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
Yeah, if the mood called for that wavy, reach-for-the-sky dance that caterpillars do. On the other hand, if the mood called for a thick, rigid caterpillar, throbbing with pent-up intention, you might want to reconsider the parties you attend.
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.)
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.
username checks out
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.
- 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…
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)
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.
Waitwhat.
Gell-Mann said it sounds like “quart”, Joyce rhymed it with Park, it is a silly word and the pronunciation is as fluid as you desire.
Chromodynamics just uses colors, but makes up for that simplicity by introducing anti-colors.
Neutrello
That sounds delicious.
Neutrello sounds good, but it is actually pretty…
weak
Rimshot, crowd moans
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”.
In physics- Like “quart” with a k In the Joyce novel- rhymes with park.
I pronounce it like cork with a w
“Work?”
Kw(schwa)rk
“Quirk?”
Apparently it rhymes with spork
Kinda yeah, though with the a-schwa transformation not quite complete. As I describe this I’m realizing it may be influenced by my accent which is similar to the tv American accent but with a bunch of dropped sounds.
My favourite is the barn. Hmm what should we call this 10^-28 m^2 cross sectional area? Ten times less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a square metre. Hur hurr wow it’s so BIG it’s like hitting a barn door, let’s call it a barn.
So… It seems that you feel let down by your predecessors in physics’ inability to tell the future… Hunh. Odd, that.
To be honest, love the “Ferrous Wheel” pun. It’s too good.
Can you explain it? I don’t get it.
Ferrous means iron. When they say Ferrous wheel, it means how the iron is stored and used in the biosphere and lithosphere. It is a pun on Ferris Wheel, which is an amusement park ride.
Google Ferris wheel. The London Eye is an example of a Ferris wheel.
#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.I’ll just leave this here
TIL that “cocksucker” has a wiktionary entry.
The predicted outcomes of sinus surgery for chronic rhinosinusitis may use the SNOT scale (sinonasal outcome test)
Relevant username. Also wow sinonasal is hard to read correctly, I got sinusoidal a few times
To be fair, that was coined by Larson and then adopted by the scientists, whereas the previous examples were coined by those in the field, specifically.
My favorite.
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)
Same lol
there’s also a protein involved in visual signals in the brain named Pikachurin,
there’s a wasp in austrialia named Aha ha,
(again, chatgpt sourcing… but I did check to make sure they’re real… lols)
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.
Player characters and profile pictures are called “avatars” after Hindu mythology. It is the physical embodiment of a divine being on a lesser plane.
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.
Well, communication is definitely shown.
But… “speech”, “language”, “sentient thought”? That’s the subjective bit, imo. Communication is easy.
There is also a good You’re Wrong About podcast episode on this.
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.
Thanks for giving us your two bits
Ha! 🤓
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.
