The Wales And The Belgium:
The British have a long history of using strange yet descriptive units of measurement. Their media especially enjoys describing the size of things in terms like “bus length,” “football pitch,” and “Olympic swimming pool.” The weirdest of these descriptive units are probably the Wales and the Belgium. The Wales is, naturally, about the same size as the country, approximately 20,000 square kilometers (8,000 sq mi).
It hails from the days of the British Empire, and it is used to describe the size of various geographical areas in terms that are easily understandable to the average person. For instance, when Americans started the Vietnam War, the British news media introduced the country to the viewers as a “country in Southeast Asia that is 14 times the size of Wales.”
When Britain joined the European Union, the Wales was replaced by the Belgium; the country is 1.5 times the size of Wales and can act as a similar, easily understandable unit of measurement. Also, “Belgium” is apparently more international.
The Banana Equivalent Dose:
There are many ways to measure radiation, and most of them are named after scientists like Geiger, Roentgen, or Sievert. And then there’s the banana equivalent dose.
Every banana you eat is contaminated with a tiny amount of radiation. Funnily enough, this amount is roughly 0.1 microsieverts (a sievert is the standard for measuring the biological effect of radiation). Although this is obviously a harmless dose, it offers an easily relatable comparison to abstract radiation figures. For instance, to receive the amount of radiation Japan’s Fukushima disaster leaked, you’d have to eat 76 million bananas.
The banana equivalent dose (BED) may actually be the first unit of measurement ever coined by a comic. It started out as a surprisingly well-researched comparison chart published in the popular webcomic XKCD. Since then, it’s been adopted by the likes of Forbes and BBC thanks to its ease and approachability.
The Crab:
A crab might sound like a measurement unit for shellfish (or perhaps venereal disease), but has nothing to do with arthropods. Crabs and their cousins, millicrabs, are used to express the intensity of radiation sources in space.
The counterintuitive name actually comes from the Crab Nebula, a vast remainder of an ancient supernova that’s famous for being a particularly intense and steady source of space X-rays. Much like the prototype meter stick that was used to define metric measurements until 1960, the Crab Nebula serves as a standard for space radiation.
In recent years, scientists have noticed its radiation isn’t quite as steady as we previously thought, so the crab’s status as a reliable measurement unit is now under some debate.
The fields of physics and engineering are famous for using a large number of different measurement systems, some more ridiculous than others. The beard second is among the stranger ones. It’s a joking (but quite popular) measure of small length, defined by the distance that the average beard hair grows in one second.
The beard second is among the many measurements inspired by (and parodying) the light year, the distance light can travel in one year. Its exact measure is hard to determine since there is no such thing as a “standardized beard.” Despite this, the beard second is generally thought to be roughly 5 nanometers (nm). This is based on the fact that a year has roughly 31.5 million seconds and the assumption that the “standard” beard grows about 15 centimeters (6 in) per year.