Weird Units Converter (banana, smoot)

Article — Weird Units Converter (banana, smoot)

Weird Units Converter

Weird units of measurement are humorous-but-real reference objects used in place of standard units. The banana (18 cm), smoot (1.7 m), football field (91.44 m), blue whale (30 m), Eiffel Tower (330 m), and Olympic pool (2.5 million liters) all have fixed numeric definitions that line up with real-world averages. This calculator converts between standard SI units and 14 weird-unit reference objects.

The numbers behind weird units are surprisingly precise. An Olympic pool is exactly 50 m × 25 m × 2 m by FINA rules, holding 2,500,000 L. A football field is exactly 100 yards (91.44 m) between goal lines. A New Routemaster bus is 11.23 m long. Even the banana sits within a tight range of 18 to 23 cm across commercial varieties.

What are weird units of measurement?

A weird unit is any measurement defined by a familiar real-world object instead of a scientific standard. The unit replaces the meter, liter, or kilogram with something the reader can picture without looking at a ruler. Bananas, football fields, blue whales, Olympic pools — every weird unit is a shortcut for spatial intuition.

Some weird units arose as pranks (the smoot, the beard-second). Others came from journalism trying to communicate scientific results (oil spills measured in Olympic pools, deforestation in football fields per minute). All of them survive because human brains process familiar shapes faster than abstract numbers.

Banana for scale: the internet's favorite weird unit

The banana became a unit of measurement in August 2010, when a Facebook user posted a photo of a safe with a banana placed beside it for size reference. The image spread, and "banana for scale" became one of the longest-running internet memes. By 2015 the phrase had its own Know Your Meme entry, and bananas began appearing in product photos, science publications, and dating profiles.

What makes the banana useful as a unit is its consistency. Commercial Cavendish bananas — the variety sold in nearly every supermarket — range from 18 to 23 cm long. The 18 cm value is the conservative average used as a reference. So 100 m equals about 555 bananas. A blue whale equals 167 bananas. A marathon (42.195 km) equals 234,400 bananas — the kind of vivid number that lives in the reader's memory better than the kilometer value does.

The smoot — a real MIT-prank weird unit

The smoot is a unit of length equal to 5 feet 7 inches (1.7018 m), named after Oliver R. Smoot. In October 1958, Smoot was a pledge at the MIT chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. His fraternity brothers picked him up and carried him along the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, marking every smoot length with chalk. The bridge measured 364.4 smoots, plus or minus one ear.

The smoot stuck. Police and engineers use the markings to give street directions on the bridge. When the bridge was renovated, the smoot markings were preserved. In 2011, Google Maps added the smoot as an optional distance unit. Smoot himself went on to become president of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) — the man behind the meter, fittingly, also defined himself as a unit.

Football fields, blue whales, Eiffel Towers

The American football field is the favorite weird unit in US journalism. It is 100 yards long (91.44 m) between the goal lines, or 120 yards (109.73 m) including the two 10-yard end zones. News reports use it to describe everything from deforestation rates (acres lost per second) to airport runway lengths.

The blue whale is the favorite weird unit in nature documentaries. Adult blue whales average 24–30 m long; the largest specimen ever measured reached 33.58 m. The blue whale appears in environmental writing because it is both the largest animal alive and a familiar mental image. The Eiffel Tower, at 330 m with its current antenna, plays the same role for tall buildings — easier to picture than 330 m of empty air.

• Football field = 100 yd = 91.44 m
• Blue whale = 30 m (avg adult)
• Statue of Liberty = 93 m (with pedestal)
• Routemaster bus = 11.23 m (new model)
• Eiffel Tower = 330 m (with antenna)
• Burj Khalifa = 828 m (tallest building)
• Boeing 747 = 70.6 m long
• RMS Titanic = 269 m long, 46,000 m³ volume

Olympic pools and weird volume units

For volume, the Olympic swimming pool is the most-cited weird unit. The FINA standard fixes it at exactly 50 m long, 25 m wide, and at least 2 m deep, holding 2,500,000 liters or 2500 cubic meters. Environmental writers use the Olympic pool to describe oil spills, ice-sheet melt, and freshwater consumption — "enough water to fill 1000 Olympic pools" hits harder than "2.5 billion liters".

Smaller volume references: the soda can (355 mL US standard), the wine bottle (750 mL), the bathtub (~150 L), the water bottle (500 mL), the US teaspoon (4.93 mL). The sheppey is a humorous unit from Douglas Adams's The Meaning of Liff, defined as the closest distance at which a sheep is no longer recognizable as a sheep — about 7/8 of a mile, though we list it here as a volume joke (one acre-meter of land equals 4047 L).

The beard-second and other physics jokes

The beard-second is a unit equal to 5 nanometers (5 × 10⁻⁹ m) — the average length a beard grows in one second. The unit appears in physics humor and nanotechnology demonstrations to give scale to molecular events. A water molecule is about 0.3 nm — 0.06 beard-seconds. A DNA double helix is 2 nm wide — 0.4 beard-seconds. The wavelength of visible light is 380–740 nm, or 76–148 beard-seconds.

Other physics joke units: the Helen (millihelens are units of attractiveness, derived from "the face that launched a thousand ships"), the donkey-power (250 watts, a third of a horsepower), the wheaton (500,000 followers, from actor Wil Wheaton's Twitter milestone), and the microcentury (52.6 minutes, used by physicists for lecture lengths). None are SI-recognized, all are real units used in real publications.

Using weird units in the classroom

Teachers use weird units to teach proportion, scale, and unit conversion. A common exercise: how many bananas tall is the Empire State Building (102 floors, 381 m to the roof, 2117 bananas)? How many Olympic pools hold the daily Mississippi River discharge at New Orleans (about 14,000 m³/s × 86,400 s = 1.21 billion m³, or 484,000 Olympic pools)? The numbers come out as memorable images instead of dry digits.

The same approach works in news writing. A 2018 Amazon-rainforest deforestation report described losses in football fields per minute (about 1.5 per minute, peak rate). A 2021 climate report measured Antarctic ice loss in Olympic pools per second (about 4.6 pools per second at peak melt). Both reports got more attention than the equivalent km² and km³ figures would have managed.

Weird unit conversion formula

The math is identical to any other unit conversion. Value_out = Value_in × (Factor_in / Factor_out), where each Factor is the unit's value in meters (for length) or liters (for volume). The factor for the banana is 0.18 m. The factor for the football field is 91.44 m. The factor for the Olympic pool is 2,500,000 L.

So 1 km in bananas = 1000 m × (1 m / 0.18 m per banana) = 5556 bananas. 1 km in football fields = 1000 ÷ 91.44 = 10.94 fields. 1 km³ in Olympic pools = 10⁹ L ÷ 2.5 × 10⁶ L = 400,000 pools. The conversions are all multiplication and division — only the labels are unusual.