French photographer needs English-speaking advice

[Struan Gray]

Nothing in SI is casual.

Not even the SI unit of beauty

 

[Roger Hicks]

Not even the SI unit of beauty

I must not have been paying attention. Has the millihelen or mH (the amount of beauty required to launch one ship) already been mentioned?

Cheers,

R

 

[Struan Gray]

H is taken, as is h and Hz. He is helium. Hel seems just wrong. I think this is why the helen was never officially adopted.

Wiki says the whole idea is due to William Rushton. My wife, whose father was a collegue, and who grew up next door, says pish.

 

[Bob F.]

Sorry Roger, under new EU harmonization legislation, the imperial Helen has been replaced by the metric SI helen. Whereas 1 imperial milliHelen was sufficient to launch one ship, the new SI helen needs to be measured in megahelens rather than millihelens as 1 helen = the heat (in joules) generated by a standard argument multiplied by the pressure (in pascal) that 1000kg of bricks will exert when falling on the other person's head from "a great height" (officially 1500 metres).

Cheers, Bob.

 

[Roger Hicks]

H is taken, as is h and Hz. He is helium. Hel seems just wrong. I think this is why the helen was never officially adopted.

Wiki says the whole idea is due to William Rushton. My wife, whose father was a collegue, and who grew up next door, says pish.

Perhaps Hb then?

I thought it was Terry Pratchett but now that you mention it, I think it may have been around longer. But whatever Wiki says anything, my default suspicion is that they're wrong.

You'd need to standardize the ship first, too. Perhabs HB can help.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Ole]

The unit must be Ht, form "Helen of Troy".

The most relevant unit of beauty is the picohelen (pHt) - just enough to get one man (sober) to consider getting his butt out of the couch (deep, in front of TV) but decide not to.

Alcohol consumption is known to have a strong irrational influence on the pHt, which must in those cases be designated (d)pHt where the "d" is the Drunkenness Index. d is in itself irrational.

 

[MattKing]

I think that, after reading through all the posts here, the OP will change her mind and vow to never, ever, include any English on her website again

Matt

 

[Struan Gray]

The unit must be Ht, form "Helen of Troy".

But the Celsius lemma would would make that hT, which is already taken by the hectotesla.

I quite like the idea that you could have a negative helen, in which case your ships row off in the other direction as fast as they can. However, my feeling is that any true definition must explicitly address the fact that beauty is a complex quantity, thus allowing moonstruck helmsmen to go round in circles or off at a hyperbolic tangent.


Roger, Hb is so widespread among medics (for Haemoglobin) that it's adoption by the Beauty industry would only lead to confusion.

Wiki is bad in this case, but it's been surprisingly helpful in some of the odd branches of mathematics I've been teaching myself lately. As always, the ability to read critically is an asset.

Pratchett seems more likely than Wiki's Robertson Davies, although it's nice to have an excuse to re-read "The Rebel Angels". Family consensus is that Rushton might have been quoting Aldous Huxley. Most of the people who would know have died in the last few years, so we are free to speculate at will.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Dear Struan,

Alas, you are right about Hb. It was merely a passing compliment to our own lovely Helen who always contributes so entertainingly to such threads as these.

The idea of a negative helen is indeed superb. Perhaps there's some scope here for a new fundamental particle, the smallest possible particle of beauty: the helon and of course the antihelon. Then again, don't I recall that 'charm' is one of the attributes of at least one subatomic particle?

As for Wiki, it makes sense that the harder the subject, e.g. mathematics, the less scope there is for witless speculation and poor scholarship.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Struan Gray]

Then again, don't I recall that 'charm' is one of the attributes of at least one subatomic particle?

Quarks have a 'flavour' called 'charm'. They can also be 'strange'. They don't however, have the property of consistently being right and interesting, which is what I associate with HelenB.

 

[Ed Sukach]

The Anti-Helen (symbol -Ht) is defined as the pressure exerted on upper and lower teeth (involuntary grinding) times distance (in cM) traveled backwards when first experiencing the image of a woman whose appearance has been modified by 60 plastic surgeries.

It is equal to the square root of the "Michael Jackson" reaction.

 

[Helen B]

I used to think that the symbol B stood for the bel (a load of of noise) and the barn (easy to hit) but now I realise that it is also the symbol for the blush.

 

[MissPhotographer]

Thank you soooo much! You are all so passionate
Unfortunately I haven't understood all :confused: it was in fact too technical for me.
A special thanks to Ed who mentioned Michael -even if it wasn't in a positive way- if I have well understood
Here my MySpace address: http://www.myspace.com/mjjphotographer
You are all welcome!!!
Don't hesitate to give me your opinion about the choice of the sentence or about something else...

- Alexandra J

 

[Bob F.]

Sorry Alexandra: the English in particular are suckers for a discussion about language and like to play with words and will go flying off topic at the first hint of a misplaced apostrophe (where else would a book on punctuation become a best-seller?!) ...

I hope your site is very successful for you!

Cheers, Bob.