FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, that’s an acronym, right?  Depends who you ask.  Since it’s pronounced “F-B-I” and not something like, “fibee” some say that’s not an acronym but instead an initialism.  An acronym is a word, such as NATO.

People in telecom always joke about the industry having too many TLAs, Three Letter Acronyms.  That makes a lot more sense to me now that I know the word acronym was created at Bell Labs in 1943.  Everything is AT&T is abbreviated. It’s to the point now where many acronyms have two or three meanings within the company.

Ever get annoyed when someone says “ATM Machine” or “PIN Number” because the last word is redundant? Apparently this is called RAS Syndrome or  ”redundant acronym syndrome syndrome”.

Then there’s the Recursive Acronym. This is an acronym that refers to itself. With a couple of notable exceptions like Saab (Saab Automobile Aktiebolaget) these are almost always computer related. Programmers always think it’s clever. I think I first came across this with GNU (GNU’s Not Unix). PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is another example. These may also be called Macronyms.

Nested Acronyms call other acronyms. IBM POWER is a great example. It expands out to International Business Machines Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC. But RISC is an acronym. So it expands one more time to International Business Machines Performance Optimization With Enhanced Reduced Instruction Set Computing.

If you’ve ever had to sit through any sort of meeting with HR people and watch a PowerPoint slideshow you’ve been exposed to the Backronym. This is a sort of contrived acronym made when someone takes a perfectly good word and decides each letter needs to stand for something. An example is Amber Alert (America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response), which is really named after Amber Hagerman. You know that thing we call the Patriot Act? It’s really the USA PATRIOT Act, or Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.

False acronyms are just what they sound like. Fuck doesn’t stand for  ”for unlawful carnal knowledge”, “fornication under consent of the king”, or anything else for that matter.

And finally there’s the Orphan Initialism or Acronymization, sometimes called a kind of Pseudo-acronym. These are often seen when companies or organizations that are typically known by an acronym drop all the words and change their name to the acronym. At that point the letters no longer stand for anything. KFC isn’t Kentucky Fried Chicken, it’s just KFC. 3M dropped Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, AARP dropped American Association of Retired Persons, and ESPN dropped Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Even SAT, formerly Scholastic Assessment Test, formerly Scholastic Aptitude Test, doesn’t stand for anything nowadays.

Merriam-Webster says

1:  in a hopeful manner

2:  it is hoped

In the 1960s the second sense of hopefully, which dates to the early 18th century and had been in fairly widespread use since at least the 1930s, underwent a surge in popularity. A surge of criticism followed in reaction, but the criticism took no account of the grammar of adverbs. Hopefully in its second sense is a member of a class of adverbs known as disjuncts. Disjuncts serve as a means by which the author or speaker can comment directly to the reader or hearer usually on the content of the sentence to which they are attached. Many other adverbs (as interestingly, frankly, clearly, luckily, unfortunately) are similarly used; most are so ordinary as to excite no comment or interest whatsoever. The second sense of hopefully is entirely standard.

And Dictionary.com says

Although some strongly object to its use as a sentence modifier, hopefully  meaning “it is hoped (that)” has been in use since the1930s and is fully standard in all varieties of speech and writing: Hopefully, tensions between the two nations will ease.  This use of hopefully is parallel to that of certainly, curiously, frankly,regrettably, and other sentence modifiers.

So there. Hopefully you can get over yourself.

When I really understand something I typically enjoy teaching it to any adult I’m not married to.

Recently the thing I’ve been most motivated to learn about it WordPress.  The more I learn the more I want to learn.  I just started getting into the hooks and WP loop.  I’m reading everything I can find about them.

Today it occurred to me that as I’m doing all this reading and taking notes, I’m sort of building a tutorial of my own.  In order to force myself to really learn this stuff (and possibly give a little tiny bit back to the WordPress community) I’m thinking about writing a tutorial on one particular aspect of WordPress, to be published here.

Don’t hold your breath.

Here’s a list of my favorite WordPress plug-ins:

• All in One SEO Pack
• Google Analyticator
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Redirection
• WordPress.com Stats
• NextGEN Gallery
• BackUpWordPress
• Akismet
• Twitter for WordPress
• Sociable

I’m curious to find out what other people will suggest.  What are the “must have” WordPress plug-ins?

On this blog I often mention the latest books I’m listening to or reading, and I often don’t specify which I’m doing. It’s mostly a matter of convenience. As I’ve mentioned before, if someone says, “Have you read the Wheel of Time?” the simple answer is, “Yes,” not, “No, but I did listen to the unbridged audiobook edition.”

But in truth there is a big difference between listening to and reading books.  First, in my case, I can recall details of books I’ve listened much easier than books I’ve read.  This will of course not be true for everyone.  Often if someone brings up a particular scene from a book I’ve listened to, even if it was many months ago, I will remember the exact intersection I was driving through when I heard that scene play out.

On the other hand, when I see, “Egwene al’Vere” in print it means nothing to me.  I have to pronounce it out loud before I recall that character from the Wheel of Time.

Now whenever I listen to fantasy or anything with a lot of fictitious words I scan the wikipedia article to familiarize myself with them.  I think this does a lot to improve the experience.

I’m going to test new stuff live on this blog, so things might get shaky for the next few weeks, but I’ll put out my usual daily blob of text.

Storm rolling in and I don’t think I’ll have power much longer, so I’m cutting it short for today.

I’ve been reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin recently, so I’ve been thinking about the topic a little.  There’s a stack of things I would like to learn in great detail.  I would like to speak 3 languages fluently, I would like to learn 2 programming languages, I would like post-graduate level understanding of physics and economics, etc…

So what’s stopping me from learning these things?  Just one thing – I actually hate learning.  I didn’t realize it until this morning.  What I love is the feeling of just having learned something. I love the retention of that knowledge – the addition to my mental arsenal.  I love the opportunity to demonstrate intelligence through the use of that knowledge.

A couple of years ago I wrote something on why I went to Gunsmithing school.  As near as I can remember I’ve never posted it anywhere.  Here’s a quote from it:

So, on to cooking. Strange thing about my love of cooking – I don’t think I have one. I have a like of cooking, but I’m not sure it’s a passion. I love eating… cooking is really just a necessary evil, a means to an ends.

Okay, I told you it was terrible joke, but it’s just the sort of terrible joke I love.

Anyway, have you ever listened to a scientist talk and noticed how they breeze past certain facts and build on them in some complicated equation or technical description, and quickly arrive at a solution? I spend a lot of time listening to physicists, astrophysicist in particular, speaking on different podcasts and such.  Often in question-and-answer segments they will string together a series of “facts” such as the mass of the sun, the distance to a star, the temperature of a star, etc, and tie it all together in a neat answer to the listener’s question.

When I hear those shows I find myself asking, “yeah, but how did you get the mass of the sun?”

Well, it turns out it’s pretty simple.  I actually understand now how that works.  I mean, I can do the math.  You take Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton’s laws of motion, mix in a little bit of Trigonometry, and you pretty quickly come up with a number.

I understand it doesn’t seem terribly useful to know how to calculate the mass of the sun, but believe me, it’s incredibly empowering.  If all you need to figure out the mass of something 150 million kilometers away is a pencil, what can’t you figure out, given enough effort?