puns

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
Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15009026/
- 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?

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)
- 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
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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
- 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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine
- 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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
- 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
  
  we'll just drop this here,
  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.
https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4
- 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.

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.
- Interesting fact: Echidnas, like platypus, have no stomach.
  
  Wait til you find out about their penises!

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.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/N/nybble.html
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine
- I appreciate that some fucking guy recorded himself reading that goddamn article and his accent makes Cox Zucker completely indistinguishable from cock sucker.

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.

It’s a nybble…
- Nope.
  
  Yes. Two nibbles make a bite. Two nybbles make a byte.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_derivatives_of_position
- 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!
- That might just be Kelloggs product placement, for all we know. /S

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.

I've learnt about byte/nibble over 30 years ago and just now got the pun.

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?
- Maybe they were Australian.

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.
- Ahh, backronyns.

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.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex
- I looked you up and you're legit.
  
  I tried to look you up but I'll do it tomorrow

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
  
  The C programming language also descends from the B programming language (though B's lineage unfortunately goes to BCPL, not A)
  
  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.

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 and Here are examples
- Yes, that's what the image text says

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.
- So, you're like super-ancestor to the famous Spaceman? 😱
  
  That's me!
- And you're right because the commenter couldn't spell nybble.

One does not simply walk into Mordor. One has to build a spacecraft because even the eagles can't fly there.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrakis_Planitia
  
  That's amazing. Such an effect on our cultural some authors have.

Nah, it's good and helps people remember things. Easier than the arbitrary name of the discoverer
- i was going to say that english was a mistake, but you convinced me
  english IS a mistake, but not for the puns

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.

Now I want to become a scientist so I can name something after a pun.

Last person just decided to make something up, huh?
- Par for the course, really. In each one of those instances, the same thing happened: the last one made shit up and it stuck.

People are really awful at naming things.
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.
- Hmm, I think we should start referring to the toll-like receptors as the awesome-ish receptors.
  Another example: there's a fruit-fly gene named decapentaplegic (which has to do with forming the 15 imaginal discs during embryonic development). When they discovered another gene that interfered with it, but only when inherited from the mother, they named that one "mothers against decapentaplegic".