11/19/08 PHD comic: 'Clever Acronyms'

Greg Bernhardt

center table border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 bgcolor=#ffffff tr tdbfont face=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif size=+1Piled Higher amp; Deeper/fontfont face=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif i by Jorge Cham/i/font/b/td td /td td div align=rightbfont face=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serifwww.phdcomics.com/font/b/div /td /tr tr align=center td colspan=3font face=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serifimg src=http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd111908s.gif border=0 align=top/img/font/td /tr tr td colspan=3 div align=centerfont size=-2 face=Arial, Helvetica, sans-seriftitle: quot;Clever Acronymsquot; - originally published 11/19/2008 /fontpfont face=arialFor the latest news in PHD Comics, a href=http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.phpCLICK HERE!/a/font/p /div /td /tr /table /center

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Borek

Redbelly98

Ha ha, yes even 10-15 years ago this had gotten out of hand.

physics girl phd

Reminds me of my days doing research for the Air Force.

Of course, I do think I won my last intra-university grant because I had an acronym!

douglass

There are a lot of amusing acronyms for NMR pulse sequences - e.g., COSY, NOESY, ROESY, DAISY, RELAY, DICE, ICE, and INADEQUATE.

BobG

Never choose an acronym that can expire. You never know what budget cuts will do to your plans.

One of the Air Force's communications satellites was called Wideband Gapfiller Satellite - a pretty weak acronym. First, it let people in on the fact that the original satellite designed to fill this function had fallen so far behind that the Air Force needed something to bridge the gap behind their current satellite program and the next. Second, it made the gapfiller satellite program sound like a loser.

And, lastly, it was eventually decided that the gapfiller satellite was good enough that it would be the new final solution (it was also a lot cheaper - it was a civilian comm satellite design modified to serve the military's needs). That meant it wasn't just a gapfiller satellite anymore. It would be too confusing and expensive to change the letters in the acronym, so a new word starting with 'G' had to be substituted for 'gapfiller'.

f95toli

In the latest issue of New Scientist there is an article about a project called Rapid-WATCH which is an acronym for Rapid Climate Change- Will the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation Halt (they are monitoring the heat circulation in the Atlantic).

Pretty clever, but I wonder how much time they had to spend coming up with that name...