 |
 |
Learn something new every day! We're gonna need a whole "buttload" of fruit flies! From: http://cartalk.cars.com/Mail/Letters/1999/11.26/5.html - - - - - - - What Geeks (Engineers and Scientists) Do When They Have Too Much Free Time On a previous show you were discussing ways to measure a butt. I recall some ideas, like the number of notes covered while sitting on a piano keyboard. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, we generally use metric units, but every once and awhile, we need to be quantitative about "a buttload of stuff," "a buttload of rocket fuel," "a buttload of antimatter," etc. I thought you might like to know that there is actually an exact unit of volume called the BUTT. I kid you not!!! See Webster's dictionary: "butt--a measure of liquid capacity equal to 126 gallons or two hogsheads" In another dictionary: An English butt is 2 hogshead of 54 imperial gallons each or ~129.7 U.S. gallons (i.e., a U.K. butt is apparently slightly bigger than a U.S. one) A Spanish butt is based on a wine cask and is equivalent to 140 U.S. gallons or ~116.6 U.K. gallons (i.e., a Spanish butt is bigger still) So next time someone says they have a "buttload" of stuff, just remember, that is about two 55-gallon barrels' worth of stuff. 1 butt equals: 2 hogsheads (this is probably the easiest to remember for social occasions) 476.961 liters 126 gallons 104.917 U.K. gallons 13.5347 bushels 0.131592 cords 11.6574 firkins 4032 gills 21504 ponys 4032 noggins 1008 pints 96768 teaspoons 12.0308 ephahs 1.58987x10^7 drops 10752 jiggers 16128 shots 629.504 wine bottles 630 fifths One microbutt = 0.0968 teaspoons Cheers, Carl Gable (and the rest of the geeks and geekettes in the car pool, Dr. Bill Carey, Dr. Barb Dutrow, Dr. Jeremy Mitchell, Dr. George Guthrie) - - - - - - -