[2] In the Zork series of games, the Great Underground Empire has its own system of measurements, the most frequently referenced of which is the bloit.
Defined as the distance the king's favorite pet can run in one hour (spoofing a popular legend about the history of the foot), the length of the bloit varies dramatically, but the one canonical conversion to real-world units puts it at approximately two-thirds of a mile (1 km).
[3] In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth, later a famed computer scientist.
Combining it with the "atto-" prefix (×10−18) yields attoparsec (apc), a conveniently human-scaled unit of about 3.086 centimetres (1.215 in) that is used only humorously.
[7] The beard-second is a unit of length inspired by the light-year, but applicable to extremely short distances such as those in integrated circuits.
Kemp Bennett Kolb defines the distance as exactly 100 angstroms (10 nanometres),[8] as does Nordling and Österman's Physics Handbook.
[11] Television station WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York developed the "Jimmy Griffin Snow Index" to measure the potential severity of a snowstorm.
It is named after former Buffalo mayor James D. Griffin, who in 1985 earned the nickname "Six Pack Jimmy" after suggesting residents grab a six-pack of Genesee beer to wait out an upcoming snowstorm.
A Muggeseggele is a humorous Alemannic German idiom used in Swabia to designate a nonspecific very small length or amount of something; it refers to a housefly's scrotum.
The Cambridge (Massachusetts) police department adopted the convention of using Smoots to measure the locations of accidents and incidents on the bridge.
[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.
[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.
[23][failed verification] A barn is a serious metric unit of area used by nuclear physicists to quantify the scattering or absorption cross-section of very small particles, such as atomic nuclei.
[26][27][28] The nanoacre is a unit of real estate on a very-large-scale integration (VLSI) chip equal to 0.00627264 sq in (4.0468564224 mm2) or the area of a square of side length 0.0792 in (2.01168 mm).
According to Gian-Carlo Rota,[41] the mathematician John von Neumann used the term microcentury to denote the maximum length of a lecture.
[42] A unit sometimes used in computing, the term is believed to have been coined by IBM in 1969 from the design objective "never to let the user wait more than a few nanocenturies for a response".
[52] A tatum is the "lowest regular pulse train that a listener intuitively infers from the timing of perceived musical events".
[55] The canard is a unit of quackery created by Andy Lewis in the need for a fractional index measuring pseudoscience.
[59] The Garn is a unit used by NASA to measure nausea and travel sickness caused by space adaptation syndrome.
The unit was coined by members of the system administrator profession who hold a basic tenet that "software that does not suck does not exist".
[citation needed] A MegaFonzie is a fictional unit of measurement of an object's coolness invented by Professor Farnsworth in the 2003 Futurama episode "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV".
[65] During World War II, scientists working for the British Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development encountered a particularly obstructive Royal Navy officer called Commander Pouter, for whom the unit of Obstruction was named, due to his implacable opposition to any work being carried out in the field for which he was personally responsible.
Subsequently, the micropouter was used, as it was hoped that no individual of a similarly difficult disposition would be encountered, and the pouter was too large a unit for everyday use.
[citation needed] Invented by San Francisco Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub, this rates county fairs by the quality of their musical acts.
[70] This is a unit of fame or hype, derived from the dictum attributed to Andy Warhol that "everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes".
[72] The comic includes references to units named for other celebrities, such as Neil Gaiman, John Hodgman, Jonathan Coulton, and Felicia Day.