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Comment by imp0cat | Hacker News Reader

The "UNITS" part is wonderful. I had no idea slugs even existed.

    You want to measure how much air mass is in a given volume? That’s gonna be slugs/ft3.

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My favorite "strange unit" is poronkusema:

"A Sami measurement of distance; the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to stop to urinate. Today used to describe something that is at a very obscure distance away" (approximately 7.5 km)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_Finnish_units_of_meas...

There's no reason for this to obsolete, I have to factor this into route planning for myself so I vote we bring this one back.

The 'List of non-coherent units of measurement' [1] and 'List of humorous units of measurement' [2] pages are always a fun rabbit hole to go down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-coherent_units_of_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas...

Ah, I now learned that "One moment, please" means that I'll have to expect to wait 90 seconds.

The whole imperial/British side has tons of ugly and weird units of measure. Reading old engineering documentation will give you headaches and nightmares from all the inconsistent systems of units.

My favourite one was when I learned about the existence of US survey feet.

My property is very irregularly shaped with the longest straight dimension being 6" shy of a quarter mile. The really scary thing is that I recognized that immediately the first time I looked at the property survey map.

Completely NSFW, but I worked at a company where we frequently needed to measure distance in approximate meters. I don't know the full origin, but at some point, after a night of drinking, one of the managers discovered that an elephant penis was approximately one meter.

From then on, any estimated distance was done in EDs.

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