A MilliEinstein is a thousandth of the brain power of Einstein.

''Just as a millifarad is too large to measure most capacitors, a millieinstein is probably too large to measure most people, especially me. BTW, milli'''e'''instein, and the abbreviation '''mE''' are probably more in line with SI usage.''

The exact unit is not important, just the concept that a collection of things that can individually be understood will overwhelm the newcomer.

''Actually, no, all SI units named after real people have capital letters - including the Farad (hence mF for milliFarad, whereas 'second' wasn't named after anyone and so is just 's').  Some people just get lazy and forget to capitalise.''  Unfortunately, neither the BIPM nor NIST appear to agree with you on that. Their position is that the capitalisation of the names of base and derived units is no different from that of any other generic English nouns (i.e., all lower case, except at the start of a sentence). For example; "Millieinsteins are a bit large for measuring most people's brainpower, so microeinsteins are often used instead." Whether it is symbolised "mE" or "me" (but not "ME" or "Me", as "M" symbolises "mega-") is purely a matter of convention (and avoidance of namespace clashes), as the things are considered ''symbols'' rather than ''abbreviations''.

mE? I guess that's (mc) squared then.

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

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Related to the fundamental unit of beauty, the MilliHelen (mH), of course.

''Which is, I take it, the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship.  :)''

That's what the fortune file says... ;)