We recently spent a lecture in my first year engineering course introducing the concepts of units, unit systems, and unit conversions. We talked about meters and feet. We discussed kilograms and slugs, pounds mass and pounds force. We even talked about esoteric units like furlongs and fortnights. But I realized afterward that I’ve short-changed their education by not mentioning two important engineering units: the bruno and the smoot. Both these units were created by (and named for) undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Continue reading →