There's a type of bacteria that infects caterpillars and produces a toxin that makes them lose all rigidity. The toxin is called MCF.
MCF stand for Makes Caterpillars Floppy
That's the best thing I've heard all week.
oh man you really don't want a flaccid caterpillar, total mood killer
scientists work their asses off, its nice to have a little fun and make the endless hours all worth it.
Not exactly the same but I remember starting my software engineering course and having to remote into the university servers to write code. All the servers were named after Red Dwarf characters. Being a career changer, as soon as I saw the server names I had this calming feeling that I'd finally found my people and everything was going to be ok.
My dad was never at university, but he was a unix admin for ages. his naming conventions for clusters?
Star Wars characters.
Red Dwarf Characters.
Star trek characters.
Asimov's robots.
and apparently, his annoying bosses. (For the troublesome clusters.)
I've heard it's a "pets vs cattle" thing. When you have a small fleet of distinct servers, you name them. When you have a thousand interchangeable boxes, you give them systematic IDs.
Or you scale up to a franchise with a large enough cast. I wonder if anyone uses One Piece character names for servers?
It kind of also depends on how you interact with them- some clusters are interacted with by admin as a single entity; those got names even if they technically represented lots of rackspace; or the hardware that's running specific groupings of services.
Like a databases. (Darth Vader was reserved for databases that logged and tracked errors.... aka other systems that were, uh, rebellions.)
Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan's Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn't even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.
Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names. Strong Force physics in general gets the good stuff: Axions were named after a detergent because they helped "clean up" the strong CP-violation problem of the standard model. Fantastic, no notes.
Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name "neutron" by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed "neutrino" or little neutron (they didn't know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.
Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.
But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they've done.
Don't even get me started on the J/Psi debacle...
The time derivative of position is velocity. The derivative of velocity is acceleration. Derive again and you get jerk. Then it's snap, crackle and pop.
(For those too young, these are the names of those characters they use to sell Rice Krispies)
Chromodynamics just uses colors, but makes up for that simplicity by introducing anti-colors.
Neutrello
That sounds delicious.
TIL I've pronounced quark wrong my whole life (rhyming with park).
Though I've heard it done that way elsewhere - perhaps it is also considered acceptable at this point.
#transcription
fuckingflying
I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp's name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
dendritic-trees
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.
There's a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization... they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one "sonic hedgehog' because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.
Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child's lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a "sonic hedgehog mutation".
And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.
error-404-fuck-not-found
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the
complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use
of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this
cycle "the ferrous wheel". We groaned about that for at
least five solid minutes.
callmegallifreya
The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden
bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant
Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHOO
Half a byte of data is a nibble.
The predicted outcomes of sinus surgery for chronic rhinosinusitis may use the SNOT scale (sinonasal outcome test)
These are hilarious. I NEED MORE!
there is a species of mushrooms named Spongiforma Squarepantsii.
there is a beetle named Agra vation
a spider named Apopyllus now
apparently, a sea slug Yoda purpurata. (but I don't see the resemblance.)
and a waterbug named Ytu Brutus,
(compliments to ChatGPT...lol)
Fun fact (not really) about Nim: he and the other ASL chimps were HORRIBLY abused. Basically every single one of them.
And it was all for nothing, not a single bit of evidence shows that teaching chimps ASL worked and allowed any form of actual communication.
Yes, even Koko.
Half a byte being a nibble is too cute to hate.
There was an early trend of giving tech stuff fantasy terms, too. Programs that do something for the user being wizards and programs that do things when triggered being daemons, for instance.
Meanwhile, in immunology:
"Can we have fun names?"
"NO! Now shut up and keep isolating proteins and cell markers!"
The stupid terminology in immunology made me hate it so much, even though the actual mechanics are fascinating. At some point my brain just reached saturation with all the CD proteins. Enough is enough!!!
1/4 of a byte, or half of a nibble, is a crumb.
Hahaha, I've assumed it was just computer-science dorks, but maybe the urge to pick stupid names is intrinsic to all science dorks.
I dunno if any of the "soft sciences" will get this, but naming things is in NP-hard.
After looking this up, TIL that Knuckles is an echidna. I had no idea!
Meanwhile psychologists just name things as exactly blandly as they can. There's a neat phenomenon where a relationship can immediately be viewed as deeper and more connected, merely by one of the individuals sharing deeply personal information. It even works at the very first interaction. In other words, if someone tends to overshare, or blurt out info about themselves, we measure their blirtasiousness and its effect on relationships. Not even kidding. I think the folks who came up with it were Scottish, which is why the blirt rather than blurt.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/N/nybble.html
Worth noting that at the time of documentation a half-byte was a nybble, and the more mundane spelling came along later
edit: ooooo I just remembered the Cox-Zucker algorithm too! Evidently the two guys behind the algo only decided to work together because of their last names.
17, 18, and 19 on the periodic table spell out ClArK, guess what's below 18. Krypton. I can't remember which one came first, but superman is baked into the periodic table and I can't help but remember that everytime I think about chemistry.
In quantum mechanics, there are types of vectors that are written like |a>, which is called a "ket", and their dual vectors as <a|, which are called "bra". You write the scalar product as <a|b>. This is called the Bra-Ket-Notation.
I've learnt about byte/nibble over 30 years ago and just now got the pun.
Been in a lab meeting (biochemists) with a group who were naming a new method they made. They started with the acronym and decided what it would stand for second.
There's always NMR scientists. Proton-Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy.
Also one paper that was talking about copper nanotubes (NT). So it was shortened to CuNT. I think that paper may have been oblivious to it though?
C++ is just the next iteration of C. C# is just another layer of iteration on top of C++. Flags are simple indicators for programs, usually set by a controlling human/system, semaphores are flags that communicate between processes.
C++ is just the next iteration of C.
This is somewhat clever when you know that the ‘++’ operator is the post-increment operator in C.
C# is just another layer of iteration on top of C++.
…except there is no ‘#’ operator in C or C++, so any interesting self-referential pattern breaks down here. The ‘#’ comes from musical notation, where a ‘#’ (sharp) note is played a semitone higher — and was chosen more for marketing purposes rather than scientists having an inside joke.
You could have also mentioned ‘D’, which is another “next iteration of C” independent of C++.
The C programming language also descends from the B programming language (though B's lineage unfortunately goes to BCPL, not A)
except there is no ‘#’ operator in C or C++, so any interesting self-referential pattern breaks down here
# is two layers of ++, so the pattern is there. Whether that was originally intended or coincidence is another matter, but it works well enough that I suspect it was considered when picking names.
Yes, that's what the image text says
I looked it up and yep it's all true.
Achoo is mostly bullshit but yeah. There's only one source for it from 2012 it looks like.
I got bits and bytes mixed up for a minute, and was trying to figure out how the heck you halve a boolean
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
