Fun with Acronyms/Real Life/Science and Technology

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Much of the scientific and information technology communities seem to have the most Fun with Acronyms.

General

  • Many computer geeks make use of the meta-recursive TLA -- which stands for "Three Letter Acronym" -- in reference to all the three letter acronyms that seem to come up whenever one discusses technology.
    • And, for all the four letter acronyms, there is the Extended Three Letter Acronym - which is a four-letter acronym itself.
      • Not to mention More Than Three Letter Acronym.
  • The hacker phrase "Waste Of Money, Brains And Time (W.O.M.B.A.T.)

Astronomy

  • Found on That Other Wiki:
    • Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which links to
    • MAssive Compact Halo Object, which links to
    • Robust Associations of Massive Baryonic Objects, at which point you notice the astronomers were just having Fun with Acronyms.
  • There are two main hypotheses for how Dark Matter works- Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or Massive Compact Halo Objects. WIMPs and MACHOs, anyone?
    • Somehow, it'd be funnier if it was Natural instead of Massive.
    • Bill Bryson suggested that for now, we use the term Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere.
    • Robust Associations of Massive Baryonic Objects
    • A person critical of the theory proposed to call it Fabricated Ad hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories.
    • On a related note, string theory and other attempts at "theories of everything" meant to explain all of physics in a simple, intuitive way are known as Grand Unified Theories.
  • Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (a framework used for SETI@Home and other distributed computing projects), presumably a reference to the Calvin and Hobbes collection Scientific Progress Goes "Boink".

Biology

  • Studies conducted at The Institute for Genomic Research often make use of Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. When a genome is worked out, it may be posted to the Genome Online Database
  • There's a type of Escherichia coli called the Growth Advantage in Stationary Phase phenotype.
  • Based Upon Related Sequence Types, an algorithm for assigning bacteria to groups based on their DNA sequences.
  • The gene "Zbtb7" was formerly known as the "POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic factor", which was often shortened to Pokémon. Pokemon USA naturally threatened to sue, as they didn't want Pokemon to be associated with the gene that may be the trigger for cancer, of all things.
  • The medical research software Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak Lineages was named after the pangolin, whose consumption as part of traditional Chinese medicine was blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chemistry

  • In a 2007 article in Chemical Communications, the unfortunate effect of abbreviating copper (Cu) nanotubes in that way was lost on the Chinese authors.

Computing

  • The UK's main police computer system is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, or H.O.L.M.E.S. Whether whoever named it knew about the High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor in Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is unknown.
  • The Scotland Yard computer system is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. Because HOES would just be silly.
  • The acronym "GNU" stands for GNU's Not Unix. This one was arguably inspired by "XINU" - XINU Is Not Unix - which earns special points for being not only a recursive acronym, but also the word Unix spelled backwards. And a backronym, to boot.
  • Unix gives us the Bourne-Again Shell
  • Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
    • This is a true backronym; it was originally just "Basic", the words were added (unofficially at first) because the public simply expected computer-language names to be acronyms.
  • Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
  • The computer that selects the numbers in Britain's monthly Premium Bond prize draw (actually the latest in a long line of computers) goes by the disarmingly quaint name of E.R.N.I.E. (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment)
  • The PCMCIA standard does not stand for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. But it ought to.
  • The computer language Perl (not 'PERL') is accepted by Word of God to stand for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, as well as the more formal Practical Extraction and Reporting Language.
  • The "codenames" of computer science research prototypes are rife with these. The most egregious example I've seen is Rich Wolski's "EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems."
  • COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language.
  • The MicroSoft Critical Update Notification Tool. Google it.
  • DDT: The debugger on the CP/M Z80 microprocessor platform was called DDT, Dynamic Debugging Tool.
  • ELF, the Executable and Linkable Format, a common standard file format for executables, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps.
    • Which was created along with its debugging data format called DWARF, Debugging With Attributed Record Formats.
  • While the Cisco's Carrier Routing System router, CRS-1 was in development, it was known by the code name of HFR that stands for Huge Fucking Router.
  • Subverted with the esoteric programming language, INTERCAL, which stands for "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym".
  • The Free/Libre/Open Source Software community seems to be quite fond of this one:
    • GNU's Not Unix being the most obvious example. (It refers to the fact that GNU intends to be similar to Unix, but contains no code from Unix.)
    • Or there's the slightly unfortunate GNU Image Manipulation Project, which, as the name states, is a sub-project of the previously mentioned GNU.
    • Another GNU project, with a less unfortunate (but still odd) name, the GNU Network Object Model Environment, or GNOME, a graphical user interface designed for GNU but usable on practically any OS similar to or based on Unix (such as BSD and Solaris).
    • A simple recursive acronym wasn't silly enough for the GNU kernel: it has a pair of mutually recursive acronyms -- and a bad pun. It's called the GNU HURD (HIRD of Unix Replacing Daemons, where HIRD stands for HURD of Interfaces Representing Depth).
    • Samba isn't an acronym but comes very close - it was the first English word containing the letters S, M and B (in that order) - SMB being the protocol Samba interoperates with.
    • Wine Is Not an Emulator. And it really isn't. (It's a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on other operating systems, not unlike what 64-bit versions of Windows have for 32-bit Windows programs or early versions of Mac OS X had for Mac OS Classic programs.)
    • And don't forget LAME, which originally stood for Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder. Unlike Wine, it is.
    • Linux, though actually a portmanteau of "Linus"(Torvalds)+"UNIX", has sometimes often been given the joke recursive-acronym interpretation "Linux Is Not UNIX".
    • And Fine Is Not EMacs. And they wonder why Linux isn't a mainstream OS. Sheesh.
      • Between servers, Ubuntu and Fedora, it very much is. Which brings us to a standard FLOSS server bundle known as... Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (or Perl).
      • Once there was Emacs. The prototype Lisp machine had an Emacs-like editor called EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). The Symbolics Lisp machine editor was called ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially). Fortunately, we were saved from DREI (DREI is Really Emacs Inside).
    • The Amnesic Incognito Live System (a privacy tool)
    • Ionization FRont Interactive Tool (3D data visualizer, now generic, but originally for stellar fireworks and named appropriately)
  • There's apparently a computer-based analysis tool for Nonnumerical, Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching, and Theorizing. In what is probably an attempt to not look too crude, the official acronym used by research papers throws in an asterisk in the middle to be NUD*IST...
  • The encryption algorithm Cipher Organized with Cute Operations and N-Universal Transformation 1998 (C.O.C.O.N.U.T. 98).
  • The Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (R.A.D.I.U.S.) protocol; its successor is called D.I.A.M.E.T.E.R.

Telecommunications

  • ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), a standard network system which was to transmit voice and data across circuit-switched copper telephone lines, was promptly backronymed to It Still Does Nothing.
  • NTSC, the 1953-era analogue colour television system, was named for the US National Television System Committee. Any errors in phase would routinely cause the wrong colours to be displayed, earning the backronym Never Twice the Same Colour in many broadcasting textbooks. NTSC was used in North America, Japan and South Korea but is incompatible with both European standards.
    • Later, incompatible rival standards (PAL - Phase Alternate by Line and SÉCAM - Séquence de Couleur Avec Mémoire, introduced to Europe circa-1967) were more robust. They have their own satirical acronyms, for instance the Anglo-West German PAL is Peace At Last or Perfect At Last while the French SÉCAM Shows Every Colour All Murky, Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method or SEcond Color Always Magenta.
    • In most NTSC countries (including South Korea but not Japan, which exports its own incompatible system) the successor for terrestrial digital television was ATSC (named for the Advanced Television Systems Committee). The new system has a few issues, including susceptibility to interference from impulse noise which has rendered the once valuable low-VHF channels all but worthless today. The era of picking up fuzzy analogue VHF TV stations from "up to 100 miles, depending on terrain" with huge antennas is over, but at least it's Always The Same Colour.
  • The STIR/SHAKEN protocol used to combat caller ID spoofing, while taking its name from James Bond's catchphrase "shaken, not stirred", stand for Secure Telephony Identity Revisited and Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs. The creators of SHAKEN "tortured the English language until [they] came up with an acronym.”

Other

  • While studying telecommunications, this troper has come up with many names for his practices that have a hidden reference to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya:
    • Hamming Algorithm Recovery Unit for Harnessing Information (H.A.R.U.H.I.)
    • Modulated Input Keying Unmodulator for Radio Unicasting (M.I.K.U.R.U.)
    • Network Addressing Gateway Application for Tunneling Operations (N.A.G.A.T.O.)
    • Automated Self-Activated Killing of User Requested Applications (A.S.A.K.U.R.A.; emphasis on the "killing" part!)
  • The eccentric UK pop-science magazine New Scientist had a laugh at the expense of the Thin Layer Unimorph Driver and Sensor, which is very tenuously acronymised as THUNDER.
  • The underwater pipeline that supplied the Mulberry harbours with fuel for the D-Day landings had one of the simplest and most elegant acronyms ever: P.L.U.T.O. (Pipe Lines Under The Ocean.) (Although strictly speaking the English Channel is not an ocean. That's okay, Pluto isn't, strictly speaking, a planet.).
  • It's probably coincidental, but there's a town in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind called Suran, and during the 80's there was a project for a packet-switched radio network called Survivable Radio Network (SURAN).
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