Thursday 5 December 2013

COLBERT - Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill

COLBERT - the Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill - is the device used by astronauts on the International Space Station to keep fit. The NASA treadmill was originally called the T-2 but was renamed:

NASA selected the treadmill’s name after comedian and host Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” took interest during the Node 3 naming census and urged his followers to post the name “Colbert,” which received the most entries.

The acronym was engineered to fit the initials in a kind of inverse post hoc fashion (where the relevance of the acronym is added after its construction). In fact, COLBERT represents a new class of acronym to ORCA: the "Backcronym". (It was the Backcronym wikipedia page where I came across COLBERT, in fact.)

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