Back in the early nineties, my friend Jameel became frustrated with the commonly accepted Scale of Babes.

As a standard, men tend to rank women on a scale of 1 to 10. However this system is innately flawed because it doesn’t allow proper granularity to really objectify a babe.

Jameel thus came up with the "halle" system. Theorizing at the time that Halle Berry was the sexiest woman alive, Jameel realized that if you were to divide her base attractiveness by a factor of 1000, you could come up with a standard unit, the millihalle(mh) which could then be used to more accurately score the attractiveness of any woman.

Of course Jameel’s standard theory had the problem that one had to accept that 100% sexiness was equivalent to Halle Berry. I soon expanded upon the theory by postulating that a woman could theoretically score greater than 1000mh and remain on the scale. This yard stick served us well for many years.

However earlier today, Jameel came to me with the problem that he felt the scale was inefficient because there were now women walking the planet who far outranked Halle. Such as Rihanna, who I would estimate at a measure of approximately 5000mh. While this number is certainly still finite and measureable, it clearly creates a problem as it becomes difficult to plot Rihanna, Halle and mere mortal women on the same chart. Clearly the system needed to be rethought. We decided that perhaps moving to a logarithmic scale might make more sense.

I therefore spent this evening doing a lot of math. In the years since high school i had determined that advanced math is actually pretty useless in every day life. Today, I discovered not so much. What I’ve determined is that while the halle scale is still useful to rank women of relative similar attracitveness at any point along the spectrum, it fails for looking at the spectrum as a whole. This is where the Hawt(h) scale comes into play. Like the Bel, a Hawt can be defined as a logarithmic measure that describes the ∆ between two points along the scale. Hawts are a base 2 logarithmic measure. So someone who scores 10H is half as attractive as someone who ranks 11H. This measure of course loses the granularity that made the halle scale useful. i have solved this problem by introducing the deciHawt(dH), which as the name suggests is equivalent to 1/10 of a Hawt.

While it remains easy to measure an individual in a linear matter in the lack of any other individual to compare against, using the mH, the dH allows you to estimate the rest of the scale with relative ease, given a known value for any other person on the scale. It works like this.

dH = 10 log2(mh)

Thus 1000mh is conveniently approximately equal to 100dH (actually, 99.6658dH). Shakira, who is twice as hot as Halle Berry ranks in at 110dH (around 2048mh) and Rihanna at five times as hot scores around 123dH (5042mh), and yet, your average completely unassuming but reasonably attractive woman who would score in the 65mh range (and therefore prohibitively far from the Halle, Shakira, Rihanna end of the scale for graphing) can be represented with a perfectly reasonable 60dH.

The scale is effectively infinite,but allows for much greater precision within the normal human range of attractiveness. Around 130dH (9000mh) the meaningfulness of hotness is basically lost on the human mind. And yet, a theoretical woman 1000 times as hot as Halle Berry and essentially inconceivable in a linear scale, ranks in at almost exactly 200dH.

So there you go. Print this out, study it, keep a copy in your wallet.

Whoever said that science couldn’t change the world?

Crossposted to my LJ Blog.