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MIT student blogger Snively '11

Units of Measure by Snively '11

A simple question with a lot of cool answers

I would like to direct you to this blog entry before we begin:

Samuel Maurer’s Day Off

Good story, right?

5 months after this entry was written I moved into the same dorm, the same floor in fact, as Sam – Conner 2, English House. Units of measure were alive and well within the culture of Conner 2 during my stay there. To the best of my knowledge there were only two rules regarding the units of measure.

  1. Celebrities get to define their own units of measure.
  2. Everybody else has to have their unit assigned to them by another member of Conner 2.

I can’t remember all of the units of my floormates but I remember a few. A Tang measured orthogonality to conversation. A Graybill is a unit of harem. The Itani is a unit of negative tact.  A Snively is equal to 1 byte wasted on the internet.

Friends with units is great, but what I really enjoyed, and still enjoy, is collecting celebrity units. You see, the Colbert story (go read the blog entry I linked to above, seriously, it’s short and important) prompted a desire to get other celebrities to answer the question –

“If your last name were a unit of measure, what would it measure?”

Over my four years at MIT, and in the years since I graduated, I’ve continued to collect celebrity units. I’m not always the one asking the question, of course – I don’t rub shoulders with famous people all that frequently. Friends who find themselves in fortuitous situations will often ask the question and add their catch to the list. We’ve acquired quite a few big names and cool units over the years and I figured it was time to share.

I believe this is the most complete list of the celebrity units we’ve collected. I’ve posted it below. Enjoy!

  • RL Stine = “Screams”
  • Evan Mathis = “Power”
  • Nicholas Negroponte = “Measure of perspective, not IQ”
  • Stephen Colbert = “Ball”
  • John Stewart = “Knish”
  • Steve Ballmer = “Energy!!” (made all the more terrifying due to the double factorial)
  • Eran Ergozy = “How fun it is to work at a company”
  • Steven Sinofksy = “Blogging words per minute”
  • Barack Obama = I tried my best
  • Kari Byron = “Cheesiness on the pun scale”
  • Tory Belleci = “Pain”
  • Grant Imahara = “Robot’s potential destructiveness”
  • Paul Provenza = “madness”
  • Matt Kirshen = “redundancy”
  • Scott Adams = “1 degree of potential awesomeness”
  • Francis Lawrence = “the amount of sweat on somebody’s palm”
  • Penn Jillette = “Nanohumor”
  • Emery Emery = “level of abrasiveness in comedic material”
  • Randall Munroe = “river output”
  • Joi Ito = “useful connections made in a day”