milli-Helen, milliHelen, as a unit of beauty (1958 March 11)

[Wilson Gray]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia contains an article titles "List of Humorous Units of
> Measurement" that includes a discussion of the miliHelen and connects
> the term to Cambridge mathematician W.A.H. Rushton and Isaac Asimov:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement
>

W:pedia, loc.cit.:

Pleasure: Hedon
Philosophers talking about Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism sometimes
use the conceptual unit of the Hedon to describe the amount of
pleasure, equivalent to the amount of pleasure a person receives from
gaining one util of utility.


A friend of mine, Judy, independently developed the concept of the
_hedon_ ['hi,dan] in 1973, defining the _megahedon_ as equivalent to
one by-some-considered-mythological female orgasm.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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