Fun Facts

Fun Fact #1: A Panda is a Bear.

Yes, its true. After 20 years of retraining my brain to call them "Giant Pandas" not "Panda Bears", I have to go back. *sigh* Pandas have a unique wrist and thumb structure for bears, and spots similar to red pandas around their eyes. For years scientists thought these features put pandas closer to Family Procyonidae, which includes the raccoon and the red panda, instead of Family Ursus, the bears.

However, on a recent excursion to the San Diego Zoo, I discovered that DNA analysis has now shown that Pandas really are closer to bears after all. The eye spots are not genetically related to red pandas at all but simply a parallel evolution due to environmental factors. I'm sure it'll only take 20 more years to sink in.

“Panda FAQ” SanDiegoZoo.org. San Diego Zoo. 2005 May 1 <http://www.sandiegozoo.org/pandas/panda_facts/panda_faqs_answer.html>

QED.
[chroniclemaster1, 2005/5/1]

Fun Fact #2: Apple’s FireWire was named by drunk Apple programmers.

(An excerpt from an article by tech reporter, David Pogue)

Last week, I wrote about my frustration with the way the technology industry comes up with confusing, if not user-hostile, names for new technologies, like EV-DO and RSS. I pointed out that these are exactly the sorts of names NOT to use if you want consumers to feel that your stuff is approachable and friendly…. I had praised the name FireWire as being both clever and descriptive of what it does. In response, I heard from Michael Johas Teener, one of the very engineers who came up with the name in 1993:

"Nice to hear that the name is appreciated. The story behind it is fairly simple: 'FireWire' was chosen by a bunch of engineers drinking too much beer after hours just before Comdex '93, when the project was about to go public. (I.B.M., Apple, TI, WD, Maxtor, Seagate were all showing drives, silicon, and systems.) We were under the gun — the marketing department would have picked some name like 'Performa' if we hadn't acted soon.

"Anyway, the beer-drinking session produced about 100 names, which were posted outside my cube with instructions to passersby to vote early and often. Aside from a few that are not printable, Firewire was the highest-rated. The extra capitalization (from Firewire to FireWire) was the big marketing-based change. There's more irreverent history at www.teener.com/FireWire."

Well, here's to engineers drinking beer, then.

Pogue, David. “Circuits: Awkward Acronyms” New York Times Direct. 30 June 2005. New York Times. E-mail to darth333vader@yahoo.com.

QED.
[chroniclemaster1, 2005/7/1]