Thursday, September 13, 2007

Obscure Units of measurement

Found this interesting post on wired....

Gou (180 milliliters — better known as a rice cup for an electric cooker), pack year (cigarette consumption based on one pack a day for a year), nibble (typically four bits of binary code, or half a byte), score (20 of something), hand (4 inches of horse height), twip (1/20 of a typesetting point), thrave (24 sheaves of wheat), shake (10 nanoseconds), mickey (ratio of computer mouse movement to onscreen cursor movement), jansky (strength of radio signals from space), butt (two hogsheads, or about 126 gallons, of booze), smoot (a measure of length developed by some MIT students, equal to 5 feet, 7 inches — the height of one Oliver R. Smoot).

URL -> http://www.wired.com/culture/education/magazine/15-09/st_units

No comments: