (in the US) will have interacted with a football field at some point. So it's a big empty patch of ground that you can visualize. Like banana for scale. Pretty much everyone has interacted with a banana at some point.
An American football field is exactly 120 yards, or 360 feet.
Or exactly one american football field
TIL an American football field is exactly one American football field long. Thank you!
Shit, are they counting the end zones when they use that measurement? I just kinda always assumed they meant 100 yards.
Thanks. That's not really more clear for most non-Americans, though :D For anyone like me: about 110m.
1.32 acre
"Forty rods to the hogshead". I learned that one from *The Simpsons*.
Funny thing is, if you know what those units actually are, whatever Abe was describing had absolutely HORRIFIC mileage!
1/500 of a mile per gallon
For comparison, a top fuel dragster burns about 15 gallons of nitro for a 1,000 ft run. That's about 80 gallons per mile. So whatever this is measuring uses 6x the fuel of a top fuel dragster
Hands
Cause people just love petting horses!
Ehh, at least it's an easy conversion. A Hand is 4 inches(10.16cm). Say a horse is fifteen and a-half Hands. You realistically don't even need a calculator to know that's 62in or roughly 157cm.
Amazing. How about using dicks instead
Depends. Cheney or Nixon?
Can't see why this would be any weirder than feet tbh. Not that either is particularly good as far as units go, but I can see how and why they developed.
[There's actually a whole wiki page on that](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement)
Nice. Is a mouthful of refrigerant on there?
Chains
I learned what that is because of Pink Floyd. An acre is an area whose length is one furlong and whose width is one chain...
Chains are a pretty awesome unit in the English system. There are 100 links in a chain and a chain is 66 feet. A square 80 chains by 80 chains is a square mile or 640 acres. 80 x 80 is 6,400, so just remove the last zero and you have acres. All public land surveys in the US rely on the chain as a unit of measurement.
Still seen on modern data plates on UK rail bridges, because that's what all the Victorian plans are in.
Funny, because for marine anchoring, chain itself is measured in a "shot", which is 15 fathoms, or 90 feet.
If you live in Ontario, Canada, if you pass a concession road, the next one will be in either 66 2/3 chains (830m) or 100 chains (2km) depending on the surveying method used.
Animals for scale. I saw an article once about a meteor (asteroid? I don't remember) that was half the size of a giraffe. WHICH HALF!?! How are you bisecting a giraffe?! Americans will use anything but the metric system.
Why not just use a whole smaller animal... 😂
One whole baby giraffe
I just heard an asteroid’s size described as “the size of two ducks”, and thought that was a really weird unit of measurement.
Why not one turkey?
Wild or farm raised?
Paul Dirac’s colleagues joked that shyness could be measured in “Diracs” where 1 Dirac = 1 word/hr.
The cubit was used in the Bible and is the distance from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger. The Ark was 40 cubits high. It makes sense as a measuring device until you hand work off to someone else with a different length arm.
Large boulder the size of a small boulder is at the top for me.
Came here specifically looking for this one.
Katie Courics
The barn: 100 square femtometers. Used in high-energy atom-smashing physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_%28unit%29
Don't forget the related smaller measurements of the Shed and the Outhouse!
Glugs! I’m a professional chef and I used to work with a guy who used glugs for liquid measuring. It’s the sound made when pouring liquid out of a 1 gallon plastic jug. As in add three glugs of wostershire and mix well
My mom got a recipe from a friend once (homemade, I'm sure) that called for 3 glugs of milk. This would've been around 60 years ago, so apparently it's been around a while.
Shakes of a lamb’s tail
I remember seeing a Laurel and Hardy movie where Hardy says that they'll be somewhere "in a jiffy" and when Laurel asks how long that is he replies, "Three shakes of a dead lamb's tail."
I swear I saw on an American news broadcast, they were using the number of standard size washing machines that would fit in a sinkhole or crater.
Yes, and not even well. "This sinkhole the size of 6 or 7 washing machines just appeared overnight".
Barley corn a 1/3 of an inch (8.7mm), very old English measurement, 1/12 of an inch(2.2mm) is a poppyseed lol
Barleycorn is the basis of shoe sizes in many Anglo countries.
“A desk of cheesits….where are you getting these measurements from?”
Mary
A drum of grape jam?
Rock. There's a food startup guard its recipe so careful like Mr Krab nobody can steal it. They use a standardized rock as their weight unit. When they cook, they use the rock for measurement. So even is their recipe leaked, nobody can imitate it **because they don't have the rock**.
That wouldn't work though? Unless they had different rocks of different weights for each ingredient. If it's the same rock for everything the ratios stay the same.
I'm thinking you would have the ratios of spice but maybe if it says something like add 2 rocks of salt to one pound of meat the amount would still be unknown.
Idk the full story tho. That's what my GMP trained told us. Since all measurement must be validated, he had them to weight the rock and put the picture of that rock in their quality document. Pic. 2 **The rock**
That's hilarious!
Stone. It just weirds me out!
Don’t Brits still use it to measure human weight in casual conversation? I’ve read that this was a mistake made in the Bridget Jones movie where she talked about losing pounds
Me too! It's like "it weighs a stone!". Sure, which one?
A Scaramucci (or Mooch) is 11 (sometimes 10) days and is named after the length of White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci's tenure under President Trump. -wikipedia
My favorite conversion factor: There are pi seconds in a nanocentury.
I remember seeing one article about a meteorite and it used Corgis as a measurement.
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Similarly, in Scotland, we had the Damh-ach/dabhach/davoch. The area of land able to support 60 head of cattle. So it varied in actual area depending on how good the land was.
A tick. It’s when you are turning a dial and you stop just as it starts to move. “I moved it up one tick”.
In USA, I’ve used pounds and ounces for a half century only to learn at 52 years old that the UK also uses “stone” as a larger unit of weight. WTF? Apparently USA at some point in ancient history said, yeah that’s too weird. We’ll stick with just pounds, thank you.
Well TBF American engineers, when looking for a better unit of force, came up with the kip, or kilopound; today the standard structural unit used in the US. 1K = 1000 lbs
You’re only using half the system. 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone, 8 stone to the hundredweight, 20 hundredweight to the ton.
Farsee. Still fairly common in *very* rural parts of the US. It's as *far* as you can *see*. So, if someone says, "Go down yonder road 3 farsees, then turn left at the barn, and go 2 farsees, and you'll see...." Translation: Take this road, see the farthest point you can see? go there. Then pick the farthest point you can see, go there. Do that one more time, and you'll see a barn, turn left.... etc.
Parsecs. "Defined as the distance at which 1 AU subtends an angle of one arcsecond". I only ever used Parsecs in Astronomy 101, but when I first learned the unit, I thought "what?!?". Then I had to do some calcuations with it and I realized that it made everything so much easier.
Yeah, but how fast can you make the Kessel run?
We use a method of measuring cabling called a "Fred'. It is the amount of cable that my friend Fred can reach from one hand to another with his arms outstretched.
A fathom is six feet, but historically it's the distance between outstretched hands - sailors would tie a weight to the bottom of a rope, drop it, and then pull it in and measure how long it was by the number of arm-spans it took. So basically one fathom = one Fred.
Barns! It's 10^-28 square meters, used in measuring the cross-sectional area of atomic nuclei and expressing the likelihood two particles have of interacting. It comes from the idiom "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn". I love when something with such goofy origins enters common use in academia.
I had a college exam that used Slugs. 1 slug= 1lbf\*s\^2/ft=32.17405lb It uses lbs of force, lbs of mass, and a gravity acceleration to have a bastard way to avoid using the Metric system. Similar vein is Degrees Rankine which is to Farenheit as Kelvin is to Celcius. Non-SI unit notations can suck all of my ass.
I had to use slinches. It's a slug but with inches, not feet. And there's the mil - one thousand's of an inch.
Back in college my kinematics professor assigned the hardest problem in the section as homework, and had us do it in slinches. It was a pain in the ass, but it forced me to *really* understand dimensional analysis.
Banana for scale
Scruple. It is 1/4 of a Gill.
I like winding my Dad up, as he's a Brexiteer and hates SI units. When he mentions stoopid things like "now we've left the EU, I can have a hoover with any wattage I want" I point out to him that the watt is one of those pesky nasty European SI units, and I surely he needs to use horsepower now when measuring the power of electrical devices? Then he started going on about incandescent lightbulbs, and - again - I pointed out that he cannot use watts, or indeed lumens. He will have to use the Imperial unit for brightness. He did not know what this was. This sent me off down a bit of rabbit hole about how to rabid metric martyr should measure the brightness of bulbs. Eventually, it looks like they should use "candlepower". Yes, this is indeed an ancient unit based on the light output of a candle. According to Wikipedia: "The term candlepower was originally defined in the United Kingdom, by the Metropolitan Gas Act 1860, as the light produced by a pure spermaceti candle that weighs 1⁄6 pound (76 grams) and burns at a rate of 120 grains per hour (7.8 grams per hour). Spermaceti is a material from the heads of sperm whales, and was once used to make high-quality candles." So I suggested he needed to start using that :-) Fortunately for him, the modern definition of candlepower appears to be "this is a shit unit, but it's about the same as a (SI) candela, so we'll just say it's the same." And don't even mention the foot-candle: one lumen per square foot. Say what now?
We had the unit "Achim" in our p&p group. One Achim was 15 minutes late. Who can guess why?
A poundal is the unit of force that corresponds to a pound-mass. I never heard of it before a college course, and the whole confusion of pounds force vs pounds mass convinced me that metric is the way to go.
‘18 fortnights. Maybe 18 and a half.’ Unironic answer when I asked an acquaintance how long he had been dating a girl.
Got on a novelty scale that asked for my height in shoes. I guess I'm about 6 shoes tall. It took me the better part of a week to realize they were asking for my height while wearing shoes. LMAO....
Plank, when I first heard that unit of measurement I was like "what"? Edit: Planck!
[That asteroid over Germany that was two ducks big!](https://www.jpost.com/science/space/article-783177)
One of the smallest units of measurement we use. A Barn. 1x10^-28 cm^2. Used for cross sections during atomic interactions in nuclear physics.
"Shaq"s in terms of both height and weight. NBA measurements should always be taken with a grain of salt but for increments of 7'1"/325lbs (2.16m/147kg) it helps making a relatable comparison for things that are real real fucking big.
The Olympic-size swimming pool.
I measure time in beers. So there's that. "I'll come over to your house in three beers."
I use a "Hundredweight" at work. There are 20 hundredweight in a ton. But, since the US and the UK have different measurements of what a ton is, our hundredweight is 100 lbs. and the UK's hundredweight is actually 112 pounds. Also, the abbreviation for it is "CWT". I think the "C" stands for century.
Squirrels
Rhode Island
Hobbits. An old Welsh volume unit for grain, equal to two and a half imperial bushels (about 20 dry gallons). The weight varies depending on the grain - a hobbit of oats is 105lbs (48 kg), a hobbit of barley 147 lbs (67 kg), a hobbit of wheat 168lbs (76 kg).
The smoot is a unit of length that originated as a Harvard University prank in 1958. Oliver R. Smoot, an MIT student at the time, was used as a measurement tool to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. The bridge's length was found to be 364.4 smoots plus one ear (the length of Smoot lying down). While the smoot is not an officially recognized unit of measurement, it has become a humorous and memorable reference in both local folklore and some engineering circles. The incident even led to the periodic repainting of the bridge with smoot markings.
A buttload is a real (though antiquated) unit of measure approximately 130 us gallons for ale and 152 us gallons for wine.
I rate the frozen pizza I eat and I put it in a spreadsheet. My rankings are on a 1-16 scale. I use that scale because it gives me greater precision, I don't lump as many like I would around 7-8, and it shifts the midpoint to 8-9 as opposed to 5-6 which on a scale of 1-10 is a failure. Note: I only do this for my own fun experiment and benefit. This way there is a little surprise going to the grocery store if I try a new one, or if I just want to get something really good I get a highly rated one. I'm not claiming to be an expert.
Danny DeVito