Formula 1 team’s amazing vests
READERS Felix Naughton and Fergal Toohey are probably not the only ones who find it hard to understand why the top Formula 1 racing team Red Bull has signed up FIR-TEX (Far Infrared Rays TEXtile) as an “innovation partner”.
Announcing the deal at , Red Bull says somewhat ungrammatically: “The agreement means that the team’s pit crew will wear their revolutionary FIR-TEX underneath its team clothing during the 2010 grands prix.”
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The announcement goes on to state: “Shown to improve circulation, balance and wellbeing, the FIR-VEST is one of the new products produced by FIR-TEX. Using Far Infrared Rays (healthy radiations) which ‘switch on’ when activated by body heat, the vests have been shown to protect the wearer from stressful electromagnetic radiation and increase power and endurance – important aspects within the demanding world of Formula One.”
None of the 91av colleagues we consulted about this has any idea what it means, and we strongly suspect it might not mean anything, other than implying the clothes can keep you warm.
Are Formula 1 racing teams an unusually credulous bunch?
“Every now and then Ian Napier’s laptop tells him: “Your Dell travel mouse batteries are critical”. Ian says he feels offended”
Acronyms nestling inside acronyms
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?
How to deal with dilated customers
WHILE on the subject of netplication, Eddy Barratt tells us that when he was working as a lifeguard, he and his colleagues used first-aid course books provided by the Swimming Teachers’ Association.
“There must have been some debate about whether would-be casualties should be referred to as customers, as you would expect in a public swimming pool, or pupils, as you would expect from a swimming teacher,” Eddy tells us. “The former must have been favoured in the end though. We were instructed, for certain conditions, to check to see if the customers were dilated.”
Searching for asteroids in New Mexico
THE London Daily Telegraph : “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.
Will birds flock to Oxford conference?
THE zoology department at the University of Oxford is hosting the in July. Ben Haller, who received an email informing him of this, wonders how the hole-nesting birds will find out about it, given that few of them have internet access.
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”.