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Helen (unit)
A helen is a humorous unit of measurement based on the concept that Helen of Troy, from the ''Iliad'', had a "face that launched a thousand ships". The helen is thus used to measure quantities of beauty in terms of the theoretical action that could be accomplished by the wielder of such beauty. Origin The classic reference to Helen's beauty is Marlowe's lines from the 1592 play '' The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus'', "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" In the tradition of humorous pseudounits, then, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship. According to ''The Rebel Angels'', a 1981 novel by Robertson Davies, this system was invented by Cambridge mathematician W.A.H. Rushton. In his 1992 collection of jokes and limericks, Isaac Asimov claimed to have invented the term in the 1940s as a graduate student. In a 1958 letter to the ''New Scientist'', R.C. Winton proposes the millihelen as th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Humorous Units Of Measurement
Many people have made use of, or invented, units of measurement intended primarily for their humor value. This is a list of such units invented by sources that are notable for reasons other than having made the unit itself, and that are widely known in the anglophone world for their humor value. Systems FFF units Most countries use the International System of Units ( SI). In contrast, the furlong/ firkin/fortnight system of units of measurement draws attention by being extremely old fashioned and off-beat at the same time. One furlong per fortnight is very nearly 1 centimetre per minute (to within 1 part in 400). Besides having the meaning of "any obscure unit", furlongs per fortnight have also served frequently in the classroom as an example on how to reduce a unit's fraction. The speed of light may be expressed as being roughly 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight (or megafurlongs per microfortnight). Great Underground Empire (''Zork'') In the ''Zork'' series of games, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Goines
David Lance Goines (born 1945) is an American artist, calligrapher, typographer, printing entrepreneur, and author. He was born in Grants Pass, Oregon, the oldest of eight children. His father was a civil engineer and his mother a calligrapher and artist. Biography David Lance Goines was born May 29, 1945, in Grants Pass, Oregon. He was the eldest of 8 children and they were raised in Fresno, Sacramento, and Oakland. He attended Castlemont High School in Oakland. During the 1960s, Goines enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley as a Classics major. While at the University of California, Berkeley he participated in the Free Speech Movement of late 1964, which led to his expulsion. Though soon re-admitted, he graduated the University in 1965, and apprenticed as a printer in Berkeley. In 1968, he founded Saint Hieronymus Press there. The major output of the press consists of Goines' limited edition poster and calendar art. Goines art style has been described as "mini ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Humour
Humour (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humorism, humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours (Latin: ', "body fluid"), controlled human health and emotion. People of all ages and cultures respond to humour. Most people are able to experience humour—be amused, smile or laugh at something funny (such as a pun or joke)—and thus are considered to have a ''sense of humour''. The hypothetical person lacking a sense of humour would likely find the behaviour to be inexplicable, strange, or even irrational. Though ultimately decided by personal taste (aesthetics), taste, the extent to which a person finds something humorous depends on a host of variables, including geographical location, culture, Maturity (psychological), maturity, level of education, inte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Units Of Measurement
A unit of measurement is a definite magnitude of a quantity, defined and adopted by convention or by law, that is used as a standard for measurement of the same kind of quantity. Any other quantity of that kind can be expressed as a multiple of the unit of measurement. For example, a length is a physical quantity. The metre (symbol m) is a unit of length that represents a definite predetermined length. For instance, when referencing "10 metres" (or 10 m), what is actually meant is 10 times the definite predetermined length called "metre". The definition, agreement, and practical use of units of measurement have played a crucial role in human endeavour from early ages up to the present. A multitude of systems of units used to be very common. Now there is a global standard, the International System of Units (SI), the modern form of the metric system. In trade, weights and measures is often a subject of governmental regulation, to ensure fairness and trans ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Decibel
The decibel (symbol: dB) is a relative unit of measurement equal to one tenth of a bel (B). It expresses the ratio of two values of a power or root-power quantity on a logarithmic scale. Two signals whose levels differ by one decibel have a power ratio of 101/10 (approximately ) or root-power ratio of 10 (approximately ). The unit expresses a relative change or an absolute value. In the latter case, the numeric value expresses the ratio of a value to a fixed reference value; when used in this way, the unit symbol is often suffixed with letter codes that indicate the reference value. For example, for the reference value of 1 volt, a common suffix is " V" (e.g., "20 dBV"). Two principal types of scaling of the decibel are in common use. When expressing a power ratio, it is defined as ten times the logarithm in base 10. That is, a change in ''power'' by a factor of 10 corresponds to a 10 dB change in level. When expressing root-power quantities, a change in ''ampl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richter Scale
The Richter scale —also called the Richter magnitude scale, Richter's magnitude scale, and the Gutenberg–Richter scale—is a measure of the strength of earthquakes, developed by Charles Francis Richter and presented in his landmark 1935 paper, where he called it the "magnitude scale". This was later revised and renamed the local magnitude scale, denoted as ML or . Because of various shortcomings of the original scale, most seismological authorities now use other similar scales such as the moment magnitude scale () to report earthquake magnitudes, but much of the news media still erroneously refers to these as "Richter" magnitudes. All magnitude scales retain the logarithmic character of the original and are scaled to have roughly comparable numeric values (typically in the middle of the scale). Due to the variance in earthquakes, it is essential to understand the Richter scale uses logarithms simply to make the measurements manageable (i.e., a magnitude 3 quake factors 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logarithmic Scale
A logarithmic scale (or log scale) is a way of displaying numerical data over a very wide range of values in a compact way—typically the largest numbers in the data are hundreds or even thousands of times larger than the smallest numbers. Such a scale is nonlinear: the numbers 10 and 20, and 60 and 70, are not the same distance apart on a log scale. Rather, the numbers 10 and 100, and 60 and 600 are equally spaced. Thus moving a unit of distance along the scale means the number has been ''multiplied'' by 10 (or some other fixed factor). Often exponential growth curves are displayed on a log scale, otherwise they would increase too quickly to fit within a small graph. Another way to think about it is that the ''number of digits'' of the data grows at a constant rate. For example, the numbers 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 are equally spaced on a log scale, because their numbers of digits is going up by 1 each time: 2, 3, 4, and 5 digits. In this way, adding two digits ''multiplies'' the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Fink
Thomas Fink (born 1972) is an Anglo-American physicist, author and entrepreneur. He has published papers in statistical physics and its applications, written two books and designed an iPhone app. He set up the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and is a manager of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (French: Centre national de la recherche scientifique). Education and positions Fink did his BS at Caltech, where he won the annual Fisher Prize for top physicist and Green prize for best research. He then moved to England for his PhD at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was supervised by Robin Ball in the TCM group of the Cavendish Laboratory. He was a Research Fellow at Caius College, Cambridge and did a postdoc at École Normale Supérieure with Bernard Derrida. He now occupies his current positions at the London Institute and the CNRS. Research Fink is a researcher in theoretical physics. He published his first paper in the journal '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tera-
A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The prefix '' kilo-'', for example, may be added to ''gram'' to indicate ''multiplication'' by one thousand: one kilogram is equal to one thousand grams. The prefix '' milli-'', likewise, may be added to ''metre'' to indicate ''division'' by one thousand; one millimetre is equal to one thousandth of a metre. Decimal multiplicative prefixes have been a feature of all forms of the metric system, with six of these dating back to the system's introduction in the 1790s. Metric prefixes have also been used with some non-metric units. The SI prefixes are metric prefixes that were standardised for use in the International System of Units (SI) by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in resolutions dating from 1960 to 2022. Since 2009, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lucky Strike
Lucky Strike is an American brand of cigarettes owned by the British American Tobacco group. Individual cigarettes of the brand are often referred to colloquially as "Luckies." Throughout their 150 year history, Lucky Strike has had fluctuating market relevance, with the brand peaking in the 1930s and 1940s, when it became one of the top-selling cigarette brands in the United States . Name Lucky Strike was introduced as a brand of chewing tobacco by American firm R.A. Patterson in 1871, and evolved into a cigarette by the early 1900s. The brand name was inspired by the gold rushes of the era, during which only about four miners in a thousand were fortunate enough to strike gold, and was intended to connote a top-quality blend. A well-circulated urban legend holds that the name "Lucky Strike" referred to the presence of marijuana in some cigarette packs. History The brand was first introduced by R. A. Patterson of Richmond, Virginia, in 1871 as cut plug and later a cigar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atto-
A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The prefix ''kilo-'', for example, may be added to ''gram'' to indicate ''multiplication'' by one thousand: one kilogram is equal to one thousand grams. The prefix ''milli-'', likewise, may be added to ''metre'' to indicate ''division'' by one thousand; one millimetre is equal to one thousandth of a metre. Decimal multiplicative prefixes have been a feature of all forms of the metric system, with six of these dating back to the system's introduction in the 1790s. Metric prefixes have also been used with some non-metric units. The SI prefixes are metric prefixes that were standardised for use in the International System of Units (SI) by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in resolutions dating from 1960 to 2022. Since 2009, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metric Prefix
A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The prefix '' kilo-'', for example, may be added to ''gram'' to indicate ''multiplication'' by one thousand: one kilogram is equal to one thousand grams. The prefix ''milli-'', likewise, may be added to ''metre'' to indicate ''division'' by one thousand; one millimetre is equal to one thousandth of a metre. Decimal multiplicative prefixes have been a feature of all forms of the metric system, with six of these dating back to the system's introduction in the 1790s. Metric prefixes have also been used with some non-metric units. The SI prefixes are metric prefixes that were standardised for use in the International System of Units (SI) by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in resolutions dating from 1960 to 2022. Since 2009, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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