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Question Definition of the word "barn."

7 years 2 months ago #1 by Valentine
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    • A friend of mine recently asked this trivia question to a group of my friends and me. We had no clue. Saturday I asked another friend, possibly the most intelligent person I know, the same question. He took a moment and gave the right answer.

    The word barn has several meanings, the most common being that of the farm building, others are derivative of that, "bus barns" and the like. Barn has another meaning that was completely made up and used similar to the way the definition of "tank" came to mean an armored fighting vehicle.

    Does anyone know, without looking up, the alternate definition of "barn?"
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    7 years 2 months ago #2 by Astrodragon
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    • There used to be a usage (in the UK) of Barns as trousers (pants to you Americans)

    Hence the hilarity caused by the biblical line "I will tear down my barns and build better ones..."
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    7 years 2 months ago #3 by Sir Lee
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    • "Barn" is an unit for area measurement used in nuclear physics, equal to 10^-28 square meters. Not kidding.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_(unit)
    Don't call me "Shirley." You will surely make me surly.
    7 years 2 months ago #4 by Valentine
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    • I am impressed Sir Lee.
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    7 years 2 months ago #5 by Kristin Darken
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    • So am I... *I* knew it... but I ran a reactor for a number of years. I kinda expected MM2 and maybe ET2Smith, if he's still around, to be the only others who know it (as the only other navy nuke peeps around the site). You'd think I'd know by now not to underestimate SirLee though. If I were ever on one of those game shows that allows a 'lifeline', I'd want SirLee's number. :)
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    7 years 2 months ago #6 by Astrodragon
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    • Oddly they discouraged us from using it when i read Physics, they were insistent on 'proper' SI units..
    I love watching their innocent little faces smiling happily as they trip gaily down the garden path, before finding the pit with the rusty spikes.
    7 years 2 months ago #7 by Anne
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    • Since it is in square meters (10-28 square meters according to Sir Lee) that seems to be a SI measure. Maybe not quite a proper name for such a small area, but still the measure is defined as some portion of a square meter, so default SI at least If I recall such things correctly.
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    7 years 2 months ago #8 by Astrodragon
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    • They hadn't been using SI for that long when I did my degree - in fact, they changed to it 'officially' when I was at school - so I think they wanted to cement its 'proper' usage. We were sorta rebuked for not using actually SI measurements, I guess to get use used to doing so all the time
    I love watching their innocent little faces smiling happily as they trip gaily down the garden path, before finding the pit with the rusty spikes.
    7 years 2 months ago #9 by elrodw
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    • In my PhD work, I modeled quantum electron transport in a quantum tunneling semiconductor junction; I never used the barn; I worked in sub-angstroms and a time scale of sub-femtoseconds. No barns.

    And my brain has healed over the damage inflicted from years of work with quantum semiconductor misbehavior.
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    7 years 2 months ago #10 by null0trooper
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    • Not to worry. "barn" has a meaning as a verb (I looked it up to get the possibility of it being used as an alternate spelling of "bairn" out of my head.)
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    7 years 2 months ago #11 by Sir Lee
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    • I only knew that piece of trivia because I once perused the Wikipedia pages listing oddball, unusual, fictional and humorous units of measurement... things like "potrzebie", "smoot", "microfortnight", "milihelen", "microlenat", "thaum"...

    Note that the barn has submultiples named "outhouse" and "shed".
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    7 years 2 months ago #12 by MM2ss
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    • I got to the party too late...

    But yeah, it can be a building, a unit of measure, a verb (the act of storing certain products) and it can be a modifier as well (free range eggs vs barn eggs for example).
    7 years 2 months ago #13 by Arcanist Lupus
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    • Sir Lee wrote: I only knew that piece of trivia because I once perused the Wikipedia pages listing oddball, unusual, fictional and humorous units of measurement... things like "potrzebie", "smoot", "microfortnight", "milihelen", "microlenat", "thaum"...

    Note that the barn has submultiples named "outhouse" and "shed".


    That's how I learned about the barn too! I think I stumbled upon the page while looking for an page I had seen once describing a number of strange/joke units of measure (like 2,000 mockingbirds = 2 kilo mockingbirds, or the existence of the beard-second )
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    7 years 2 months ago #14 by Bek D Corbin
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    • Hey, Elrod! What's the latest on High Beta Fusion?
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