I'm a Smoot !!!!!; Are You?

smoot - a non-standard unit of length = 5 foot 7 inches

During a recent episode of the CBS sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" there was a cameo appearance by physicist George Fitzgerald Smoot III, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. While reading the wikipedia article about George, I came across this disclaimer:

From wikipedia: George F Smoot

Although Smoot attended MIT, he was not the same Smoot who was laid end to end to measure the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston;[4][5] this was his cousin Oliver R. Smoot, an MIT alumnus who served as the chairman of the American National Standards Institute.[5][6]

This led me to read about Oliver, who had a unit of length - his height of 5 ' 7" - designated as a "smoot"



From wikipedia: Smoot

The smoot is a nonstandard unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot (class of 1962), a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

So they could have also used me, a Boston, to measure the distance from Boston to Cambridge across their bridge. (That was a cool construction - see how I did a 'Boston Boston bridge bridge'?) Of course in the year 1958 I was not yet 5 years old, much less 5' 7", and much closer to 5 months old, so they would have had to wait a few years for me to reach my full smootedness.

Note: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the following:


Smoot

and

George F Smoot



(and lastly, the answer to your subliminal question is 'Yes', the "!!!!!;" in the title was a sneaky reference to 5 foot 7 inches -> smooth, huh?)