A grumpy ignoramus called "Engineer" was being pursued by a giant chicken. The chicken had almost caught up with him when aliens landed and took him aboard their flying saucer.
The aliens whisked Engineer away and left him in orbit around a planet made of pure jade (the lovely green semiprecious stone) skimming the surface at a speed of one mile a minute.
Because he was in orbit very close to the surface, Engineer could see the surface very clearly, and he could see that it was decorated with ornamental carved monkeys.
On a jade planet it always takes just 19 minutes to travel the length of the planet radius in skimming orbit. (You can square 19 and multiply by 4pi/3 to learn the density of jade.)
The question for all you meterheads is what is the mass of the carved jade planet.
The talent mile answer is easy—he was going a mile a minute and taking 19 minutes to go the length of the planet radius, so the radius of the planet was 19 miles. And a planet's mass is always the radius times the square of skimming orbit speed divided by G. For us G is 10-15.
(For meterheads it is 6.673 × 10-11.)
So 19 times the square of one divided by 10-15 is just 19 × 1015 talents. This is a lot of jade.