Measuring Milias

Dear Editor:

When I was a mathematics graduate student at Harvard there was a student named, as I recall, Kravetz whom people regarded as obnoxious. My fellow grad student Tom Lehrer invented a unit of obnoxiousness which was the “1 Kravetz.” But this was such a huge unit that the practical unit was the micro-Kravetz.

I would like to rename this unit “the Milias” and suggest that the practical unit is the pico-Milias.

Jeremy Bernstein

Aspen