Fairly Odd Measurements

Lucy has arrived home for the Easter holidays from Leeds Uni, bringing with her, amongst other things, such as a suitcase full of laundry, Rang and Dale’s Pharmacology (Sixth edition) a weighty tome full of must-have information for the earnest enquirer into vancomycin, endocannanonoids, presynaptic modulation and other words I have to have prior warning of before I attempt to pronounce them.  (When I say it’s a weighty tome, I’m not joking; it turns the scales at just shy of five and a half pounds) It’s the last place you’d think of looking for comic relief.

However, the section on General Principles of Bioassay occurs a note on standard measurements.  Quoting J.H. Burn writing in 1950, Rang and Dale say:

Pharmacologists today strain at the king’s arm but swallow the frog, rat and mouse, not to mention the guinea pig and pigeon.  Burn was referring to the fact that the king’s arm had been abandoned as a standard measurement of length, whereas drug activity continues to be defined in the dose needed to cause vomiting in a pigeon or cardiac arrest in a mouse.

Leaving to one side the picture of a laboratory stocked by hurling pigeons and expiring mice, Rang and Dale then weigh in with a footnote worthy of Terry Pratchett.

More picturesque examples of absolute units that Burn would have frowned on are the PHI and the mHelen.  PHI stands for “Purity In Heart” index and measures the ability of a virgin pure-in-heart to transform, under appropriate conditions, a he-goat into a youth of surpassing beauty.   The mHelen is a unit of beauty, one mHelen being sufficient to launch one ship.

However, it was the Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe, who said Helen had a “face that launched a thousand ships,” whereas, according to Homer, the Trojan fleet consisted of 1,186 ships. That means Helen herself measures 1.186 mHelens of Beauty. Shakespeare had a crack at a beauty index but, in a defeatist sort of way, immediately gave up the task as hopeless. (“Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s Day?  Thou art more lovely…” etc.)  Which means what could be called the S.D. index never took hold.

Clive James, when considering the work of the futurologist, Herman Khan (ie, Kahn told us what was going to happen in the future) proposed that Herman Khan’s favourite measurement of time, an auto-extruding temporal unit (As in, “This is gonna happen fivetenfifteentweenytwennyfive years from now”) should be called a Hermie, a  measure that ensured by the time it was fivetenfifteentweenytwennyfive years from now we’d have all forgotten what Hermie had said so Hermie could carry on predicting without anyone harshly pointing out that Hermie Got It Wrong.

This is a game anyone can play.  I’ve got two standards of measurements of my own.  One’s the W.I. (not the Women’s Institute) but the Wodehouse Index where, granted that PG Wodehouse’s books are infinitely re-readable, a book can be assessed on the W.I. scale.

Harry Potter is 10 on the W.I., as is Agatha Christie.  I was chuffed to bits when a critic for The Historical Novel Review gave Off The Record 1 on the W.I. by stating, in cold blood in print, that she’d enjoyed the book so much she’d re-read it. The Hunger Games, which I’ve just finished, is a roller-coaster read but scores zero on the W.I.  Now I’ve got to the point where Katniss is living in a sort of peace, I don’t want to do the journey with her again.  Much too exhausting.

The other Standard Measurement I’ve got was evolved with the kids on the school run, as A Diversion, as Legolas memorably says in Lord Of The Rings.  (That’s about 6 W.I.’s, incidentally).   It’s the K.O.C., or Kittens Of Cuteness Index, one kitten = one measure of cuteness.  For instance, a wriggly King Charles’ Spaniel puppy winding its lead round its owner’s leg is 3 K.O.C.’s, whereas a little girl in a sticky-out raincoat, carrying an umbrella   and sloshing through puddles is 10 K.O.C.’s.  Aw.