Weird Units Converter
Convert weird units between units instantly. Includes conversion tables, common equivalents, and calculation formulas.
Weird Units Converter
Calculator
Adjust values & calculateEnter your values below. Every result is computed in your browser โ no data is sent to any server.
Formula: converted = value x (fromFactor / toFactor)
Worked example โ 364.4 smoots = 6.7826 football fields
Formula
converted = value x (fromFactor / toFactor)
Each weird unit has a known conversion factor to a standard SI unit. Conversion multiplies the input by the source factor, then divides by the target factor, allowing conversion between any pair of units in the same measurement category.
Worked Examples
Example 1: Smoots to Football Fields
Problem:The Harvard Bridge is 364.4 smoots. How many football fields is that?
Solution:364.4 smoots x 1.7018 m/smoot = 620.20 m 620.20 m / 91.44 m/field = 6.7826 football fields
Result:364.4 smoots = 6.7826 football fields
Example 2: Microcenturies to Minutes
Problem:How many seconds are in 1 microcentury?
Solution:1 microcentury = 3155.76 seconds 3155.76 / 60 = 52.596 minutes
Result:1 microcentury = 3,155.76 seconds = 52.6 minutes
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a smoot?
A smoot is a nonstandard unit of length equal to 5 feet 7 inches (1.7018 meters), based on the height of Oliver R. Smoot, who was used to measure the Harvard Bridge in 1958. The bridge was found to be 364.4 smoots plus one ear. The markings are repainted by MIT fraternity pledges each year and have become a beloved Cambridge landmark recognized even by Google Calculator.
What is a microcentury and why is it useful?
A microcentury is one millionth of a century, which equals approximately 52.6 minutes. Computer scientist Grace Hopper popularized it by noting that a microcentury is conveniently close to a standard lecture period of about 50 minutes. This makes it a humorous but surprisingly practical unit for academic scheduling and a memorable way to think about time scales.
What is a jiffy as a unit of time?
A jiffy has different definitions depending on the field. In computing, it is the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt, typically 1/60th or 1/100th of a second. In physics, Gilbert Newton Lewis defined a jiffy as the time it takes light to travel one centimeter, approximately 33.3564 picoseconds. In electronics, it commonly refers to one alternating current cycle period, which is 1/60 second in North America.
How many bananas long is a typical car?
An average banana is about 17.8 centimeters (7 inches) long. A typical sedan is approximately 4.5 meters long, which means it is about 25.3 bananas in length. This banana scale is used humorously on the internet for size comparisons but actually provides a surprisingly intuitive sense of scale since most people can easily visualize a banana.
How does the converter get from one odd unit to another when no direct factor exists?
Every unit in a category carries a single conversion factor to an SI base quantity: metres for length, kilograms for mass, seconds for time, joules for energy. The tool multiplies your value by the source factor to reach that base, then divides by the target factor. Ten smoots becomes 10 x 1.7018 = 17.018 metres, and 17.018 / 0.178 = 95.6 bananas. Routing everything through one base unit means n units need only n factors rather than a table of every pair.
What is a light-nanosecond and why is it close to one foot?
A light-nanosecond is the distance light covers in a billionth of a second in vacuum. Since light travels 299,792,458 metres per second, one nanosecond of travel is about 0.2998 metres, or roughly 11.8 inches. Grace Hopper famously handed out lengths of wire cut to that size to show engineers why signal delay matters in fast computers: no instruction can cross a machine faster than this, so physical layout sets a hard floor on latency.
What is a shake and where is this unit actually used?
A shake is exactly 10 nanoseconds, or 1 x 10 to the minus 8 seconds, and the name comes from the phrase two shakes of a lamb's tail. Unlike most units on this page it has a serious application: the time between successive generations in a nuclear chain reaction is on the order of a shake, so the unit gives physicists a convenient whole-number scale for describing reaction timing without dragging exponents through every calculation.
Why is a ton of TNT defined as exactly 4.184 gigajoules?
It is a defined convention, not a measured explosion. One gram of TNT is taken to release 1,000 thermochemical calories, and the thermochemical calorie is fixed at exactly 4.184 joules, so a gram is 4,184 joules and a metric ton is 4.184 x 10^9 joules. Real TNT detonations vary with charge geometry and confinement, so the unit is a standard yardstick for comparing energy releases rather than a prediction of what a particular ton would do.
What is a foe and what scale of event does this unit describe?
Foe stands for fifty-one ergs, meaning 10^51 ergs. An erg is 10^-7 joules, so one foe equals 10^44 joules. Astronomers coined it because a core-collapse supernova releases energy of roughly this order, almost all of it carried away by neutrinos rather than light. Using foe keeps supernova energy budgets in single-digit numbers, in the same way that astronomers use parsecs and solar masses instead of metres and kilograms.
How long is a millifortnight in ordinary time units?
A fortnight is 14 days, which is 14 x 86,400 = 1,209,600 seconds, so a millifortnight is one thousandth of that: 1,209.6 seconds, or 20.16 minutes. The fortnight survives in the joke unit system furlongs per fortnight, prized because it makes ordinary speeds come out as absurdly large numbers. Prefixing a non-SI unit with SI prefixes like milli or micro is the same trick behind the microcentury, and it is a quick way to build a unit at a human-friendly scale.
References
Reviewed for accuracy by Manoj Kumar, Mathematics Educator ยท Editorial policy
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