10 Strange Ways of Measuring Stuff

We live in a world of meters, kilograms, and seconds… and also in a world of
smoots, banana equivalent doses, and beard-seconds. Humans are great at
inventing serious tools for science, but we’re equally talented at coming up
with ridiculous, oddly specific, and surprisingly useful ways of measuring
things. Some started as jokes, others as lab in-jokes, and a few became
genuine scientific standards. Together, they reveal something funny and
strangely beautiful about how our brains make sense of the universe.

In this tour of 10 strange units of measurement, we’ll meet the prank that
turned into a unit of length, the chili scale that ranks peppers by how much
they hurt, and a risk unit that turns “this might kill you” into simple
math. By the end, you may never look at a ruler (or a banana) the same way
again.

1. The Smoot: Measuring a Bridge with a Freshman

What is a smoot?

A smoot is a nonstandard unit of length based on the height of one very
specific person: Oliver R. Smoot, an MIT freshman in 1958. One smoot equals
about 5 feet 7 inches (roughly 1.7 meters), which was Smoot’s height at the
time his classmates decided he should become a human yardstick.

The prank that became a legend

As part of a fraternity initiation, Smoot’s Lambda Chi Alpha brothers rolled
him head-over-heels across the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge.
They marked his position every “smoot” in paint, finally declaring the
bridge to be “364.4 smoots, plus or minus one ear.” The “ear” was a playful
nod to measurement uncertainty, and the joke stuck so hard that the markings
still get repainted today during renovations.

Why the smoot actually matters

At first, the smoot was nothing more than nerd humor. Over time, though,
those painted tick marks became convenient reference points: even the local
police have been known to use them when describing accident locations on the
bridge. The smoot shows how a prank can quietly become part of a city’s
practical languageand how measurement doesn’t always have to be boring or
official to be useful.

2. Banana Equivalent Dose: Radiation, But Make It Snackable

Turning scary numbers into fruit

Ionizing radiation is usually measured in sieverts and microsievertsunits
that most people never encounter outside medical scans or nuclear-plant
reports. To make these doses more relatable, some physicists started
describing them in terms of the banana equivalent dose
(BED): how much radiation you’d get from eating a single banana.

Why bananas?

Bananas contain potassium, and a tiny fraction of that potassium is naturally
radioactive. Eating one banana exposes you to roughly 0.1 microsievert of
radiation, a truly tiny amount. By expressing other exposures in “bananas,”
experts can say things like, “This airport scanner gives you about a few
bananas’ worth of radiation” and instantly make a big, scary number feel
understandable.

Educational, not official

The banana equivalent dose isn’t an official scientific unityou won’t see
it on lab reports or regulatory documents. It’s more of a teaching tool, a
way to show that small radiation doses are part of everyday life. Still, as
strange ways of measuring stuff go, “your annual banana count” is hard to
beat.

3. Beard-Second: The Blink-and-You-Miss-It Distance

How far does a beard grow in one second?

The beard-second is a humorous unit of length defined as
how far an average beard hair grows in one second. Depending on who you
ask, that’s somewhere between 5 and 10 nanometersabout the size of a few
dozen atoms laid in a row. In other words, a beard-second is fantastically,
gloriously tiny.

From light-years to face-years

The beard-second riffs on the concept of the light-year. Instead of asking
“How far does light travel in a year?”, someone flipped the idea and asked,
“How far does a beard travel in a second?” The result is a unit so
ridiculously small that it’s occasionally used tongue-in-cheek in physics
or engineering lectures to talk about nanometer-scale distances.

Why it captures the imagination

The beard-second works because it connects a cosmic ideadistance over
timewith something deeply human and down-to-earth: facial hair. It’s a
reminder that math doesn’t have to feel abstract; you can anchor even
nanometer scales to your bathroom mirror.

4. Furlong per Fortnight: Comically Slow Speed

Breaking speed down the weird way

Velocity is usually measured in miles per hour or meters per second. But if
you combine two antique unitsa furlong (one-eighth of a mile) and
a fortnight (two weeks)you get the wonderfully obscure
furlong per fortnight.

How slow is one furlong per fortnight?

One furlong per fortnight is roughly 0.000166 meters per second, or about a
millimeter every six seconds. That’s slower than a distracted toddler being
asked to put on shoes, and only slightly faster than the speed of a queue at
the DMV.

A programmer’s favorite joke unit

The furlong per fortnight often shows up in physics problems, programming
examples, and engineering memes. By converting serious speeds into this unit
(for instance, the speed of light becomes an absurdly huge number of
furlongs per fortnight), people highlight how arbitrary unit choices can be
while also sneaking humor into what might otherwise be dry calculations.

5. Micromort: The Risk of Death, in One Simple Number

One chance in a million

A micromort is a unit of risk equal to a
one-in-a-million chance of death. Instead of saying, “This activity has a
0.000001 probability of killing you,” you can just say, “It costs you one
micromort.”

Comparing risky activities

Micromorts make it easier to compare activities that sound very different
but carry similar danger. A single skydive, for example, is commonly
estimated at around 8–10 micromorts per jump; running a marathon is in the
same ballpark, while everyday driving piles up micromorts slowly over many
miles. By putting them all on the same scale, micromorts turn vague fear
into something you can think about rationally.

Why this strange unit matters

Unlike many of the humorous measurements on this list, micromorts are used
seriously in risk analysis, medicine, and policy. Doctors and statisticians
use them to explain surgical risks, extreme sports, and even environmental
hazards. It’s a slightly morbid unit, surebut it helps people understand
how risky something really is, instead of just guessing based on gut
feeling.

6. Scoville Heat Units: Quantifying the Burn

Measuring pain on your tongue

The Scoville scale measures how spicy a chili pepper (or
hot sauce) is. The unit is the Scoville Heat Unit (SHU), and it
roughly corresponds to the concentration of capsaicinoidsthe compounds that
make your mouth feel like it’s melting.

From sweet bell pepper to weaponized fire

A bell pepper scores 0 SHU; a jalapeño might land between 2,500 and
8,000 SHU. Carolina Reaper–level peppers soar into the 1,500,000+ SHU range,
and pure capsaicin tops out around 16,000,000 SHU. At that point, you’re
basically measuring “liquid regret.”

How Scoville changed food culture

Originally developed in 1912 by pharmacist Wilbur Scoville, this scale
turned what used to be vague (“kinda hot,” “pretty spicy”) into a measurable
number. Today it drives marketing for hot sauces, guides pepper breeding,
and fuels endless YouTube challenges where people voluntarily eat things
that their ancestors would have classified as “a bad idea.”

7. The Barn: Hitting the Broad Side of a Nucleus

A barn you’ll never see

In nuclear and particle physics, scientists use a unit of area called the
barn to describe the “cross section” of tiny particlesthat
is, how big a target they present for interactions. One barn equals
10⁻²⁸ square meters, roughly the cross-sectional area of a heavy
atomic nucleus like uranium.

Born in the Manhattan Project

The term “barn” was coined during World War II by physicists working on the
Manhattan Project. The joke was that these nuclear targets were “as easy to
hit as the broad side of a barn”even though, in human terms, they’re
unimaginably tiny. The name stuck, and today we talk about femtobarns and
picobarns when describing collision experiments in gigantic particle
accelerators.

When tiny numbers become intuitive

Without a unit like the barn, physicists would be stuck writing out long
strings of zeros to describe interaction probabilities. By bundling those
microscopic areas into a single unit, they make the math manageableand give
the rest of us a wonderfully weird mental image: a barn door shrunk down to
nuclear size.

8. Dol: Trying to Measure Human Pain

What’s a dol?

The dol (from dolor, Latin for “pain”) is a unit
that was once proposed to quantify how much pain a person feels. In the
mid-20th century, researchers at Cornell University used carefully
controlled heat applied to the skin and asked subjects to report how the
sensation changed. They built a 0–10 “dol scale,” where each step
represented a “just noticeable difference” in pain.

Why it never took off

The big problem? Pain is intensely subjective. Two people can experience the
same stimulus and report wildly different levels of suffering. Ethical
concerns about deliberately inflicting pain in the lab didn’t help either.
The dol didn’t become a standard; today doctors use simpler tools like
0–10 rating scales or smiley-face charts for kids.

A fascinating dead end

Even though the dol is basically extinct in modern medicine, it’s a
fascinating example of how far scientists will go to measure the
unmeasurable. It also raises a deeper question: some experiences, like pain
or grief, might resist tidy numbers no matter how clever our units become.

9. Foot-Candle: Lighting by the Glow of One Candle

Lighting the room, one candle at a time

A foot-candle is a unit of illuminance that tells you how
much light falls on a surface. Specifically, one foot-candle is the amount
of light from a one-candela source hitting a surface one foot awayessentially
“how bright it is right here if I put a candle at arm’s length.”

Where you’ll see it

Foot-candles are widely used in architecture, photography, and lighting
design, especially in the United States. Building codes and design guides
often specify recommended foot-candle levels for offices, hallways, and
operating rooms. It’s an oddly poetic unit: a literal candle, stretched into
a standard for modern LED-lit spaces.

Why it feels delightfully old-fashioned

In the metric system, the lux (lumens per square meter) is now more common,
but the foot-candle lingers on as a stubbornly charming piece of
illumination history. It bridges the gap between the era of wax and wick
and today’s smart lighting apps.

10. Mickey: The Tiny Steps of Your Computer Mouse

When your cursor speaks “mickey”

In computer graphics and hardware design, a mickey is the
smallest detectable movement of a computer mouse. The name is a nod to
Mickey Mouse (of course), and device resolution is sometimes described in
“mickeys per inch.”

How small is a mickey?

The exact size of a mickey depends on the mouse. A typical device might
detect around a few hundred to several thousand mickeys per inch. The higher
the count, the more sensitive the mouse feels. Gamers and designers who care
about pixel-perfect aiming or editing might not talk about mickeys out loud,
but their high-DPI mice are living in that world.

A playful unit hiding in your desk drawer

The mickey shows how whimsical language can infiltrate serious technology.
Under the hood of your workdaysending emails, drawing shapes, landing
headshots in a gameyour mouse is quietly counting mickeys, translating
invisible hardware increments into the smooth glide of a cursor.

Why Do We Keep Inventing Weird Ways to Measure Stuff?

These strange unitssmoots, beard-seconds, micromorts, and the restmight
look like trivia, but they serve real psychological and practical purposes.
They make abstract ideas concrete: a micromort turns “statistical risk” into
a simple, countable thing; the banana equivalent dose makes nuclear physics
feel as ordinary as breakfast.

They also create in-jokes and shared identities. Physicists talk about barns
and femtobarns; hot-sauce fans brag about Scoville levels; computer
scientists smile whenever “furlongs per fortnight” shows up in example
code. These units are part serious tool, part cultural bonding ritual.

Most importantly, strange measurements remind us that units aren’t sacred.
They’re human inventionsstories we tell about quantities. And if we can
tell those stories with a bit of humor, learning about the world gets a lot
more fun.

Experiences with Strange Ways of Measuring Stuff

Once you start noticing weird units, you see them everywhere. Think about
how often people casually measure things with “football fields,”
“Olympic-size swimming pools,” or “times the distance to the moon.” Those
aren’t official units, but they instantly paint a mental picture. That’s the
same trick the banana equivalent dose and smoot are playingjust with a bit
more nerd flair.

Imagine being a first-year student at MIT walking across the Harvard Bridge
for the first time. You notice the numbers painted along the sidewalk:
10, 20, 30… all labeled in smoots. You don’t know the backstory yet, but
you can feel the culture in it. Later, when you learn that a bunch of
sleep-deprived students once rolled their friend across the bridge to “take
measurements,” the whole structure turns into a living monument to
creativity and mischief. You’re not just crossing a riveryou’re crossing
364.4 smoots, plus or minus an ear.

Or picture a conversation between a doctor and a nervous patient considering
surgery. Talking in percentages or scientific notation can feel cold and
confusing. But if the doctor says, “This procedure adds about 10 micromorts
of riskthat’s similar to running a marathon or going skydiving once,” the
patient suddenly has a frame of reference. The unit is strange, but the
comparison is human. Micromorts give language to a kind of fear that’s
usually fuzzy and overwhelming.

Chili-head culture is another perfect example. If you’ve ever watched
someone proudly announce that a sauce is “over a million Scoville,” you’ve
seen how a quirky scale can become part badge of honor, part measuring
stick, part dare. People compare Scoville scores the way others compare
miles per gallon or smartphone benchmarks. The numbers don’t just describe
realitythey shape behavior. Without the Scoville scale, would nearly as
many people line up to try peppers that actively fight back?

Even office life is full of invisible odd units. When a lighting designer
talks about bringing a workspace up to 30 or 50 foot-candles, they’re using
a term that sounds straight out of the gaslamp era. Yet that “old-timey”
unit helps determine whether you’ll leave work with a headache or not. And
every time you nudge a mouse to wake your computer, tiny mickeys translate
your hand movement into cursor motion without you ever realizing there’s a
whimsical bit of cartoon history baked into the hardware.

These units also change how we tell stories. A news article that says “this
exposure is equivalent to eating 200 bananas” will stick in people’s minds
far more than one listing microsieverts alone. A science teacher who says
“this transistor is only a few hundred beard-seconds across” is inviting
students to laugh, wonder, and rememberthree things that are great for
learning.

In a way, strange measurements are little acts of translation. They take
something the human brain struggles withhuge distances, minuscule risks,
microscopic scalesand rewrite it into a language made of jokes, food,
faces, and everyday experiences. They don’t replace standard units; they sit
alongside them, acting as a bridge between hard data and human intuition.

So the next time you see an article measuring something in “blue whales,”
“Empire State Buildings,” or “bananas,” you’ll know what’s going on. It’s
not just clickbaitit’s part of a long tradition of playful units that make
our huge, complicated universe feel a little more graspable, one smoot, one
micromort, or one beard-second at a time.

Conclusion

From bridges measured in smoots to peppers ranked by Scoville heat, strange
units of measurement are more than triviathey’re tools that connect abstract
ideas to real human experience. Some started as pranks, others as earnest
scientific proposals, but they all show the same truth: measurement is a
human story we tell about the world.

Whether you’re explaining nuclear physics with bananas, comparing skydiving
to a surgical procedure in micromorts, or just joking about your mouse
sensitivity in mickeys, you’re participating in that story. And who knows?
One day, your inside joke might end up painted on a bridge or baked into a
scientific paperanother strange way of measuring stuff that helps someone,
somewhere, make sense of reality.