A Tad

Measure twice, cut once

Culled from here and there, (most were on Neatorama) here are some measurement systems or roots from common phrases.

• Baker's dozen - If you buy a dozen loaves of bread, bakers usually throw one in for free, so baker's dozen means 13. They didn't do this out of the goodness of their heart: the practice came to be in the 13th century, when a medieval English law made it so a baker could be punished by chopping his hand off with an axe if he was found to be shortchanging a customer. Tossing in an extra loaf of bread seemed to be a prudent way of keeping one's hand.
• Gillette - American physicists Ted Maiman, who made the first working laser, used to compare laser output power by how many Gillette razor blades it can burn a hole through. A 2 Gillette laser can only through 2 stacked razor blades.
• jiffy - there are two definitions of a jiffy, both of which are units of time and mean very, very fast. In computer engineering, a jiffy is one cycle or one tick of the computer's system clock. The second definition is the time required for light to travel one centimeter, as proposed by American chemisty Gilbert Lewis. This translates to 33.3564 picoseconds.
• millihelen - If Helen of Troy had "the face that launched a thousand ship," then the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship is a millihellen. A negative hellen is the amount of ugliness that makes a thousand ships sail the other way.
• moment - If you ask someone to wait a moment, you're asking them to wait for a very short period of time. But how short? Turns out a moment is a medieval unit of time equals to 1/40th of an hour or 1.5 minutes.
• smidgen - Yes, it means "small" but how small? A smidgen is exactly 1/2 a pinch or 1/32 of a teaspoon.
• Warhol - Andy Warhol once said that "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." So, warhol is a measure of fame. 1 kilowarhol is being famous for 15,000 minutes or approximately 10 days. Conversely, 1 milliwarhol is about nine-tenths of a second of fame, which is about how long it takes my brain to forget a name.
• Sagan - Carl Sagan loved to say "billions and billions of stars," so in his honor, a Sagan is defined as at least 4 billion. So that you know, there are nearly 100 Sagan (400,000,000,000) stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
• Big Mac Index - a measure of exchange rates (actually purchasing power parity) between two currencies. It was defined by Economist's editor Pam Woodall to measure whether a currency is under- or overvalued. She used a Big Mac because the burger is produced in about 120 countries.
• Potrzebie - 1 ngogn halavah = 1 blintz (b)