Check your units
19Sep07
A few weeks ago I was bugging my astro-buddy* to write a blog post about the funny-sounding units he uses, such as the jansky (watt per meter squared per hertz). Well, astro-bud, welcome to academia because you got scooped by Wired magazine. (*-Ok, so he’s not my `astro-buddy’ but rather my friend who is an astrophysicist… but astro-buddy sounds cool and retro.)
Particle physicists use 
- nibble: half a byte, also known as a `nybble’
- mickey: measuring the ratio of mouse-to-cursor movement
- butt: two hogsheads, ~477 L of alcohol
- jiffy: time for light to travel the radius of the electron
A few others they missed, (mostly from Wikipedia):
- slug: an English unit of mass (the slimy-slugs that eat leaves are huge here, trust me)
- sydharb: the amount of water in Sydney Harbor
- jerk: 10^9 joules
- warhol: unit of hype, equal to fifteen minutes of fame
- pub-on: minimum amount of new information required for a paper to qualify as `original research’
- gillette: amount of power for a laser to burn through a razor blade
- fonzie: unit of coolness (fictional, courtesy of Futurama)
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Filed under: Just for Fun | 3 Comments
Flip Tomato
I'm a postgraduate, expatriate physics student. RSS Feed.
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So you don’t find anything amusing at all about “barn”?
Or 1 shed = 10^-24 barn.
Those humourless particle physicists….
Haha! Good point Charles — I’d taken `barn’ for granted! The barn is a unit of cross sectional area roughly equivalent to the cross section of the uranium nucleus. It may also be the only `silly unit name’ that was classified: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000258 .
Cheers!
Stupid Wired magazine scooping me …
ah well. i have not blogged in ages. the start of my time here in Manchester has been HECTIC!! i will no doubt unleash a barrage of posts altogether sometime soon.
🙂
Evan