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.
I appreciate that some fucking guy recorded himself reading that goddamn article and his accent makes Cox Zucker completely indistinguishable from cock sucker.
Some German nerd thought it was cool while they discovered some new receptor so they called it “toll” (German for cool/awesome). Computer science is full of names that are kind of funny if you already know the particular area but are total gibberish if you’re trying learn it. We’re not even good at naming humans. The default is to either pick one of the names that’s common in your culture. When people deviate from that you get a huge number of “special” names.
We need to put this in the hands of experts. I’m gonna propose a new field, “nameology”. Those folks will do a bunch of research into names that make sense. How do we best name things so they completely and unambiguously label them in a way that’s easy to remember and use? Then they can run around and give non stupid names to all the things.
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.
I don’t know whats worse: Scientists naming everything unpronounceable unspellable Latin, naming things after people, or naming things jokes. Just name it what it fucking does in a language someone actually uses jerks.
I joked to a coworker yesterday that they should name new materials they make after stupid pop culture references because the regulations for naming new things in our field are obtuse.
I may have implied that if it worked for biochemists, Sonic the Hedgehog would work for us too. Next time, I’ll suggest we name it something even dumber in Vietnamese or Arabic.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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