Wikipedia has a list of Humorous units of measurement, in addition to their List of unusual units of measurement. The humorous units are better, although the two lists are not mutually exclusive. the humorous units all have funny stories behind them, but some stand out because they are actually used.

Mickey (distance)

One mickey is the smallest resolvable unit of distance by a given computer mouse pointing device. It is named after Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse cartoon character.^[15] Mouse motion is reported in horizontal and vertical mickeys. Device sensitivity is usually specified in mickeys per inch. Typical resolution is 500 mickeys per inch (16 mickeys per mm), but resolutions up to 16,000 mickeys per inch are available.

Smoot (distance)

The Smoot is a unit of length, defined as the height in 1958 of Oliver R. Smoot, who later became the Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and then the president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The unit is used to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. Canonically, and originally, in 1958 when Smoot was a Lambda Chi Alpha pledge at MIT (class of 1962), the bridge was measured to be 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus one ear, using Mr. Smoot himself as a ruler.^[17] At the time, Smoot was 5 feet, 7 inches, or 170 cm, tall.^[18] Google Earth and Google Calculator include the smoot as a unit of measurement.

The Cambridge (Massachusetts) police department adopted the convention of using Smoots to measure the locations of accidents and incidents on the bridge. When the original markings were removed or covered over during bridge maintenance, the police had to request that someone reapply the Smoot scale markings.^[19] During a major bridge rebuild, the concrete sidewalk was permanently divided into segments one Smoot in length, as opposed to the regular division of six feet.^[20]

Wiffle (distance)

A Wiffle, also referred to as a WAM for Wiffle (ball) Assisted Measurement, is equal to a sphere 89 millimeters (3.5 inches) in diameter – the size of a Wiffle ball, a perforated, light-weight plastic ball frequently used by marine biologists as a size reference in photos to measure corals and other objects.^[21][22] The spherical shape makes it omnidirectional and perfect for taking a speedy measurement, and the open design also allows it to avoid being crushed by water pressure. Wiffle balls are a much cheaper alternative to using two reference lasers, which often pass straight through gaps in thin corals.

A scientist on the research vessel EV Nautilus is credited with pioneering the technique.^{[citation needed]}

Barn, outhouse, shed (area)

A barn is a serious unit of area used by nuclear physicists to quantify the scattering or absorption cross-section of very small particles, such as atomic nuclei.^[23] It is one of the very few units which are accepted to be used with SI units, and one of the most recent units to have been established (cf. the knot and the bar, other non-SI units acceptable in limited circumstances).^[24] One barn is equal to 1.0×10⁻²⁸ m². The name derives from the folk expression "Couldn't hit the broad side of a barn", used by particle accelerator physicists to refer to the difficulty of achieving a collision between particles. The outhouse (1.0×10⁻⁶ barns) and shed (1.0×10⁻²⁴ barns) are derived by analogy.

Pirate-ninja (power)

A Pirate-ninja is defined as one kilowatt-hour (3.6 MJ) per Martian day, or sol. Andy Weir, author of The Martian, revealed in a 2015 interview with Adam Savage that the Curiosity rover team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory references milli-pirate-ninjas in their meetings.^[29]

Shake (time)

In nuclear physics, a shake is 10 nanoseconds, the approximate time for a generation within a nuclear chain reaction. The term comes from the expression "two shakes of a lamb's tail", meaning quickly.^[41]

Garn (nausea)

The Garn is a unit used by NASA to measure nausea and travel sickness caused by space adaptation syndrome. It is named after astronaut Jake Garn, who was frequently sick during tests and on orbit.^[50] A score of one Garn means the sufferer is completely incapacitated.^[51]

You'll also want to go read about the Sagan, the milliHelen, the Wheaton, the beard-second, and the megaFonzie at Wikipedia.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Peter Vince)

What's the difference between granulated sugar and brown sugar, anyway? Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains. On the way to finding out why brown sugar gets lumpy while regular everyday sugar doesn't, we learn an awful lot about sugar.

A set of fossil bones discovered in 2017 in Australia has been named as a new species of pterosaur. The flying dino has been named Ferrodraco lentoni, or “Butch’s Iron Dragon” in honor of the late mayor of Winton, Graham “Butch” Lenton. It had a wingspan of 13 feet (four meters) and a skull that's two feet (60 centimeters) long. This species is quite a rare find.  

To remain in the air, these fancy fliers’ bones had to be extremely lightweight and hollow, which means their delicate remains readily collapsed and crumbled under pressure. Because of this, astonishingly few have ever been found, and Australia in particular has largely remained a blank slate.

“You could put all the fossil material in a handbag,” Unwin says.

In Ferrodraco’s case, its remains were found in an iron-rich rock, the source of its remarkable preservation—and of its genus name, a combination of the Latin words for “iron” and “dragon.” Iron-rich fluids likely permeated the animal’s carcass after it died, which later formed a tough mineral that bolstered the fragile bones and preserved them in 3D, Pentland says. Such exceptional preservation could help researchers better understand pterosaur mechanics, such as how pterosaurs flew, Unwin adds.

Butch's Iron Dragon lived approximately 96 million years ago. Read more about the fossil at National Geographic.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Travis R. Tischler)

Don't you just love it when people on the internet take a joke and expand on it with their own creativity? A couple of months ago, comedy writer Keaton Patti wrote an artificial intelligence version of a Batman story, meaning he wrote it as if it were AI generated. It is bonkers.

I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Batman movies and then asked it to write a Batman movie of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/xrgvgAyv1L

— Keaton Patti (@KeatonPatti) August 13, 2019

What was really generated were immediate memes. Drinking anarchy. Drinking bats. A coupon for parents. A tray of goth ham. Justin Davis produced an audio version of the script. Matt Shults did a four-page comic book.

You can read the whole comic here. And now Nerd Odyssey gives us the full animated treatment.  



You can peruse the responses to the original Tweet for more. -via the A.V. Club

Everyone has either owned a goldfish, used goldfish as bait, or admired goldfish in aquariums and ponds. They're everywhere, but how did they get there? Professor Anna Marie Roos of the University of Lincoln wrote the book Goldfish that answers that question and more. Roos sat down with National Geographic to talk about goldfish.

Where do goldfish fit into the animal kingdom?

Goldfish are basically carp. The Chinese originally bred them to eat. Carp, which are normally grey or green, breed like crazy, and you get variations of colors and shapes. Nature plays around. They have a smattering of pigment cells that are red or gold. A mutation would have suppressed the grey pigment cells, allowing the yellow and red ones to be expressed. Humans took a mutation and made a species of them.

In China, the golden fish takes on religious overtones.

In about the ninth century, goldfish mutants, when captured by fishermen, were not eaten and [instead] released into Buddhist ponds of mercy in an act of fang sheng, or mercy release. The monks fed and kept them, so the fish were protected by not being in the open waters. Releasing an animal into such a pond of mercy was an act of self-purification, a good deed in the Buddhist religion, which becomes even better if the animal is rare, like a goldfish versus a common carp.

You can see how they survived and reproduced with their gold color intact. Roos talks about goldfish as pets, as experimental subjects, as giveaways, and as invasive species, at NatGeo. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Daiju Azuma)

The Ohio State University Marching Band (TBDBITL), known for their elaborate and intricate formations, recreated the moon landing in a 50th anniversary tribute this past weekend. They depict scenes from the space race, the liftoff, the lunar lander, and even Neil Armstrong's famous quote. I, for one, am truly impressed. -via Boing Boing

Check out some of their previous routines.

Last October, people started noticing an inordinate number of teddy bears in Paris. Then they began to spread to other cities. They sprang up again this year, as soon as the weather allowed, and no one seems to know why.

They came quietly. Massive teddy bears, popping up along Paris’ boulevard des Gobelins to cozy up in a bookshop, or relax en terrasse. Week after week, they seemed to multiply as if by magic, inciting joy and mystery in the otherwise humdrum 13th arrondissement. A little over a year later, and the nounours des Gobelins (Teddies of Les Gobelins) have extended their paws throughout the city and beyond, from France to New York City; from the streets of Montmartre to those of Sri Lanka. “We’ve seen them on the beach, in the mountains, you name it,” says the man behind the magic, who has asked that we only refer to him as Philippe le papa des nounours (Philippe, Father of the Teddies), “of course, everyone wants to know: why?” We had a chat with Philippe to set the record straight, only to discover that the answer isn’t as clear cut as you’d think. Luckily, it is as cute.

No, it's not an art installation. It doesn't have a grand purpose. And it wasn't even planned to turn out this way. Philippe tells the story of how this teddy bear thing got off the ground at Messy Messy Chic.

See a gallery of the teddies at Instagram.

Pall Sigurdsson and his friends were diving in Indonesia and encountered a tiny coconut octopus that was using a plastic cup for protection. Thinking the flexible transparent plastic cup wasn't much protection, they offered it shells instead.

While a shell is a sturdy protection, a passing eel or flounder would probably swallow the cup with the octopus in it, most likely also killing the predator or weakening it to a point where it will be soon eaten by an even bigger fish.

We found this particular octopus at about 20 meters under the water, we tried for a long time to give it shells hoping that it would trade the shell. Coconut octopus are famous for being very picky about which shells they keep so we had to try with many different shells before it found one to be acceptable.

-via Laughing Squid

An old abandoned insane asylum always makes for a good horror story setting. The US has more than a hundred abandoned asylums, so it's a trope we are all familiar with. They have quite a bit in common with each other. First, they are abandoned. Second, these old buildings all look alike. The reason for this was the influence of Pennsylvania doctor Thomas Kirkbride. He advocated for the philosophy that the mentally ill should be treated instead of simply being isolated. It was the moral thing to do.

Kirkbride worked a few years at the Friends Asylum, learning and practicing moral treatment. Then in 1840, he became superintendent of his own asylum, the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane. It was here that he began thinking about another way to treat insanity. He started thinking a lot about the environment where patients were treated.

As part of a push to get patients out of that prison-like basement, the hospital had already commissioned a brighter, more spacious building in the countryside, but Kirkbride came to believe that even this wasn’t enough. He wanted an asylum designed with treatment in mind. A few years later, Kirkbride was given the opportunity to construct his own facility for the hospital and began to experiment. The architecture of the building, the landscaping of its grounds, the efficiency of its operation — nothing was left to chance. He documented everything he learned in an extremely detailed book called On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane With Some Remarks on Insanity and Its Treatment.

The asylum designs that came to be known as Kirkbrides were magnificent and quite progressive for their time. Read about the rise and fall of Kirkbride asylums at 99% Invisible. -via Digg

You've seen costumes where you swap out your legs for some creature's legs, and it's usually pretty funny. This T-rex costume uses the same idea in a totally different class. It has a steel frame that incorporates 31" (78 cm) stilts. The T-rex blinks, swivels its head, and roars, controlled by the reins. You can check out more pictures of it at Etsy, and see a video here. And it only costs $4,900! That includes free shipping from China and a skin repair kit. Or you could buy a truck.

Quick, which event happened first: the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza, or the death of the last woolly mammoth? The Great Pyramid was around for hundreds of years before the last mammoth died out. While mammoth populations began disappearing around 15,000 years ago due to climate change, the population of mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean held on until 4,000 years ago, when they died fairly suddenly. So why did the Wrangel Island mammoths live so much longer?

The team of researchers from Finland, Germany and Russia examined the isotope compositions of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and strontium from a large set of mammoth bones and teeth from Northern Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon, and Wrangel Island, ranging from 40,000 to 4,000 years in age. The aim was to document possible changes in the diet of the mammoths and their habitat and find evidence of a disturbance in their environment. The results showed that Wrangel Island mammoths’ collagen carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions did not shift as the climate warmed up some 10,000 years ago. The values remained unchanged until the mammoths disappeared, seemingly from the midst of stable, favorable living conditions.

This result contrasts with the findings on woolly mammoths from the Ukrainian-Russian plains, which died out 15,000 years ago, and on the mammoths of St. Paul Island in Alaska, who disappeared 5,600 years ago. In both cases, the last representatives of these populations showed significant changes in their isotopic composition, indicating changes in their environment shortly before they became locally extinct.

That opens up another question: why did the Wrangel Island mammoths go extinct? We do not have a definitive answer, but we do have a few possible explanations, which you can read about at the University of Helsinki. -via Kottke

(Image credit: Miss Barabanov)

Spider-Man: Far From Home is the second story in a trilogy that began with Spider-Man: Homecoming, but the advance marketing had to mesh with Avengers: Endgame, which hit theaters just a couple of months before. Then the planned third movie was endangered when Sony pulled out of the Spider-Man agreement with Marvel, then they worked things out for another movie to end the story in 2021. Whew. That's a lot of baggage for one film, but it managed to become the first Spider-Man film to gross more than a billion dollars worldwide. Screen Junkies, however, were able to reduce Spider-Man: Far From Home to "Spider-Man goes on vacation."

Tiki culture was  born in Southern California in 1933 as a fantasy escape from reality, a patron's trip to an exotic culture where everything was perfect for the short time they stayed. Authenticity and cultural sensitivity were minor concerns, so the trappings included both sexism (topless hula dancers) and blasphemy (cups modeled on tropical deities). As the aesthetic spread, it also became cheap. But those fruity cocktails, both authentic tropical drinks and those created for tiki bars, are so delicious!

“The pina colada is a natively Puerto Rican drink,” García Febles says, meaning that it was created in Puerto Rico, with Puerto Rican ingredients, by a Puerto Rican. “It became associated with ‘the tropics’ at the same time tiki was commodifying the concept and was sold to tourists, hence the confusion.”

The subsuming of anything with a hint of rum and fruit under the category of tiki is a misappropriation that has persisted precisely because of tiki’s original sin: What gave birth to it was a far-reaching act of cultural pillage, one that swiped broadly and unabashedly from Caribbean drinking traditions, then forced them into a pastiche molded by Polynesian aesthetics, all for U.S. consumers.

With the modern tiki revival, bartenders are working to undo that original sin, or at least toward some form of absolution — to hang on to the fun and the orgeat, just without the appropriation. But what does it mean to create a distinct sense of place when that place is not your own?

While tiki bars are now rare compared to their heyday in the 1950s, bartenders still want to offer customers tropical cocktails, but without the cultural appropriation. Read about the resurgence of tropical drinks and the issues that come with them at Eater.  -via Digg 

(Image credit: AlejandroLinaresGarcia)

Have you ever wondered if Neanderthals imagined their role in our lives, that they would be examples of the distant past? They probably had more important things to worry about, like survival. So maybe we can imagine our own roles as teachers of the past for the humans of the distant future. Animator Kirsten Lepore (previously at Neatorama) does just that in a video that takes place in the same museum, but in different time periods. -via Laughing Squid

Fifteen ships entered the Suez Canal in 1967, expecting to traverse to the Arabian Sea in about 12 hours. Instead, they were stuck there for eight years! They couldn't just leave and take the long way around the horn of Africa, because both ends of the canal were blocked. RealLifeLore tells the story -which is only eight minutes long; the rest is an ad. -via Digg