My dad liked to play around with units that might be more or less useful. He used to say that a unit that would be useful for extremely long, thin volumes would be a barn-parsec (a barn being "the broad side of a barn"). He never got it into general use, though.
I can still remember some obscure conversion factors between metric and British, but I never, ever can remember what a league or a furlong is, or a cubit, and I'm a little vague about the weight measure called a "stone," too.
I've heard of speeds expressed as "furlongs per fortnight" You can get absurdly high numbers for almost any rate of travel when the "per TIME" unit is measured in two-week increments.
IIRC one quantity used in VAX/VMS system tuning was measured in micro-fortnights.
A barn is 10^-24 square cm, of course. Curiously enough, I was doing some back of the envelope estimations of cosmic ray interactions last week that combined barns and parsecs in just that way.
This is great.
ReplyDeleteMy dad liked to play around with units that might be more or less useful. He used to say that a unit that would be useful for extremely long, thin volumes would be a barn-parsec (a barn being "the broad side of a barn"). He never got it into general use, though.
I can still remember some obscure conversion factors between metric and British, but I never, ever can remember what a league or a furlong is, or a cubit, and I'm a little vague about the weight measure called a "stone," too.
Obscure measures...
ReplyDeleteI've heard of speeds expressed as "furlongs per fortnight" You can get absurdly high numbers for almost any rate of travel when the "per TIME" unit is measured in two-week increments.
IIRC one quantity used in VAX/VMS system tuning was measured in micro-fortnights.
ReplyDeleteA barn is 10^-24 square cm, of course. Curiously enough, I was doing some back of the envelope estimations of cosmic ray interactions last week that combined barns and parsecs in just that way.
Barns are proof that physicists have a sense of humor.
ReplyDelete