The Importance of Thermocouples and Flow Switches 

There are many unusual, mostly unknown, and sometimes silly units of measure that exist. Some are used in specific fields of interest, and some are obsolete or too foolish to be taken seriously. Here’s a list of some of the more interesting ones. Many might have some experience with the Scoville, but never knew how to quantify it.

The Mho: The unit of conductance, which is the inverse of resistance. The reader will notice that mho is ohm spelled backward. It gets a bit weirder still. The symbol of a mho is Ʊ, the Latin letter upsilon, which is an upside-down omega symbol. 1Ʊ = 1 / 1Ω.

If you have something measuring 5Ω of resistance, that’s the same as saying it has 0.2Ʊ of conductance. If you have something else measuring 0.01Ω of resistance, that’s equivalent to 100Ʊ of conductance. That all makes sense; the lower the resistance, the higher the conductance. The mho was renamed in 1881 to the Siemens, which is both singular and plural.

The Shake: In physics, it’s 10 nanoseconds or 10 billionths of a second and is used to measuring nuclear reactions.

The Jiffy: In computer science, a jiffy is the time of one computer clock cycle or about 10 milliseconds. In quantum physics, however, a jiffy is the time it takes for light to travel one fermi, which is approximately the size of a nucleon (a neutron or a proton, which are about the same size). One fermi is 10−15 meters, so a jiffy is about 3×10−24 s or 0.000000000000000000000003 seconds. That’s quick. 

The Garn: This unit of measure is used by NASA to measure nausea and travel sickness caused by space adaptation syndrome. Suffering from one garn means the sufferer is completely incapacitated by nausea.

The Galactic Year: This is the duration of time required for the Sun to orbit once around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. One galactic year is approximately 225 million Earth years. As a side note, the Solar System is traveling at an average speed of 514,000 mph along its trajectory around the galactic center. That speed is approximately 1/1300 of the speed of light, relative to the center of the galaxy. For anyone interested, at the center of Milky Way Galaxy is an enormous supermassive black hole named “Sagittarius A*” with a mass about 4 million times that of the sun. That’s what’s holding us all together! 

The Dol: The dol is a unit of pain. It’s from the Latin “dolor”, meaning “pain or grief”. One dol is defined as a “barely noticeable difference” in pain. The maximum pain a human can tolerate is about 11 dols.

The Grave: This is from Latin, meaning gravity or heavy. This was the original name first proposed for a kilogram in 1793. It didn’t stick around for long as it was changed in 1795 to the kilogram.

The Light-Nanosecond: Similar to a light year that’s the distance light travels in a year, a light-nanosecond is the distance light travels in a billionth of a second, which is 29.9 centimeters or 11.77 inches. I don’t think it’s used seriously.

Scoville = The measure of the hotness of something in terms of spiciness as the concentration of capsaicinoids. The actual unit is an SHU, meaning Scoville Heat Unit. It is named after American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville who devised this very subjective scale in 1912. The bell pepper is at the bottom of the scale at 1 SHU.

Some other ‘hotnesses’ are:
Jalapeno Pepper - about 8,000 SHU
Habanero Pepper - about 275,000
SHU Ghost Pepper - about 1 million
SHU Carolina Reaper Pepper - about 2.2 million SHU 

For fans of hot wings (and those that might want to brag), here’s a helpful scale of wing hotness:
Mild - 10,000 SHU Medium - 10,000 - 30,000 SHU
Caribbean Jerk - 30,000 - 60,000 SHU
Wild - 50,000 - 90,000 SHU
Mango Habanero - 100,000 - 180,000 SHU
Blazin’ - 200,000 - 350,000 SHU 

Briefly, there are lot of other units of measure that are interesting, funny, and just plain silly. 

The Ligne - used to describe button sizes
The Hand - defined as 4 inches, so there are 3 hands to a foot
The Sagan - defined as at least four billion of something (named after Carl Sagan)
The Beard Second - Yes, it’s the distance a beard grows in a second. How silly!
Ohnosecond - This is the time it takes to realize you’ve done something very wrong, like irrevocably deleted a file you shouldn’t have or sent an email to the wrong person.
The Thaum - This one is totally fictional as it’s a unit of magic. Specifically, it’s the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls!
The Hobbit - (so they DO exist) is an old unit used in Wales that is a volume equal to 2.5 bushels, where one bushel is (or was, to be correct) the volume of 8 dry gallons, like wheat or some other grain.
The Metric Foot - (the what?)
The Smoot - This is an interesting unit of length. Look it up. It’s still in use today, but only in one very specific location. 

 There are many more unusual and strange units of measure to discover. A brief on-line search will keep you entertained for a good while.