To your complaint about the invented unit, see here It is entirely in character to make up a unit to amuse and challenge himself instead of using SI An example: &gt;The smoot is a unit of length, defined as the height in 1958 of Oliver Smoot, who later became the Chairman of the American National Standards Institute ANSI and president of the International Organization for Standardization Or think of all the weird programming languages like the one that consists entirely of Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Impractical, buy funny and My personal example BS, MS chemical engineering , we would sometimes do our projects in obscure Imperial units to annoy/challenge our TAs if they had not specified what units were to be When you are working on the same problem for weeks/months, you get a little And just because SI units are easy does not mean you always use the easy This is a person who is supposed to have copious free time to occupy after