Bizarre Units used by Scientists - Sixty Symbols

[@sixtysymbols]

Postscript: Becky got so excited by this idea of a physics cake recipe that she went full steam ahead and managed to ignore her own advice about being careful with units. For those wishing to convert the values back to normal metric values in order to bake the cake, know that it should be 126 giga-yotta eV/c2 of both sugar & flour and only 0.02 Hubble Barns of butter. Otherwise you’ll end up with a cake that is ~74% butter and Mary Berry won’t enjoy that soggy bottom.

[@Inertia888]

A little extra heat at the end of cooktime maybe? Possibly the broiler briefly? Maybe end up with a new type of dessert, the "Fried Physics Cake"

[@leeterthanyou]

You completely missed out on the opportunity to bake an apple pie a-la Carl Sagan's Cosmos in SI units.

[@BillClinton228]

No one is watching this video because they care about science.

[@JasperJanssen]

Eddie Mercury most Apple pie recipes are in SI-adjacent units - grams, liters. Admittedly degrees centigrade rather than Kelvin, but that’s an easy conversion.

[@FrankHarwald]

Seriously: most funny units are basic information units from computer science: bits & bytes, & then you have nibbles & crumbles in between :D

[@dermathze700]

The biggest unit, used to measure the size of a lad , is obviously the absolute unit.

[@aksela6912]

And one absolute lad is a legend, the most absolute unit.

[@19822andy]

+Aksel Anker Henriksen So how many mad lads are there to the legend?

[@Christoph1990]

@@aksela6912 Is a massiv legend 1.000 or 10.000 legends?

[@sdegueldre]

I'm in awe at the size of this comment.

[@Danilego]

8:02 That unit is an absolute unit. (also the word unit completely lost its meaning now)

[@tibees]

I had a lecturer who would refuse to give students a percentage score on their assignment if they handed it in without units on the answers. He would instead just give the assignment a grade of say 'pi' in retaliation

[@JoeTaber]

That is an ingenious way to get your students to care about units.

[@jeffirwin7862]

So, about 314%? I'll take that grade.

[@Splatpope]

@@cinquine1 because grades are defined as the ratio of points obtained over the amount of obtainable points

[@jeffirwin7862]

I'm being a bit obtuse and sarcastic intentionally, but percentages are by definition dimensionless. 3.14 = 314%.

[@ColdsideRamrod]

I have a professor right now who will do that if we leave our answers in exact form. Like in terms of pi or root 2 or something. Because I'm an EE major. And anything past three decimal places confuses and enrages the engineer.

[@jaimie00]

When my brother and I were young (I was about 12, so he would have been 11), we used to make up units that we found in our everyday lives and then applied them to astronomical things. Like we once measured the time it took an ant (whom we named Larry) to go from one end of a paving stone to the other. Then we'd calculate how many "Larry" it took for Jupiter to complete one orbit around the sun. We were weird kids.

[@cherrytaly9765]

Its not weird...rather its interesting and appreciable !

[@jorgschrauwen]

i call bs

[@LangieDG]

That's amazing!

[@beachboardfan9544]

I watched cartoons when I was 'about 12'

[@StonedWidowOnDoom]

That sounds very cool. Do you know the answer? How many Larry are one Jupiter orbit? The closed I can think of is, I played in a band and we started to measure our fee in kebab. We had a favorite restaurant and used the prize there as standard. We considered to prize our merch in kebab too. But dropped it, because it would be to much effort... (affraid people would actually bring kebabs to buy cds)

[@Kostchei]

My cake didnt fit the oven, i think i made a conversion error somewhere

[@BlackPearl27]

@Aaack Aardvark Does it hold life though?

[@infinitesimotel]

You forgot to use square root granules, your factor is still the area.

[@tomaszkantoch4426]

The oven is not big enough then...not your fault mate :D

[@anirbanroychowdhury5080]

Try a gamma ray burst.

[@morbulten]

That was a funny comment.

[@doougle]

By moving her finger she was forcing her results to match her thesis

[@Scy]

Also known as test driven development.

[@00BillyTorontoBill]

also known as "too much coffee"

[@klaxoncow]

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts" - Einstein (grossly paraphrased).

[@stumbling]

Maybe the camera was closing one eye and opening the other.

[@etizoman2403]

[sic] ayee no one thought about shutter speed ;)

[@adamgray9212]

Everyone: "Can I get uuuuuhhh sensible units" Astronomers: "Sorry, sensible unit machine broke"

[@douglasmacaulay2301]

It's not used in physics, or by anyone really, but my favourite unit of measurement is the Millihelen, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship in ancient Greece.

[@Superphilipp]

Why is it a millihelen, not a whole helen?

[@jeremylakeman]

"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" ... Isaac Asimov jocularly coined the unit "millihelen" to mean the amount of beauty that can launch one ship.

[@aussiebloke609]

I love it!

[@aussiebloke609]

PS: I assume this means Helen looked like a champagne bottle? :-D

[@chinmayasunkur7297]

A similar unit sounding is used though, millionth of hemisphere used is solar physics.

[@gcewing]

A couple of my favourite weird units: The space flight industry measures the exhaust velocity of a rocket engine (otherwise known as specific impulse, or Isp) in seconds. It contains an implicit factor of g (gravitational acceleration at the Earth's surface), because some bright spark thought that pounds-force and pounds-mass are the same thing and cancelled them out. Electronic engineers measure power ratios in bels (B) (named after Alexander Graham Bell), or more commonly decibels (dB). It's a logarithmic scale where 1B, or 10dB, represents a factor of 10, so 1dB is a factor of 10^(1/10) or about 1.23. By a lucky coincidence, log10(2) is about 0.301, so a factor of 2 is very close to 3dB. The confusing part is that it still represents a power ratio even when you're talking about voltages instead of watts, and since power in a resistive load is proportional to voltage squared, everything gets multiplied by two. So a ratio of 2 between *voltages* is called 6dB, and a voltage ratio of 10 is called 20dB.

[@LastStar007]

It's because impulse = force * time and the annoying thing about rocket fuel is that you have to lift it into orbit (weight). I think impulse per unit mass would have made more sense than per unit weight, but I'm about a hundred years too late to do anything about that.

[@cadr003]

Dr. Smethurst is such a lovely person and seems like a blast to talk to.

[@CandidDate]

Biology needs the "adapt-ion". The unit from 0 to 1 of how evolved an organism is: 0 = virus, 1 = human

[@Enmos]

Viruses are way more evolved than humans.

[@Mekratrig]

Dr. Becky has such lovely eyes. What color are they, and how would that color be expressed and in what units.

[@CandidDate]

@@Enmos In the way that they can sustain the tortures of clinging to bus seats.

[@Caffeinix]

@@Mekratrig They appear to be distributed in a wavelength range across the visible spectrum, with a wide normal distribution peaking at around 15.4 yoctoparsecs.

[@robfenwitch7403]

Way, way back when I was at school (mid 1970's) we still had physics textbooks using cgs and mechanics textbooks using Imperial units. The exams were, of course, in SI units...

[@rexwhitehead8346]

And can you still distinguish between pounds and slugs? :)

[@robfenwitch7403]

Alas, no. For the record, I failed that course.

[@MrJdcirbo]

Legendary

[@nikonissinen6772]

Not forgetting the infamous "unit": the "football field". Triggers my face to explode every time when someone says that "something is X football fields big"

[@steelwarrior105]

Its more of an order of magnitude measurement, not everyone can estimate say a half mile but most people in America can visualize 8 to 9 football fields

[@binky_bun]

That or the area of Wales.

[@MephLeo]

Or the size of NYC.

[@Starclimber]

'2 Statues of Liberty' to describe the depth of a volcanic lake was spectacularly meaningless to me.

[@heyandy889]

Olympic-sized swimming pool

[@victor9sur768]

Radiochemistry with banana equivalent dose ,BED, the amount of radiation exposure related to the amount of radiation exposed to when eating 1 banana, about 0.1 uS.

[@celtgunn9775]

Love bananas too, sure wish humans had never learned about nuclear power.

[@sandervandijk2373]

One Minion??

[@TheToric]

Ive heard of it in a joking context, is it actually used?

[@victor9sur768]

@@TheToric I've never seen it used in a published paper they stick to mircosieverts (uSv), but colloquially or in talks I have seen some use the banana equivalent dose as a way of demonstrating the amount of radiation absorbed by the body from a targeted radio-drug in PET or cancer imaging. TLDR it's used but not overly widely.

[@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatca]

BED is actually super useful for science communicators like Scishow, because how afraid of radiation people are. It's a way to remind that no matter the dosage makes the poison. Background radiation just isn't as understandable. The only downside is some nutjobs start limiting their potassium intake and that might lead to health issues. But at least most people instantly realise, that maybe they shouldn't worry about few bananas

[@maxximumb]

The Proclaimers song wouldn't be so catchy if they changes their units. But I would walk 2.6077644 x 10-11 Parsecs And I would walk 2.6077644 x 10-11 more Just to be the man who walks a 0.0000000000521553 parsecs To fall down at your door.

[@ChadDidNothingWrong]

how much is that in furlongs per fortnight

[@xavierpaquin]

@@ChadDidNothingWrong hahaha

[@absurdantiquity5240]

omg i am absolutely dying at this comment

[@brianjuelpedersen6389]

In Danish (probably only in geeky engineering Danish) we have Munks constant, which I guess could also be used as a unit. Munks constant is the number of beers which can be contained in a cubic light year.

[@icusawme2]

Awesome to watch this and also knowing Dr. Becky has a channel now

[@ericvilas]

soon, the electronvolt _will_ be a defined unit, cause the charge of an electron will be a defined unit. It's a part of the change in the metric system that's gona be voted on in a few weeks! (on the 16th)

[@Teck_1015]

It's been 4 months. What was the decision??

[@dkevans]

@@Teck_1015 the decision hasn't been defined yet. ;p

[@benmorris118]

I had a phone with very few features, one of which was a unit converter. Among the units, you could convert grams to grains (think its a gunpowder thing). I love that someone thought that out of all the things you could put on a phone, they chose that.

[@cvkline]

I minored in Astronomy in college and never could get over why we were using these ridiculously tiny units like dynes, ergs, and baryes to measure these ridiculously huge quantities like energy output of a star. But after a while we got kind of jaded by numbers in the 10^30 or 10^50 range so maybe it doesn't matter... those quantities would still be pretty huge numbers in the MKS system as well. Excellent video... I'd never heard of the SNUB or the Foe before.

[@celtgunn9775]

🤣 The reading of the cake recipe was absolutely the best. Thank you both. She's my favorite. As for the finger & eye thing, not everyone is affected by that phenomenon. It does work best if you place your hand or use something to block vision and view something like a telephone poll, tree, building or unmoving object. Attempt this on a still day. Personally, I can switch dominant eye and maintain both eyes open for performance target shooting. My Left eye is actually my dominant eye but I shoot right handed. When I was young, I was forced to learn to be right handed. Take time to check it out guys, it's always good to know. And learn if you have floaters. Blessings my friends, from SW North Dakota

[@calinculianu]

I think this was one of the most entertaining videos you have ever done with Becky. Really funny and informative. Plus the ending was hilarious. Thanks so much for doing this Becky and Brady!

[@moroccangeographer8993]

This is one of my favourite videos on this channel.

[@RasperHelpdesk]

My chem prof in college used to use "bud" as a unit of volume, defined as the volume of a beer can. He also used Torr for pressure making the units of R in PV=nRT to be "bud torrs per mole kelvin" It was his way of forcing us to be flexible with unit conversions.

[@talltroll7092]

I'm sorry, that first unit is invalid, because in no possible universe can Budweiser be reasonably be classified as "beer"

[@nari5025]

@@talltroll7092 it can be in Czech Republic (and possibly adjacent countries)

[@talltroll7092]

@@nari5025 Um, no. American Budweiser and Czech Budwar share no characteristics, other than both being liquids

[@nari5025]

@@talltroll7092 The Czech Budweiser is actually beer or so i have heard. And yes, it's called Budweiser here, because d'uh.

[@katgirl3000]

"You're moving your finger". hahaha! and BBC accent - I love it!

[@toncent]

the cake recipe was pure gold.

[@toncent]

i mean in a comedic sense. not literally

[@1224chrisng]

well, I wouldn't want a Victoria sponge that's that dense

[@blendonator]

The recipe read was hilarious! You're so incredibly smart, Becky! 😍

[@iabervon]

My favorite unit is microHertz. 1.65 uHz is a frequency I often tune things to. Other people often use a non-SI unit for it, but I prefer to avoid those ad hoc units like "weekly".

[@Jivvi]

That would be μHz, not uHz.

[@MrDuno9]

great video, I know I'm way late but I just wanted to point out that the parallax angle of a star is actually 1/2 the angle that the object appears to subtend (because that is the angle used in the trig calculation, since that's the angle that's part of a right triangle). So for the diagram around 3:10, just draw a vertical line down the middle, and the angle between that line and one of the diagonal lines is ACTUALLY an arcsecond.

[@damienw4958]

The "Mho" which is the unit of transductance, the reciprocal of "Ohm" unit of resistance

[@kdawg3484]

Not anymore. The "mho" was an easy, clever unit to use for electrical conductance, the exact opposite (in every way) of the "ohm" for electrical resistance. But we can't have fun, a committee decided, so they gave it a different, more-official sounding name: the "siemens." All snickering aside, a particularly annoying aspect of the new unit is that it's used the same in both singular and plural cases. Yes, 1 unit of electrical conductance is 1 siemens. My electrical engineering professor hated it.

[@damienw4958]

oh well, it will always be mhos in my heart

[@MephLeo]

Nothing stops you from listing it in the appendix for abbreviations stating that through your paper you call it a mho for objection of conscience :p

[@Gribbo9999]

Siemens has a capital S because it's named after someone called "Siemens" which is also why a single unit still has an s at the end. We could of course say 2 Seimenses. How ugly is that?

[@dfhgjhg]

@@Gribbo9999 If it didn't have s at the end, it would literally translate to a seed in Finnish.

[@BalladOfLooks]

This video is funny and informative (though admittedly I'll likely never use any of this knowledge) - the cake at the end was a lovely idea. Becky seems awesome!

[@beachboardfan9544]

This lady is delightful I never use that word... but it feels like the only one to describe her bubbly-ness Thanks for the more Becky annotation at the end 👍

[@Triantalex]

WeirdChamp

[@geoffreyault423]

Late sixties, we had O levels in imperial, A levels in CGS, then at Uni SI. So those units were still around in living memory. SI lost the angstrom unit which was ideal CGS for visible light wavelengths

[@DaylightDigital]

Slugs (for mass) were one of my favorite units, and in fact it cleans up many of the gripes with the Imperial system if used instead of pounds-mass.

[@nineball039]

My father (an MIT ME, 1950) calculated slugs using a slide rule.

[@jproctor2010]

This was an incredibly enjoyable video and I'm so glad she added the ridiculous recipe at the end. I was thinking the exact same thing as soon as a teaspoon came up.

[@aner_bda]

Always enjoy Dr. Becky's videos. Just an awesome enthusiasm with physics.

[@andyguy0610]

Dr Becky, yet another great video. You did however miss a few measurements out. I live in Shropshire and in my area we have a few very important measurements that I think could be very useful to the science community. We use, “Not far”, “a bit further than (insert place”, “Quite far”, “A long way”, “A very long way” and “A Blo*dy long way” I am sure these will be useful as they save you doing all the hard maths, they are always right and they cannot be contradicted. You show me one convincing argument that the Andromeda Galaxy is not “A blo*dy long way” Keep up the great work 

[@KarlFFF]

I hope the Victoria sponge has a low amount of eV per HubbleBarn. I do like my sponges fluffy and light.

[@bielanski2493]

"You Are Here."

[@thryduulf]

@@bielanski2493 that was fairy cake not a Victoria sponge cake

[@bielanski2493]

Whilst I recognise you are technically correct, are you suggesting that a Victoria Sponge is somehow incapable of being used..? I feel like you have to go **through** fairy cake on the way to Victoria, but your mileage may vary. (this is not as serious a comment as you think)

[@lovedance2]

I'm Stunned - After looking for something new on your channel, I was content to be learning stuff and then the recipe for baking a cake was so funny I just had to laugh out loud - almost, so thank you Dr Becky, for again making science such fun! Oh of course I do appreciate your bloopers as you are multi-talented!

[@Sunflowrrunner]

I feel like having students learning how to do unit conversions make a cake using those those odd units would be a great assignment.

[@Ramboost007]

I wanted to do this but my students already struggle with converting m/s to km/h so I thought against it

[@davedaley9093]

When I studied high school physics in the 50's , we used both the CGS units, the MKS units (SI hadn't yet been defined) as well as Imperial units. I still believe it was to sow confusion and weed out those not committed.

[@EebstertheGreat]

The use of units called simply "units" is common in pharmacology. For instance, a unit of insulin is a mass of insulin with equivalent biological activity to 34.7 mcg of crystalline wild-type human insulin. Biological activity is defined in terms of its effects on fasting blood glucose concentration in a representative sample of people. Units like this are created out of necessity.

[@superfluidity]

And in the UK a 'unit' is a unit of volume equal to 10ml, and used specifically to refer to pure alcohol. It's used systematically in labelling and public health information.

[@pyotrleflegin7255]

If you were to read out the telephone directory you would still have thousands of enthralled viewers! Your voice is so lovely!

[@hotdrippyglass]

Thank you for making this one. The day I wrote this was the 8th of November 2018 and I really can not express how much this has lifted my spirits after my countries election and its aftermath. There are sane humans on this planet somewhere and they are still using their minds.

[@thelanavishnuorchestra]

Ok, it was definitely worth it for the cake recipe. Which was delicious by the way. I might have gotten a smidge more than 0.06 Hubble-barns of butter, though. I think my centibarn measuring cup is a bit off.

[@Yossus]

This was a lot of fun! As a Physics teacher, units are a perennial struggle to impart the importance of to pupils, but they're also really close to my heart. I never knew about the background of the Gray and the KERMA! Am I right in thinking a SNUB essentially converts to Joule because it's Supernovae per time (centuries) per (energy per time) (the collective luminosity)? Minor nitpick: I don't know how I feel about the electronvolt being described as an empirical unit. The way it's defined is not actually by measuring the energy gained by an electron, but its value in Joule is simply the charge of an electron in Coulomb. So in a way, we have to measure the electron charge to know that value, but I would still argue it's a unit derived from an SI unit and a fundamental constant. I don't think that subtlety will detract much from the value of this video, though! Also, I love the illustrations so much. The representation of an electron was especially brilliant.

[@Yossus]

P.S. Thank you for making me realise that pressure is essentially energy per space! That's honestly made my month.

[@Ranchhand323]

Thanks Doc for your personal dose of Becky's humor at the finale . I had acquired a horrendous migraine attempting to keep up with the terminology lecture .

[@RobertGallop]

Hahahah, the recipe at the end was a great treat for watching the whole video, hilarious!

[@recklessroges]

I agree

[@notdaveschannel9843]

A guy I used to work with once heard the square miles of Amazon rainforest being cut down every year and replied "Meaningless statistic. I need it in multiples of Belgium".

[@thinkingape7655]

Once again Becky’s wonderful energy has made my day... Becky = 10^13K keep on rockin’ 🤘

[@sammarks9146]

Measuring the power of supernovae in ergs sounds like measuring cars in antpower rather than horsepower.

[@gerhardmeier1748]

This barnmegaparsec thing reminds me on something I was thinking about recently. That is on how we measure the usage of a car. It is measured in liters per kilometer. That is volume divided by length, so we measure the usage of a car with an area. Let's do it. Let's say our car needs 5l/km. 1l is 100mm*100mm*100mm. So, this are 5000000mm^3. A meter is 1000 mm, so a kilometer is 1000000mm. So that is 5 mm^2. Imagine a tube with a cross section of 5mm^2, pretty thin. Make that tube 1km long then the full needed to drive this kilometer fits into the tube.

[@TurdFurgeson571]

*5L per km?!?!?* What kind of car do you drive? I hate unsolicited advice, but I really think you should consider downsizing. There are commuting options out there much better than a Komatsu quarry truck, for example a VW Passat or a Honda Civic.

[@markwilliamson9199]

My Grandfather’s text book of electronics was cgs, written in 1887. I learned a lot. My favourite units I have actually used is hectayards/minute and micropascals squared/hertz

[@stanleystriker7065]

'Write your units' Been tutoring my nephew in pre-aglebra.... pounding this into his head.... lol That and show your work...😁

[@isaactfa]

Stanley Striker you really shouldn't pound your unit into your nephew's anything.

[@stanleystriker7065]

@@isaactfa .... there's nothing to be proud of. Coefficient of sliding friction, ya know...

[@Biomirth]

I love how absolutely chuffed Dr. Smethurst is at the end. When you work hard and get to the ships sailing for the East at last, you relax on fields of giggles and barn-megaparsecs until nobel, which is equal to 1 unit of excellence.

[@MasterHigure]

4:25 1.6*10^-19 is not 16 atto. It's 0.16 atto.

[@jumbo6498]

Thank you for broaching this.

[@vivekvenkatramankrishnan3923]

They should add a caption to the video for this.

[@PerthScienceClinic]

I remember a very different derivation of the Barn. The radiochemists in France in the early part of the 20th century were working with elements like copper and iron, and when they went to the USA to work on the Manhattan Project, they were suddenly looking at uranium with its nucleus' huge cross-sectional area, so it was "hitting the broad side of a barn", but not so ironically.

[@arcaneminded]

17:50 You laugh but this shit going straight into my sci-fi dnd game next week.

[@lostincyberspaceIII]

Have you heard of starfinder?

[@arcaneminded]

@@lostincyberspaceIII I have, but we're playing a homebrew cyberpunk mixed with dnd 5e.

[@NowinWTF]

I'd love to see Dr. Becky's outtakes for this (as well as a little singing).

[@twilightknight123]

I'm a bit disappointed about the explanation behind a barn. Yes it was created so particle physicists would have a convenient unit to reference, but most importantly it came about during WWII at the Manhattan project as a way to further protect their work from outsiders. If documents were to ever leak, all the values would be referencing an unknown unit and so no one would be able to reconstruct the atomic bomb without doing the calculations over again which would take quite a while.

[@michalbotor]

from inside astronomer's house: "janet, honey? could you bring me quick a dozen of those silver barnmegaparsecs to the table? the guest will be here any moment now!"

[@thryduulf]

My favourite of the combined large and small units is attoparsecs per microfortnight. 1 attoparsec per microfortnight is almost exactly 1 inch per second.

[@romanski5811]

Fortnite?

[@MasterHigure]

@@romanski5811 Fortnight. It is equal to 14 days.

[@romanski5811]

@@MasterHigure FORTNITE?

[@Gribbo9999]

What's an 'inch'?. How many fortnites in a fortnight?

[@thryduulf]

@@MasterHigure The etymology is "fourteen nights"

[@kylenolan2710]

I'm reminded of the extra credit question on a physics exam - Express the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight.

[@baganatube]

In data centers, the height unit for a server module to be installed on a rack is also called... unit..., abbreviated as U.

[@666Tomato666]

while their width is measured in inches and depth in mm

[@Grizzly01]

But the name is 'rack unit'. Often the abbreviation RU is used as well.

[@666Tomato666]

@@Grizzly01 "often" [citation needed]

[@Grizzly01]

@@666Tomato666 Why? I didn't say 'mostly'. Or are you implying that RU isn't used?

[@666Tomato666]

@@Grizzly01 yeah, I really don't remember ever seeing the abbreviation "RU" used; and I recall "rack unit" used only as an explanation for what the "1U", "3U", etc. is, not as the literal name of it that's with only 10 years of experience assembling and speccing racks, but still, if it was indeed used "often" I'm quite sure I'd have seen it multiple times...

[@RafaelSolaPACalsaverini]

A colleague in physics school defined a unit of pleasure called "ploc". It's how much pleasure you derive from popping a single bubble in a standard bubble wrap plastic sheet.

[@TurdFurgeson571]

What is the volume of a standard single bubble?

[@kirkhamandy]

Sorry, U is already taken. 1U is 44.45mm and 47U is a full rack :)

[@arbazna]

This is indeed the correct answer.

[@MelodeonTunes]

1U is actually 1.75 inches

[@kirkhamandy]

@@MelodeonTunes 1.75 * 24.4 does, in fact, equal 44.45mm. I cheated, I asked Google so have a word with them about it :)

[@snukie73]

Creamy Pasta 24.4? I’m sure you meant 25.4

[@kirkhamandy]

@@snukie73 yay for typos, cheers for the correction

[@BaronFeydRautha]

Reminds me about that article on The Register. The Velocity of Sheep in a Vacuum

[@jimskea224]

"Most of the time pressures are done in atmospheres or bars..." Poor Mr Pascal. Nobody remembers him.

[@QemeH]

How about "mmHg" or "mmH2O" while we're at it? ;)

[@drearyplane8259]

I call my N/m2 pascals to make myself sound smarter :P PSI is the main unit of pressure in the UK

[@Grizzly01]

@@drearyplane8259 Only for tyres, really, I'd say.

[@drearyplane8259]

@@Grizzly01 Well pressure is only used for a few things: air pressure (no unit), tyres (psi), and boilers (bar)

[@Grizzly01]

@@drearyplane8259 the accepted unit for air pressure (used by many meteorologists) is the hectopascal (hPa), which you find on many barometers, as well as mmHg/cmHg/inHg.

[@cj0815]

The point of calling it barn and giving it the size it has was that, compared to other cross sections in particle phyiscs, neutron capture cross sections of uranium were huge.

[@petercollin5670]

I heard them say "Jansky" in the movie Contact. Now I know what they meant. Thanks:)

[@e1woqf]

Haha! Me too!

[@tekvax01]

over 100 janskies! I could pick it up on my.......................... *(transistor radio!)

[@jlunde35]

Great job Dr. Becky. Delightful.

[@TheStryper777]

I collapsed the entire universe into a black hole trying to make the cake... I must have made a conversion error somewhere

[@kconger_]

You may have created a fruit cake so dense that light cannot escape - the antithesis of a sponge cake. Do try again in one of the many neighborhood universe readily disposable.

[@pierremarcotte6299]

The amount of giggles in a KZbin video should be measured in Smethurst. As in: "This video of tumbling puppies is pure joy, it's clocking in at 47 Smethurst"

[@Wytnucls]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Brady's parsec animation is a bit misleading. The angle of 1 arc second should be subtended by 1 astronomical unit (distance between the earth and the sun), not 2, as on the picture.

[@X_Baron]

Yes, the distance to the "Foreground star" in that animation would be two parsecs, not one.

[@Wytnucls]

100% error is bad kerma!

[@Arycke]

What a wonderful video :D loved the focus on laymen uncommon units.

[@OverusedArgument]

Fun fact: Kerma is Finnish for "cream", as in "Do you want your coffee with milk, with cream, or black?"

[@X_Baron]

And Barn is, or course, "child" in Scandinavian languages, so are they trying to hit children with particle beams :S

[@wlan246]

18:17 Should we use a double-slit to divide the mixture? If so, how many furlongs apart should they be, to minimize the amount that lands outside the two tins?

[@leplum2001]

Back to normality: Favourite working unit = Henry. Favourite leisure unit=Pint

[@lolcat23]

cgs is still used in watchmaking, but only in two areas. Inertia numbers of balance wheel and stiffness of the hairspring (a typical balance wheel will have a inertia number of anywhere between 6 and 18, for a standard wristwatch movement).

[@TrevorClarke]

My SUV gets 65 kilosmoots per Hubble-barn

[@StarkRG]

Now you're being lazy since you didn't include the full unit. Sure, we all KNOW the hubblebarn is measuring petrol/gasoline, but you should include it for completeness. I'm curious, though, what's its top speed in beard-seconds per fortnight.

[@Gribbo9999]

But how many Hubble-barns per hundred kilosmoots?

[@StarkRG]

Steradian-micro-volts

[@SimonClarkstone]

That's an inverse area. You should give it in inverse barns.

[@StarkRG]

@@SimonClarkstone hubble-barn it's volume. Vehicle fuel efficiency is generally given in terms of distance per volume of fuel and most people just drop the "of fuel" part as shorthand, hence saying "30 miles per gallon" instead of "30 miles per gallon of gasoline".

[@Nobe_Oddy]

That was the GREATEST mix of CREATIVITY and PHYSICS I have EVER witnessed!!!! GO BECKY!!! Wo0T-W0oT!!

[@gawain78]

Great video! I am a software engineer and one of the weirdest units I know about is "BogoMips".

[@eddprst]

It used to be the unit to measure the proc strength or power. Now its just weird because its irrelevant anymore

[@stargazer7644]

How about the Jiffy? The time interval between clock timer interrupts on the PC, originally at the rate of 65536 per hour, or 18.2 per second.

[@olafzijnbuis]

At 04:31 I think it is 0.16 attojoule

[@smuecke]

Absolute unit.

[@Iliya117]

Been scrolling way to long fot dis

[@MusicalRaichu]

Since the SI system standardized the unit for distance as metres and provided standardized prefixes for large quantities, doesn't that render light years and parsecs obsolete? So if I converted it right, alpha centauri is about 41 Pm away and Andromeda is 24 Zm away, and the observable universe around 400 Ym.

[@modestdreamer]

More Becky! She's very good at explaining things and has a great personality!

[@HaliPuppeh]

This video was really cool to watch and that cake recipe had me in stitches. Thank you!

[@sithman78]

Please tell me that I'm not the only one here with a crush on Dr. Becky.

[@sidharthcs2110]

Nyet comerad

[@urbaniv]

Guilty

[@BattleBunny1979]

why? you like some competition?

[@celtgunn9775]

No "crush" because I'm a female but I do love watching videos of Dr. Becky. She's great.

[@calinculianu]

She's awesome, indeed.

[@john-paulwallcraft9362]

My cake has turned into a black hole, think I may have gone wrong somewhere.

[@PaulPaulPaulson]

What's the unit for new invented units per year?

[@raykent3211]

I think it's the bollock.

[@michaelsommers2356]

_"What's the unit for new invented units per year?"_ It's just a number; it doesn't have a unit.

[@WaffleAbuser]

There is no "the" unit for anything, but some units you can use are 1/s, Hertz, nanohertz.

[@hello_2632]

That gives a new meaning to the unit, "units".

[@IreneSaltini]

@@michaelsommers2356 It’s a per-year quantity, so it’s not just a number. It has units of frequency.

[@ynamaxa]

Absolutely LOVE this channel.Thanks for jumping directly to Star Wars on parsec reference.

[@adrukker]

It was worth it just for the cake recipe at the end

[@Birkguitars]

A friend of mine at school referred to time in picomillennia and similar terms. So anything that "will only take two minutes" would require about 4 nanomillenia and "back in a tick" became "back in a couple of picomillenia". If I have done the maths correctly a couple of picomillenia is about 0.1 seconds and 4 nanomillennia is about 126 seconds so it seems about right.

[@MyYTwatcher]

I think we wouldnt agree on definition of word bizarre in this context. She mentioned some not very known units from the field. What I find bizarre is definition of mole [M]. Since elementary school this unit never stop to amuse me and I am graduated chemist :) How the hell they were to able to define it that way is beyond me. I also always disliked joules/calories schizophrenia. Also ppm/ppb/parts per whatever unit always gives me headache. For some reason I am unable to process that unit unconsciously and I always have to make the math in the head. I like CFU (unit) from biology - colony forming unit. But I guess we all can agree that uncontested winner is the imperial system.

[@thstroyur]

Mostly my feelings, as well (Chem BSc too :D). I actually came upon a description of Perrin's experiment as a throwaway in an Atomic Physics course, but I still don't quite get where 10^24 came from - it predates Perrin and was defined in the context of gases, but still...

[@isaactfa]

They actually determined it to a degree of accuracy via Millikan's experiment on the charge of an electron. Since Faraday's constant F was already a known quantity defined as eN (where e is the charge of an electron and N is avogrado's constant) they just had to divide F by e to get N.

[@ottolehikoinen6193]

Mole should indeed be redefined to be a much duller unit.

[@ChadDidNothingWrong]

PPM is just like a more precise percentage-like measurment...I imagine you just have to find a way to visualize it. ...just go count 999,999 black Marbles on the floor, and add one white one, and just visualize that from then one. Easy Peazy.

[@Fiddlesticks86]

17:50 😂😂😂 I want a cookbook with these units (and some sort of registry in the back with the conversion)

[@Phyrexious]

1 ND or "Dorm" equals 1/10th the temperature of the surface of the sun. Science yo!

[@JanboelPe]

Also the temperature of my dorm this summer.

[@MephLeo]

It's a unit to measure the temperature of mix tapes, for those of you that aren't acquainted to it.

[@emilyscloset2648]

Casually explained ftw

[@Markle2k]

About twice the thermodynamic temperature of a pint of beer then.

[@Saki630]

what is the surface temp of the sun?

[@ffggddss]

Correction at 4m 30s: 1.6·10⁻¹⁹ J = 0.16 attojoules, not 16 aJ. atto = 10⁻¹⁸ Also, major kudos! for pointing out that a "steradian" is really just a radian². Fred

[@kelsie.j]

i stopped writing my lab report to watch this

[@kelsie.j]

Dr. Becky That’s called the Smethurst effect!

[@sidharthcs2110]

I have an exam on optics tomorrow

[@MephLeo]

Well, if you are watching a video that is on the subject of your studies you might stumble upon the Schrodinger's Paper effect. It is both being written and being procrastinated at the same time.

[@connorwilliams3451]

@@kelsie.j Can the internet please make "The Smethurst Effect" a thing? Thanks. You could have it defined as measuring, "the absolute probability that a given action or event will stop even a dedicated scientist from completing their work."

[@triestelondon]

If watching paint dry would stop you writing, would that be in the milliSmethurst or microSmethurst range?

[@mikmop]

For the benefit of people not familiar with the TV show, the "Mary Berry and soggy bottom" reference relates to the British TV show The Great British Bake Off, where Mary Berry, a judge on the show, is known for critiquing pies and cakes that had a "soggy bottom." So this phrase refers to a pastry or baked goods that havn't been baked properly and remain undercooked or wet on the underside. Therefore, in the context of the Sixty Symbols video, the reference is to illustrate a concept or measurement in science, playing on the idea that, much like a "soggy bottom," some things in science can be metaphorically undercooked or incomplete.

[@gasdive]

How recipes in imperial units sound to someone who grew up using metric. 17:30

[@gasdive]

@Thijs Janssen what got me is that there are two systems of fluid measurements that use all the same names, (gallons, pints, cups) but they're about 15% different in size and recipes *never* specify which system they're using. So even if you convert the temperatures, you end up making something 15% bigger, which takes longer to cook. So then the centre of your cake is raw.

[@LieseFury]

@@gasdive I've never heard of this and I'm American, can you elaborate or provide examples?

[@gasdive]

@@LieseFury even more confusing, a cup of something could be anything between about 180 and nearly 300 millilitres.

[@valeriavagapova]

@@LieseFury I've never encountered pints being used much, but I often run into this problem with gallons especially. Quoting Wiki, " Three significantly different sizes are in current use: the imperial gallon defined as 4.54609 litres (4 imperial quarts or 8 imperial pints), which is used in the United Kingdom, Canada, and some Caribbean nations; the US gallon defined as 231 cubic inches (4 US liquid quarts or 8 US liquid pints) or about 3.785 L, which is used in the US and some Latin American and Caribbean countries; and the least-used US dry gallon defined as 1/8 US bushel (4.405 L)." And the problem is that people _never_ specify which gallon they mean, even though the difference between 4.546 and 3.785 is pretty significant. So, as a result, I have to try to figure out where the author of the recipe/video/text is from (which is not even always possible), Google which gallons they are supposedly using in that country and hope for the best.

[@Jivvi]

@Thijs Janssen My ex thought °C was for conventional and °F was for fan-forced.

[@N.I.R.A.T.I.A.S.]

Dr Becky is such a fantastic find for your channels Brady.