#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. ACHO0. Half a byte of data is a nibble.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.
scientists work their asses off, its nice to have a little fun and make the endless hours all worth it.
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 # looks like two “++” stacked on top of one another
Exactly
The C programming language also descends from the B programming language (though B’s lineage unfortunately goes to BCPL, not A)
pretty sure there’s a D language, and i know there’s R but that’s not super related, obviously.
i’m just waiting for the ø programming language
R is a wonderful programming language in the eyes of people who are bad at programming. And that’s not disparaging it, it’s just used by scientists and engineers more than programmers because nothing makes an anova take less work
R is partly based on S.
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.
That feels like a significant reach — and every online reference I was able to find only talks about using ‘#’ in the musical notation sense, hence why the name of the language is pronounced “C-sharp”.
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
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.
That’s the best thing I’ve heard all week.
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
My favorite.
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.
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.
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 like cork with a w
“Work?”
Kw(schwa)rk
“Quirk?”
I pronounce it with the a sound I’d use in “warp”.
So… It seems that you feel let down by your predecessors in physics’ inability to tell the future… Hunh. Odd, that.
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.
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.
You need it to make the quantum duck joke. Quark quark.
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)
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.
To be honest, love the “Ferrous Wheel” pun. It’s too good.
Can you explain it? I don’t get it.
Google Ferris wheel. The London Eye is an example of a Ferris wheel.
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.
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.
So, you’re like super-ancestor to the famous Spaceman? 😱
That’s me!
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 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
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.
Interesting fact: Echidnas, like platypus, have no stomach.
Wait til you find out about their penises!
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’ll just leave this here
TIL that “cocksucker” has a wiktionary entry.
