2759: Easily Confused Acronyms

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Easily Confused Acronyms
'Lever' was originally an acronym for Load Emplification by the Vimulated Emission of Radiation.
Title text: 'Lever' was originally an acronym for Load Emplification by the Vimulated Emission of Radiation.

Explanation

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Transcript

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Discussion

Comic 1937 also features misinterpretation of acronyms. 2659: Unreliable Connection (talk) 03:59, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

.... i am gonna need a cetation on that bit about Archimedes. Does anyone have one? I don't doubt the veracity of the statement, but we have standards around here! 162.158.154.143 06:14, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

On the Equilibrium of Planes (Ancient Greek: Περὶ ἐπιπέδων ἱσορροπιῶν, romanized: perí epipédōn isorropiôn) is a treatise by Archimedes in two volumes. The first book contains a proof of the law of the lever ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Equilibrium_of_Planes ) 172.71.246.60 07:05, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

The wikipedia page for LEVER is not working. I think it's case sensitive. N-eh (talk) 06:31, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

fixed. 162.158.86.200 07:15, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Somebody posted a link to Comic 1937 by mistake and I made an edit to the page about San Diego and The Scrabble. Coincidentally, The new comic was also about acronyms. Incredible. 2659: Unreliable Connection (talk) 09:10, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Do we need a category about acronyms? There's 1341: Types of Editors, 1460: SMFW, and today's comic, and there may be more. 2659: Unreliable Connection (talk) 09:22, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

xkcd = Xight Kmplification by the Cimulated Dmission of radiation --162.158.154.140 09:29, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Except that R was not even used. So it'd be "adiation", for we replace "R" with nothing. 172.68.51.12 09:02, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

LEVER is an acronym - Light Electric Vehicle Education and Research, apparently.172.71.178.65 09:49, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Another use of LEVER as an acronym is Laboratory for Evaluation and Validation of Epidemiologic Research -- 172.71.222.172 14:34, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

This raises the question why are there no SODARs, RANARs and LINARs? Or RASERs for that matter? --162.158.111.77 12:34, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

RASERs only work in the online realm, where they're known as eRASERs.172.71.242.173 13:30, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
In theory, you could build a RASER (that is, a radio-wavelength LASER) via the 21cm (1420 MHz) hyperfine hydrogen transmission. That would require some fairly nontrivial engineering, and probably needs a very large superconducting magnet to establish a magnetic field gradient and allow for separation of atoms into parallel and anti-parallel magnetic moment populations. But, in principle, because of the astronomical importance of the 21cm transition, you could use this as an interstellar signalling device. Indeed, SETI considered (but rejected) the idea early on (although I'm not sure that building a 21cm RASER was feasible at the time). 172.70.178.97 20:10, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
RANAR exists pretty much only in controlled environment laboratory conditions. Radio doesn't reflect well enough off the ground for how noisy it tends to be in that spectrum. It's like trying to noticably brighten up a large grassy field in the middle of the day by shining a dim normal flashlight at it. 172.71.146.119 06:15, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
...whilst looking through a narrow-band anti-green filter and waving the torch around to try to invoke observable parallax in the remaining illumination/shadows. 141.101.99.122 08:25, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
Gotta say, I love this community for like this, the very reasonable conversation-rich question of why such logical things don't exist. :) NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:00, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Is this comic inspired by a laser incident? 2503: Memo Spike Connector (talk) 06:17, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

  • It isn't just the first letter changed in the comic in the manner used in the article: if only the initials of stimulated were changed, it were "ntimulated", "dtimulated", "vtimulated" etc. So I believe that was just simplified to easen pronunciation.
  • RANAR would mean Radio navigation and ranging (cf. above), LINAR would mean Light navigation and ranging, SODAR would mean Sound detection and ranging, etc. (but I don't know how usable any of these are, or if they are used outside of controlled environments)

172.68.51.11 09:01, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Sad to see that TASER isn't in the list, cause that really throws someone for a loop. Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle -- Daemionfox (talk) 13:18, 19 April 2023 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

And here I was, thinking that TASER stood for Torture Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. 172.70.110.141 14:13, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone here know about the Federal Oroadcasting Xompany? 172.69.22.144 (talk) 08:06, 8 May 2023 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Japan also has a "National Hroadcasting Kssociation". 162.158.166.173 (talk) 02:58, 18 May 2023 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)