Beauty. Helen of Troy in causing the Trojan War was said to have had "the face that launched a thousand ships". Therefore a face beautiful enough to launch one ship would be 1 millihelen.
Alternative answers and thoughts:
- A millihelen is a face that can launch a single ship. I think the phrase was coined by Larry Niven. My life however has been full of women who could be measured in nanohelens, i.e. they could launch 2 lengths of deck planking and six rivets! 1 Helen (H) is a huge quantity of beauty, and is thus inconvenient to work with. The smaller unit, the milliHelen (mH), representing the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship is more workable. Even this has problems, since the amount of beauty required to cause the spontaneous launching of ships must be large, since verifiable instances of beauty-induced ship launching are not commonplace. Also, there is no explanation as to how beauty could be "used up" in launching ships in such a way as to allow the count of successful launches to be able to be related to the total beauty.
- Are there negative measurements (ugliness) and how are they measured? Spontaneous sinking of boats? Or the launching of submarines? With the reported problems of the Collins class submarines (a seriously ugly boat) probably resulting in extended times in dry-dock, their multiple launching could soak up a lot of ugliness in the world.
- Is there a factor that needs to be applied to different classes of vessels to account for size, displacement, crew, etc. e.g. does a Trimaran require 1mH, 3mH, or some other amount of beauty to spontaneously launch?
I've had this sitting around for a while. I hope you got a laugh out of it, Helen.
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of course. but then, it never takes too much, i hope. on another note entirely, (diane, close your... eyes?) i'm an enfp! woohoo! apparently i should be a psychologist - how convenient is that?
Explain nano's to me. What happens to those of us not named Helen. What an ideal to live up to.
Congratulations Helen, the past four years of your life have been validated. :P
Nano is 10^-9 or .000000001 times the calculated value. So, in the given context, that would be a very small amount of beauty.
I should mention that what I posted was from an e-mail, not something I wrote on my own. Thus, the isn't really my, per se.
Historical fiction may not have talked about a Rebekah whose beauty started wars, but would you really want that distinction? It's quite a reputation for Helens everywhere to live up to.
Saying much more could get me in a very sticky situation. I'd just like to add that you're very beautiful and I'm very happy to have you all to myself.
:-D
nice dodge, tim. cassius would be proud.
why is it pronounced kashus and not kasEus? (sorry that my phonetic alphabet has escaped me, but you get the idea.)
Rebekah of the Bible actually caused a bit of trouble by convincing her son Jacob to steal his older brother's blessing from his father, thereby changing history as it may have been. But seeing as God knew it would happen ... I guess it really didn't change anything. The important women are always scandalous - cool.
I'm convinced phonetic alphabets don't exist. Especially in Norway. Or do they use their own phonetic alphabet? I guess you can't use an English phonetic alphabet for Norwegian, eh?
OK, to summarize: Rebekahs are trouble, but God knows about it, so it's fine?
There's an attempt to quantif
There's an attempt to quantify the millihelen (or at least rate people in them) at millihelens.com, which is pretty interesting.