90 nanometers is 1.06295027754813E-5 barleycorns

Converter, from JURPSoft, is a little Windows program that lets you take several different measurements including length, light, Time and many others, and convert between them.

Which is how we know that 90 nanometers measures 1.06295027754813E-5 barleycorns.

The Time conversions are pretty good too. You can measure time in, for example "shakes", as we presume "shakes of a lamb's tail"*.

And if you can't fathom perches several leagues away, this natty little program will help you figure the whole thing out.

You can download Convertor, which has Czech and English versions, here.

Some of us at the INQ are so old that we used to use slide rules, log tables and, believe it or not, at Mageek's first school he was taught counting with an abacus and using a slate and chalk. Sheesh! µ

* READER BILL JENKINS says: "Just wanted to comment on the converter program you were talking about...and specifically, the length of a "shake". It was a term born in the early 40's, in the midst of atomic weapons research. As you know, an atomic bomb is a chain reaction, with a uranium atom splitting, creating two neutrons, which split other uranium atoms, which create more neutrons, etc, until the reaction finishes. The time it took for each succeeding "generation" of fission to take place was called a "shake", after, you got it, "shakes of a dead lamb's tail".

It's generally meant to be a billionth of a second, I believe, although it's more of an arbitrary measurement. What's amazing is that the entire fission process, from criticality to disassembly, lasts only 30 or 40 shakes. Not that I'm an a-bomb expert, but I've read the Nuclear Weapons FAQ by Carey Sublette...look it up sometime.