Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

> > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

The author is just wrong. Chemistry is fairly jam-packed with various cutesy names either to amuse the authors or because they’re attempting to make an algorithm memorable to the field.

Off the top of my head:

- SHAKE and RATTLE: Bond constraint algorithms.

- CHARMm: An MD package but you’d never guess it from the name

- Amber: Another MD package that you’d never guess from the name.

- So so many acronyms from NMR: COSY, TOCSY, NOESY

The list goes on and on and permeates most of the subfields in one form or another.

If you want really cutesy names, though, look in molecular biology.

> > > No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

Lawrencium has entered the chat.

Americium, Einsteinium, Unobtanium also show chemistry isn't so uptight as suggested.

Off-topic, but it always amuses me that the sleepy town of Livermore, CA, known locally for its vineyards and an outlet mall, is immortalized in the Periodic Table, instead of the other greater places like New York or Chicago.

Chicago even had the world's first nuclear reactor, but no luck.

Most of your examples are software!

Also SHAKE and RATTLE describe the motion-simulation in the algorithm.

Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.

> Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.

I think often words are added to allow for a memorable name, such as crispr

> When Mojica and Jansen struck up a correspondence, they began tossing around catchy names for the patterns, and on Nov. 21, 2001, they settled on CRISPR—an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.

https://nautil.us/the-unbearable-weirdness-of-crispr-236685/

yeah like how about the "sonic hedgehog" protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein

Physics has "Strangeness" and "Charm Quarks"

My own field Materials Engineering has:

"Hardness", "Toughness", Resilience", etc. which all describe different properties.

"Ferromagnetic" or "Ferrimagnetic best believe those are different.

> Most of your examples are software!

Most of my examples are from computational chemistry, which is software, but (historically) written by chemists.

As one of those chemists (at least before my current work), I feel somewhat qualified to comment on my field and whether it always names things seriously or not.

But if you look around, fun terms are everywhere in chemistry or chemistry-adjacent fields. For example, PALM and STORM (from fluorescence microscopy) were almost certainly chosen because they were easy to remember.

> Also SHAKE and RATTLE describe the motion-simulation in the algorithm.

Not really. SHAKE and RATTLE are bond constraint algorithms to avoid simulating the fast degrees of freedom, typically in solvent.

In molecular dynamics, your time step is effectively set by the fastest degree of freedom (there’s a relationship with the Nyquist theorem here), so it pays to freeze out the vibrations of the O-H bonds in water when you’re simulating a larger system. SHAKE and RATTLE effectively freeze the bond and angle distances near equilibrium while allowing some relaxation.

The rest of the degrees of freedom are typically integrated with a larger time step using a method appropriate for the simulation ensemble (eg: one of the Verlet integrators, a Langevin integrator, etc).

> Acronyms are abbreviations for meaningful names.

Acronyms like XPS, EPR, NMR, etc are like that: dry, short, and meaningful.

But there are a lot that were chosen because they were entertaining to the authors or because they are easy to remember. Even in a technical field, marketing matters.

and, of course, can't forget the derivatives of position after jerk being snap, crackle, and pop [1] after, you know, Rice Krispies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...

America is named after some author writing about a "New World." America is sometimes erroneously used to refer to only one of the states instead of the whole continent.

Einstein doesn't tell me anything, unlike Müller (miller) and Schmied (Schmiede = Forge)

Unobtanium is fiction from the movie Avatar lol

Notoriously bad exposition I might add ("This is unobtanium. This is what we're here for!").

> - So so many acronyms from NMR: COSY, TOCSY, NOESY

My favourite: MAS, for magic angle spinning. Because every paper needs a bit of magic.

Scientists are the wrong population to pick if you want people who dislike silly names. They are everywhere because we don’t hate fun, and it does make things memorable. We’re also fond of naming things after people, which is as un-descriptive as it gets.

Ytterby is an otherwise pretty insignificant small town of 6k inhabitants in Sweden, but it has FOUR elements named after it: yttrium, terbium, ytterbium, and erbium.

And astrophysics has MACHOs and WIMPs.

Unobtanium was a thing in fiction long before Avatar.

unobtainium predates Avatar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium

and at least that exposition makes more sense then the "fountain of youth brain juice" in the sequel, when the humans can literally reincarnate themselves without having to cross interstellar space to do it.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachurin