Unit of Beauty

Stan Kelly-Bootle’s articles in the ACM Queue magazine crack me up. (Well, his name cracks me up ...) In his most recent column, he writes about units of measurement. This part was really funny:

The unit of beauty depends on Christopher Marlowe’s Helen whose sweet face “launched a thousand ships.” The milliHelen is therefore the amount of beauty that can launch one ship. A recent elaboration is that ugliness can be expressed as a negative Helen values, as when we say his or her face could sink a battleship.