I've learnt about byte/nibble over 30 years ago and just now got the pun.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Meanwhile, in immunology:
"Can we have fun names?"
"NO! Now shut up and keep isolating proteins and cell markers!"
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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?
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Now I want to become a scientist so I can name something after a pun.
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 looked you up and you're legit.
I tried to look you up but I'll do it tomorrow
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!
Yeah, that's probably why they called him "Knuckles the Echidna."
I don't remember ever playing any of the early games, but I can only ever remember him being referred to as "Knuckles", as in "Sonic and Knuckles". I guess I was just a little too far removed from the game to ever follow the characters.
It said it in the title screen of the games.
Haha wow. It just must have never registered into my long term memory.
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Not just hedgehog, there's one called Sonic Hedgehog...
And there's an enzyme called Fuculokinase sometimes abbreviated "Fuck" in the literature because some of us are still 12 years old.
Here is an example
Yes, that's what the image text says
That might just be Kelloggs product placement, for all we know. /S
I studied physics, not engineering, in undergrad, so I knew about the joke, but I didn't realize that snap was actually used in some cases. That's really interesting!
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.)
You give systematic id's to completely interchangable things. You give unique names to unique things.
If you name a formal thing (like a physical computer) by its function you have failed at naming. And are probably a manager who doesn't see that one day you'll need many things of almost the same function and to tell them apart. Or that one thing will have many functions.
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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 stron 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.
- Neutrino
- Neutretto/neutronetto
- Neutrello/neutronello
Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.
- Neutroni
- Neutrachione/neutronachione
- Neutrozzo/neutronozzo
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...
Chromodynamics just uses colors, but makes up for that simplicity by introducing anti-colors.
Neutrello
That sounds delicious.
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Wait, how is "quark" supposed to be pronounced? Not like the Star Trek character or the German cheese?
I pronounce it with the a sound I'd use in "warp".
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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.
You need it to make the quantum duck joke. Quark quark.
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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)
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I got bits and bytes mixed up for a minute, and was trying to figure out how the heck you halve a boolean
You never met my ex. She was the queen of half-truths.
And you're right because the commenter couldn't spell nybble.
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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
oh man you really don't want a flaccid caterpillar, total mood killer
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That's the best thing I've heard all week.
It’s a nybble…
Nope.
Yes. Two nibbles make a bite. Two nybbles make a byte.