Interesting Links for 09-02-2026

[andrewducker]

1. Jurassic Tank Top: The Uncanny Valley of Agency

(tags:scarlettjohansson patriarchy movies JurassicPark )

2. Etymology of "Foo"

(tags:language history swearing )

3. World's first mass-production sodium-ion battery keeps 90% capacity even at -40c

(tags:batteries temperature )

4. Blood omega-3 is inversely related to risk of early-onset dementia (incidence drops from 0.19% to 0.11%)

(tags:omega3 )

5. I was totally blown away by this beatboxing. Just totally unbelievable. (Wing: Dopamine)

(tags:music video voice impressive )

6. Substack's "Nazi problem" won't go away

(tags:Nazis blogs )

7. The time of day when you eat could be key to success for intermittent fasting

(tags:food time diet health )

8. Last week the Prime Minister lost control of how documents should be reviewed for security reasons.

(tags:security politics uk constitution )

Comments

[gingicat]

But but... foobar is from FUBAR, "fucked up beyond all recognition." The rest is all back-formation.

[original_aj]

Note the date on the letter.....

[andrewducker]

I refer you to the second paragraph of section 3.

[gingicat]

Ugh, this was hard to read on my phone, thank you.

[gingicat]

I simply missed it. And yeah, it certainly *looks like* the original RFC which is why I was so confused.

[simont]

I also had often heard the etymology FUBAR → foobar → foo and bar separately, and it always struck me that it left something out: how did an acronym that meant "disastrously fucked" turn into such an extremely neutral pair of placeholder words that can describe anything good, bad or in between?

This is often the question that most interests me about etymologies: not just "what word in which historical language gave rise to this one?", but if there was a change of meaning somewhere in there, "how did a word for this end up meaning that?" Wiktionary's etymologies in particular – the ones I look at most often – are sometimes very good at this, and other times, frustratingly ignore the question completely.

So I like the revised theory of "foo" having been around already as a meaningless word that you sometimes replace things with, and an etymology of FUBAR that starts with "furchtbar" for "terrible", replaces a part with "foo" because 1930s comic strips made it popular to do that (plus I guess if Germans look like becoming the enemy then you want to deGermanise your slang?), and then thinks of something it can stand for. It may or may not be true – I wasn't there, of course! – but every step of the reasoning makes sense to me, which makes me find it plausible in a way that I don't find the FUBAR → foobar step.

[simont]

... which (now having seen the RFC date) makes it a very good 1st April gag!

[andrewducker]

The problem is that I can't tell if it is a gag.

[simont]

True, of course – a 1st April RFC need only be frivolous, and need not actually be full of lies.

[andrewducker]

Or, indeed, be on that date coincidentally.

[conuly]

It also is very plausible that people made up an acronym when it wasn't one originally, because people do that all the time.

[simont]

I must admit that I've always assumed that rfc-editor would carefully avoid publishing any 100% serious RFC on 1st April, in case of misunderstandings!

Though I suppose doing it as a cunning double bluff would have some style.

[fanf]

RFC dates are normally truncated to just month + year, except for April 1st RFCs :-)

[andrewducker]

Aaah, that's definitely useful information!

[jack]

Hm. The wikipedia page cites the April 1st RFC and now I don't know who to believe. It seems likely that foo was already used as a placeholder, and Fubar led to "bar" being used too, but a quick check of the obvious places didn't show anyone who'd traced where "bar" was first used with "foo".