Bizarre Units used by Scientists

Bizarre Units used by Scientists - Sixty Symbols

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Күн бұрын

From nanomaggies to SNUBS... Featuring Dr Becky Smethurst.
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Full screen of the recipe animation: • Cake Recipe in strange...
Dr Smethurst was the "Sixty Symbols Ogden Fellow", supported by The Ogden Trust.
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Editing and animation by Pete McPartlan
Recipe animation by Alison Williams
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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.

Пікірлер: 1 300

@sixtysymbols 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@BillClinton228 5 жыл бұрын

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

@JasperJanssen 4 жыл бұрын

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 4 жыл бұрын

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

@dermathze700 5 жыл бұрын

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

@aksela6912 5 жыл бұрын

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

@19822andy 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Christoph1990 5 жыл бұрын

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

@sdegueldre 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Danilego 5 жыл бұрын

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

@tibees 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@jeffirwin7862 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Splatpope 5 жыл бұрын

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

@jeffirwin7862 5 жыл бұрын

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

@ColdsideRamrod 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@jorgschrauwen 5 жыл бұрын

i call bs

@LangieDG 5 жыл бұрын

That's amazing!

@beachboardfan9544 5 жыл бұрын

I watched cartoons when I was 'about 12'

@StonedWidowOnDoom 5 жыл бұрын

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)

@doougle 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Scy 5 жыл бұрын

Also known as test driven development.

@00BillyTorontoBill 5 жыл бұрын

also known as "too much coffee"

@klaxoncow 5 жыл бұрын

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

@stumbling 5 жыл бұрын

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

@etizoman2403 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Kostchei 5 жыл бұрын

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

@BlackPearl27 5 жыл бұрын

@Aaack Aardvark Does it hold life though?

@infinitesimotel 5 жыл бұрын

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

@tomaszkantoch4426 5 жыл бұрын

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

@anirbanroychowdhury5080 5 жыл бұрын

Try a gamma ray burst.

@morbulten 5 жыл бұрын

That was a funny comment.

@adamgray9212 4 жыл бұрын

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

@douglasmacaulay2301 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

Why is it a millihelen, not a whole helen?

@jeremylakeman 5 жыл бұрын

"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 5 жыл бұрын

I love it!

@aussiebloke609 5 жыл бұрын

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

@chinmayasunkur7297 5 жыл бұрын

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

@cadr003 5 жыл бұрын

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

@CandidDate 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Enmos 5 жыл бұрын

Viruses are way more evolved than humans.

@Mekratrig 5 жыл бұрын

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

@CandidDate 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Caffeinix 5 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@nikonissinen6772 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

That or the area of Wales.

@MephLeo 5 жыл бұрын

Or the size of NYC.

@Starclimber 5 жыл бұрын

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

@heyandy889 5 жыл бұрын

Olympic-sized swimming pool

@gcewing 5 жыл бұрын

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 Жыл бұрын

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.

@robfenwitch7403 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@robfenwitch7403 5 жыл бұрын

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

@MrJdcirbo 4 жыл бұрын

Legendary

@maxximumb 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@SuperPhunThyme9 4 жыл бұрын

how much is that in furlongs per fortnight

@xavierpaquin 3 жыл бұрын

@@SuperPhunThyme9 hahaha

@absurdantiquity5240 2 жыл бұрын

omg i am absolutely dying at this comment

@victor9sur768 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@sandervandijk2373 5 жыл бұрын

One Minion??

@TheToric 5 жыл бұрын

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

@victor9sur768 5 жыл бұрын

@@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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@brianjuelpedersen6389 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@toncent 5 жыл бұрын

the cake recipe was pure gold.

@toncent 5 жыл бұрын

i mean in a comedic sense. not literally

@1224chrisng 3 жыл бұрын

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

@ericvilas 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@dkevans 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Sunflowrrunner 5 жыл бұрын

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 9 ай бұрын

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

@RasperHelpdesk 5 жыл бұрын

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 4 жыл бұрын

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

@nari5025 4 жыл бұрын

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

@talltroll7092 4 жыл бұрын

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

@nari5025 4 жыл бұрын

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

@beachboardfan9544 5 жыл бұрын

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 👍

@iabervon 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

That would be μHz, not uHz.

@cvkline 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@benmorris118 9 ай бұрын

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.

@damienw4958 5 жыл бұрын

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

@kdawg3484 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

oh well, it will always be mhos in my heart

@MephLeo 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@gerhardmeier1748 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

*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.

@calinculianu 5 жыл бұрын

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!

@KarlFFF 5 жыл бұрын

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

@bielanski2493 5 жыл бұрын

"You Are Here."

@thryduulf 5 жыл бұрын

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

@bielanski2493 5 жыл бұрын

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)

@EebstertheGreat 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@TrevorClarke 5 жыл бұрын

My SUV gets 65 kilosmoots per Hubble-barn

@StarkRG 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

But how many Hubble-barns per hundred kilosmoots?

@StarkRG 5 жыл бұрын

Steradian-micro-volts

@SimonClarkstone 5 жыл бұрын

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

@StarkRG 5 жыл бұрын

@@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".

@TheStryper777 5 жыл бұрын

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

@kconger_ 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@lovedance2 Жыл бұрын

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!

@icusawme2 Жыл бұрын

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

@celtgunn9775 5 жыл бұрын

🤣 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

@thryduulf 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

Fortnite?

@MasterHigure 5 жыл бұрын

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

@romanski5811 5 жыл бұрын

@@MasterHigure FORTNITE?

@Gribbo9999 5 жыл бұрын

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

@thryduulf 5 жыл бұрын

@@MasterHigure The etymology is "fourteen nights"

@jproctor2010 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@davedaley9093 Жыл бұрын

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.

@DaylightDigital 4 жыл бұрын

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 4 жыл бұрын

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

@thinkingape7655 5 жыл бұрын

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

@HaliPuppeh 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Arycke 5 жыл бұрын

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

@blendonator 5 жыл бұрын

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

@aner_bda 5 жыл бұрын

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

@togelian 5 жыл бұрын

Loving the humor of this video :) sillyness is awesome and you seem to have so much fun making it

@chinogixxer7506 5 жыл бұрын

I like your format and presence. Thanks for making learning interesting :-)

@petercollin5670 5 жыл бұрын

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

@e1woqf 5 жыл бұрын

Haha! Me too!

@tekvax01 5 жыл бұрын

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

@smuecke 5 жыл бұрын

Absolute unit.

@Iliya117 5 жыл бұрын

Been scrolling way to long fot dis

@IndianaTony 5 жыл бұрын

That was fantastic! Interesting units, good animations, and I loved the cake recipe.

@geoffreyault423 5 жыл бұрын

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

@baganatube 5 жыл бұрын

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

@666Tomato666 5 жыл бұрын

while their width is measured in inches and depth in mm

@Grizzly01 5 жыл бұрын

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

@666Tomato666 5 жыл бұрын

@@Grizzly01 "often" [citation needed]

@Grizzly01 5 жыл бұрын

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

@666Tomato666 5 жыл бұрын

@@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...

@RobertGallop 5 жыл бұрын

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

@recklessroges 5 жыл бұрын

I agree

@katg-gk5ox 3 жыл бұрын

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

@notdaveschannel9843 4 жыл бұрын

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".

@Yossus 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@kirkhamandy 5 жыл бұрын

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

@arbazna 5 жыл бұрын

This is indeed the correct answer.

@MelodeonTunes 5 жыл бұрын

1U is actually 1.75 inches

@kirkhamandy 5 жыл бұрын

@@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 5 жыл бұрын

Creamy Pasta 24.4? I’m sure you meant 25.4

@kirkhamandy 5 жыл бұрын

@@snukie73 yay for typos, cheers for the correction

@Ranchhand323 5 жыл бұрын

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 .

@MrDuno9 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@hotdrippyglass 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@stanleystriker7065 5 жыл бұрын

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

@isaactfa 5 жыл бұрын

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

@stanleystriker7065 5 жыл бұрын

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

@jlunde35 5 жыл бұрын

Great job Dr. Becky. Delightful.

@N.I.R.A.T.I.A.S. 5 жыл бұрын

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

@twilightknight123 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@arcaneminded 5 жыл бұрын

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

@lostincyberspaceIII 5 жыл бұрын

Have you heard of starfinder?

@arcaneminded 5 жыл бұрын

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

@moroccangeographer8993 2 жыл бұрын

This is one of my favourite videos on this channel.

@ynamaxa 4 жыл бұрын

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

@MyYTwatcher 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@SuperPhunThyme9 4 жыл бұрын

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.

@jimskea224 5 жыл бұрын

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

@QemeH 5 жыл бұрын

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

@drearyplane8259 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Grizzly01 5 жыл бұрын

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

@drearyplane8259 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Grizzly01 5 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@markwilliamson9199 2 жыл бұрын

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

@pyotrleflegin7255 5 жыл бұрын

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

@kelsie.j 5 жыл бұрын

i stopped writing my lab report to watch this

@kelsie.j 5 жыл бұрын

Dr. Becky That’s called the Smethurst effect!

@sidharthcs2110 5 жыл бұрын

I have an exam on optics tomorrow

@MephLeo 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

@@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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@leplum2001 5 жыл бұрын

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

@BalladOfLooks 5 жыл бұрын

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!

@andyguy0610 4 жыл бұрын

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 

@sithman78 5 жыл бұрын

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

@sidharthcs2110 5 жыл бұрын

Nyet comerad

@urbaniv 5 жыл бұрын

Guilty

@BattleBunny1979 5 жыл бұрын

why? you like some competition?

@celtgunn9775 5 жыл бұрын

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

@calinculianu 5 жыл бұрын

She's awesome, indeed.

@Wytnucls 5 жыл бұрын

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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Wytnucls 5 жыл бұрын

100% error is bad kerma!

@PerthScienceClinic 11 ай бұрын

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.

@coolHeadSaurabh 5 жыл бұрын

Very nice information and of course, a fantastic interview.

@gasdive 5 жыл бұрын

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

@gasdive 5 жыл бұрын

@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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@gasdive 5 жыл бұрын

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

@valeriavagapova 5 жыл бұрын

@@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 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Phyrexious 5 жыл бұрын

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

@JanboelPe 5 жыл бұрын

Also the temperature of my dorm this summer.

@MephLeo 5 жыл бұрын

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

@emilyscloset2648 5 жыл бұрын

Casually explained ftw

@Markle2k 5 жыл бұрын

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

@Saki630 5 жыл бұрын

what is the surface temp of the sun?

@tekvax01 5 жыл бұрын

I just love this video! it is my new fav on the internet!!

@gevmage 5 жыл бұрын

This is wonderful. I haven't heard of most of these.

@MasterHigure 5 жыл бұрын

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

@jumbo6498 5 жыл бұрын

Thank you for broaching this.

@vivekvenkatramankrishnan3923 5 жыл бұрын

They should add a caption to the video for this.

@vladomaimun 5 жыл бұрын

Why is an outhouse bigger than a shed? This is really weird.

@um5785 5 жыл бұрын

Have you seen the size of the backsides of the egos of some physic professors?

@stiv_mcgivers 5 жыл бұрын

I think you meant to say, "that's really weird ****"

@xavier1278 5 жыл бұрын

Fantastic video, can’t wait to try the recipe.

@marvthebass 5 жыл бұрын

Probably my favorite Sixty Symbols video! 😂😂😂😂 Dr. Becky is one of my favorite scientists ever

@realcygnus 5 жыл бұрын

ThE Zeroth Law of ALL calculation is, Know thy Units.

@CandidDate 5 жыл бұрын

If "man is the measure of all things," comparing things to human activity is the only way to get a "feel" for any quantity.

@Anonymous-zp4hb 5 жыл бұрын

The first is know thy uncertainty

@sbjf 5 жыл бұрын

*thine

@michalbotor 5 жыл бұрын

or.. you can do pure math. ^_^

@gumunduringigumundsson9344 5 жыл бұрын

Units are for horny housewifes to dream on and geeks having fun.. never tell me the odds! 🤠

@kibidk 5 жыл бұрын

6:13 "Each-ish" probably the weirdest unit of them all.. :-)

@NowinWTF 4 жыл бұрын

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

@BytebroUK 5 жыл бұрын

Becky, you did that so WELL!

@adrukker 5 жыл бұрын

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

@OverusedArgument 5 жыл бұрын

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

@X_Baron 5 жыл бұрын

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

@djenning90 3 жыл бұрын

I absolutely loved this!! ❤️

@michalbotor 5 жыл бұрын

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!"

@KalikiDoom 5 жыл бұрын

Love the cake! 🎂

@gawain78 5 жыл бұрын

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

@eddprst 5 жыл бұрын

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

@stargazer7644 4 жыл бұрын

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.

@Biomirth 5 жыл бұрын

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.

@michaelzumpano7318 5 жыл бұрын

Becky, you make it so much fun. And you are very smart. I hope you do many more.

@jmm1233 5 жыл бұрын

Kerma sounds like something used in ksp

@SD-de4do 5 жыл бұрын

What I learned? Astronomers are rebellious and silly.

@pierremarcotte6299 4 жыл бұрын

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