FEEDBACK

Every now and then Ian Napier’s laptop tells him: “Your Dell travel mouse batteries are critical”. Ian says he feels offended

DOCKING spacecraft is no simple

matter, and neither is naming the

means for doing so. Jonathan Wallace

noted that NASA calls one system

LADAR (16 January, p 34). That

stands for Laser Detection and

Ranging – which is an example of a

nested acronym, writable as “(Light

amplification by stimulated emission

of radiation) Detection and Ranging”.

Are there, Jonathan wants to

know, more nested acronyms out

there? Yes, there are. Feedback has

had cause to mention the Oxford,

Cambridge and (Royal Society of Arts)

examination board (OCR), which after

taking over the Midlands Examining

Group (MEG) carried out a search-

and-destroy acronym-replacing

mission – what Feedback is now

calling a netplication (3 April) – on

its syllabus. The result was that it for

a while required students to learn

about ocrawatts (14 January 2006).

Feedback’s colleagues

point out another nested acronym,

the WPPT, which stands for the

(World Intellectual Property

Organization) Performances and

Phonograms Treaty.

Can readers tell us more?

We’d like examples outside the

world of geekery, please, because

geeks seem to delight in forming

nested acronyms for the sake of it.

Indeed, some fetishise recursive

acronyms, like the GNU family of free

software, which is “GNU’s Not Unix”

(17 February 2001).

And it was the free web-page-

generating software PHP which

first drew our attention to the

phenomenon of netplication, when

loads of people substituted PHP for

ASP, the name of a competing

Microsoft product, giving rise to

words like “phpects” (13 February).

Equally recursive, PHP stands for

“PHP Hypertext Processor”, and

the PHP in that stands for…

Jonathan issues a further

challenge: can anyone find any

acronyms or initialisms that nest

more than one other acronym?

THE London Daily Telegraph announced recently: “NASA scientists

use Hubble Space Telescope to

capture head-on asteroid collision.”

Judy Grindell was surprised to

read on: “The fuzzy cloud from the

debris was first photographed last

month with a robotic camera called

LINEAR that searches for asteroids

in New Mexico.”

“One wonders why they bothered

Hubble when the asteroids were so

much closer,” she says.

LINEAR, by the way, is not

a nested acronym, in case you’re

wondering. It stands for Lincoln

Near-Earth Asteroid Research.

FINALLY, one from the department of

redundant information. Originally a

food store, UK supermarket Tesco

has branched out into selling a more

diverse range of goods. A recent

addition is fitness products, including

3-kilogram hand weights which, Colin

McLeod informs us, retail at £3.99

each. That, the shelf label points out,

is “£1.33 per kilogram”.

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

68 | NewScientist | 5 June 2010

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