ok well i just wanted to add some stuff to show what it looks like with "actual posts"

While on the subject of chemists and acronyms, Derek Lowe has a post about journal acronyms, or how to pretend to be a research chemist. (Yes, it's Lagniappe Week here at Uncertain Principles...). Similar things happen in physics, though there are slightly fewer journals to keep track of. All the Physical Review journals get shortened to "Phys Rev" whatever (e.g. "Phys Rev A" or "Phys Rev Letters"), or sometimes just letters ("Pee Are Aye" or "Pee Are Ell"). The only thing I look at with any regularity (and that's not much) that gets pronounced as words is the Journal of the Optical Society of America B (JOSA B), which gets pronounced something like "Joe's a bee."

Most of the stupid acronyms in physics come in as people try to find names for new devices or processes that can be used to spell words. These range from the entirely reasonable (MOT for "Magneto-Optical Trap) to the slightly strained (STIRAP for "STImulated Raman Adiabatic Passage") to the faintly ridiculous (ROBOT and UBOAT for "ROtating Beam Optical Trap" and "Ultra-Blue Optical Atom Trap"), to the cringe-worthy (the "ROBOT" concept was dubbed "RoDiO" (pronounced "rodeo") by another group, for "Rotating Dipole Optical" trap) . Eric Cornell has used this as a joke, referring to his Time Orbiting Potential (TOP) trap as "Part of the larger set of Cute Acronym Traps, or CATs."

Of course the reigning champion in the production of dippy acronyms is the federal government, where they occasionally reshuffle agency names, for no real better reason than to make the acronyms better. Hence, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) became the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (though it remains the "Bureau of Standards" to about 80% of the population of suburban Maryland...).

The best silly government acronym story involves the collaboration between NIST and the University of Colorado in Boulder. For many years, this was called the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, or "JILA," generally pronounced as a word (or a hesitant naming: "Jill, uh..."). Eventually, it was pointed out that they really didn't do any astrophysics, let alone astrophysics in the laboratory, so the name was pretty inaccurate. So a decision was made to change the name to: JILA. It's the same name everyone was already using, but officially, it no longer stands for anything. I guess they wanted to save the money they would've spent on printing new stationary...

(No, I really don't have much of a point, here. But it passes the time while I wait for someone to call me back...)