We were reading about smoots the other day, a unit of measurement based on the height of Oliver Smoot in 1964 (5 feet 7 inches). As a prank when he was a student at MIT, Oliver Smoot repeatedly lay down on the Harvard Bridge while his friends measured how many of him would make up its length. It was discovered that the bridge was 364.4 smoots.
Since then the smoot has become a semi-official measurement of distance. The original marks are repainted every year and you can even use it in the official Google Calculator (we’ve worked out that Fruit Towers is just over 14 smoots).
Having learnt about smoots, we then got lost in a tunnel of other odd (and surprisingly real) ways to measure stuff.
The beard-second - 10 nanometers, the distance the average beard grows in a second.
The sheppey - the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque
The New York second - the time between the lights turning green and the cab behind you beeping its horn. The shortest imaginable measurement of time there is.
A Warhol - a measurement of fame. Fifteen minutes worth of fame equals 1 Warhol. Can be expanded to:
- 1 kilowarhol — famous for 15,000 minutes (about ten days)
- 1 megawarhol — famous for 15 million minutes, (roughly 28.5 years)
We’d like to add our own method of measurement to all this.
The Wiki-moment - The amount of time you accidentally spend on Wikipedia before realising you really should get back to work.