Most obscure and useless unit of measurement

What is the most obscure and useless unit of measurement you know of? Here's a good one:

The Saybolt Universal Constant.

 

a bit, as in I'll be back in a bit.

 

I vote for the smoot!

"One smoot is defined to be equal to five feet and seven inches (1.70 m), the height of Oliver R. Smoot. Smoot was an MIT student whose fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha in October 1958 was to be used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The bridge's length was measured to be 364.4 smoots plus or minus one ear, with the "plus or minus" intended to express uncertainty of measurement. The marks are repainted each year on the Harvard Bridge by the incoming associate member class (similar to pledge class) of Lambda Chi Alpha and during the bridge renovations that occurred in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department requested that the markings be maintained, since they had become useful for identifying the location of accidents on the bridge. [4] Not so ironically, Oliver Smoot later became Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)."


List of unusual units of measurement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

richard the first's nose, hand, arm as units of linear measurement. my sister thinks they probably used another elongated part of the king as a standard of measurement.

 

How about a 'tad'? No idea whether that's Metric or Imperial!

 

Ahh, now you see 'tad' is an imperial measurement equal to approximately .314 of a metric 'petit peu', it is larger than a 'smidgin' but smaller than a 'touch.' There are approximately 5 smidgins to the tad and 3 tads to the touch. There are 17 touches in a lot and 1000 lots in an imperial 'whole lot' or f**k ton (not to be confused with a metric f**k tonne).

Hope that cleared things up Gordon.

 

Anybody fancy a 'Firkin' of beer ?????

 

Ahh, now you see over here Yonder isn't a unit so much as a direction, it means simply 'there.' So to go 'yonder' is simply to go 'over there' wherever that may be.

Interesting to see it used differently by you colonials

 

I think we may be failing on T.A.'s 'Obscurity' criteria here.
If you google "Saybolt Universal Constant" (with the quotes) you'll see that he's increased it's Google hit-rate by 100% with a single mention here ..

Not sure I can compete with that, but I once spent a mind-numbing session with my Tudor fixated other half and a friend trying to pin down exactly what a 16th century 'pennyweight loaf' weighed - which descended into realising that nobody was quite sure anywhere and consistent confusion caused by conflicts with the troy system, and interpretation thereof, had obfuscated most assertions on the matter, even local geographical perspectives cropped up. one of those things that sounded simple but proved incredibly complex. (I promise you, if anyone thinks there's a simply googled answer here... there isn't. It's turned into a bulging folder of historical bread related calculations and documents. - I refuse to get involved with their ongoing 'bread debate' now.)

A famously foul work colleague years ago used to use a most uncommon colloquial measurement for liquids... sadly not suitable for Internet use, though it always made me laugh.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

Thanks awfully, old boy!

 

Ahh, like the time you asked me to go 'an appendage' to the left, i've rarely been so happy to say yes!

 

Firkin is widely used in the brewing industry. Just as a half firkin is.

My nomination for the most useless unit is the mile, thankfully buried in most of the world today. My second nomination would be the gallon.

 

Actually I understood a firkin to mean a quarter of a barrel so please, give me a firkin of beer and I'll be 'more than happy!'

To be honest I had very little concept of quite what this meant until I worked in a brewery at which point I came to understand quite how big a single barrel was and when asked to finish one... well....

 

Now, I'm sure some are wondering just what the Saybolt Universal Constant is. Am I right? Of course I am!

This is a unit of measure in seconds for determining viscosity of liquids. It is equal to

.22sec x 180 / sec per Centistoke. But, of course, we all knew that.....

Anyway, we can from this deduce the values for other measures such as the more common Centiposie or the non-metric Reyn which is equal lbs. force-sec/ in^2 instead of the dyne-sec/100 cm^2 of the centiposie.

As Yakov Smirnov would say: "Piece of pie!"

 

Want to know how much I care about this thread? Not one single iota Don't ask me what an iota is, as I and the rest of the world have no clue what this undefined measurement equals.
Cheers

 

An Iota is the 9th letter of the Greek alphabet.In numerical use its equal to 10.


A "mickle" and a "muckle" as in , many a mickle makes a muckle.

A wheen , i had a wheen'o beers , a wheen o'them were going to the game.

It would give you a wheen o'mickles makes a muckle.

 

Oh, I dunno. I know what 5,250 feet looks like, but 1,000 metres means damn all.
Then again, I tend to write measurements as feet ('), and inches (")...which are also good for minutes/arcminutes of time/degrees and seconds/arcseconds of time/degrees.
Old fashioned, me.....

 

Over here for engineering purposes we use a specific part of the male anatomy as a unit of measure for a different amount of physical quantities, with a bewildering variety of applications.

"It's big as a ***", "It will take a *** of a time to perform that activity", "That piece of equipment is heavy as ****". On the other hand this Unit of Measure will also be employed on the diminutive scale: "That was fast as ***", "That railroad stretch will be totally unprofitable, it will be short as ***". Or "You won't be able to retrieve the Musashi, it's deep as ****". Or "Hitler couldn't beat the Russians, they were smart as ***".

The best unit of measure ever. Variety of application, flexible meaning, every guy has one.