🤯 Fun units
Absurd Units Collection
Beard-seconds, smoots, sheppeys, barn-megaparsecs and foes are real units with real definitions. Pick a category, enter a value and convert them into something almost sensible.
About the Absurd Units Collection
Some units are jokes, some are serious, and some are serious units with ridiculous names. The beard-second (about 5 nanometres) was invented as a unit of length that grows at the speed of a beard. The smoot (1.7018 m) is the length of the MIT bridge measured in students. The sheppey (1,408.176 m) is the distance at which a sheep becomes indistinguishable from a dog, roughly seven eighths of a mile.
The barn-megaparsec is a genuine particle-physics unit. A barn is 10⁻²⁸ m², the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus used as a target area in scattering experiments; a megaparsec is 3.0857 × 10²² m. Multiply them and you get 3.0857 × 10⁻⁶ m³, about 3 millilitres — a volume that is simultaneously tiny and enormous.
The FFF-adjacent absurd units are equally useful for checking intuition. A furlong per fortnight is about 0.166 mm/s; an attoparsec per microfortnight is about 2.55 cm/s, roughly an inch per second. The firkin, a 90-pound mass or a 9-imperial-gallon cask, appears in both mass and volume categories because the word describes a container and its contents.
The energy list runs from the erg (10⁻⁷ J) to the foe (10⁴⁴ J), a unit used to express supernova output. The data list runs from a bit to the Library of Congress's estimated digital collection. None of these units is suitable for engineering, but all of them are memorable, and memorable units make scale easier to reason about.
How the calculation works
- 1 beard-second = 5 nanometres = 5 × 10⁻⁹ m, assuming a beard grows 5 nm per second.
- 1 attoparsec = 10⁻¹⁸ parsec = 0.0308567758 m.
- 1 barn-megaparsec = 10⁻²⁸ m² × 3.085677581 × 10²² m = 3.085677581 × 10⁻⁶ m³.
- 1 smoot = 1.7018 m; 1 sheppey = 1,408.176 m (seven eighths of a mile).
- 1 foe = 10⁴⁴ J, roughly the energy released by a supernova.
- 1 furlong per fortnight = 0.0001663095 m/s.
Reference values
| Absurd unit | Real value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Beard-second | 5 nm | Beard growth in one second |
| Mickey | 0.127 mm | One two-hundredth of an inch |
| Attoparsec | 3.086 cm | 10⁻¹⁸ parsec |
| Light-nanosecond | 29.98 cm | Distance light travels in 1 ns |
| Smoot | 1.7018 m | MIT bridge length unit |
| Sheppey | 1,408.176 m | Sheep/dog resolution limit |
| Furlong/fortnight | 0.1663 mm/s | FFF speed unit |
| Attoparsec/microfortnight | 2.551 cm/s | About one inch per second |
| Barn-megaparsec | 3.086 mL | Particle-physics volume |
| Firkin | 40.82 kg or 40.91 L | Cask mass or volume |
| Foe | 10⁴⁴ J | Supernova energy |
| Library of Congress | 10 TB | Estimated digital collection |