Alice and Bob: Difference between revisions

→‎Real Life: added TWC's naming of winter storms
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(→‎Real Life: added TWC's naming of winter storms)
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== [[Real Life]] ==
* Alice and Bob really are quantum -- a professor at the University of Washington has used two separate remote cameras, named Alice and Bob, to test the theory of non-locality and its potential for time travel, by attempting to receive a message before it's sent. The experiment hasn't yielded results so far, but it's telling.
* In [[Linguistics]], it's more often John and Mary.
* Named tropical storms (typhoons, hurricanes, cyclones) are based on a sequential list of given names, replaced every year, with a different list for each region. The lists will be re-used at half-dozen year intervals, but with the names of historic "worst" storms periodically retired. That'd make Hurricane Andrew the first (A) tropical storm of the North Atlantic hurricane season in his respective year. Q, U, Z are not used; a particularly bad season (such as 2005 with Dennis, Katrina, Wilma) can exhaust the entire 23-name alphabetical list, after which the Greek alphabet (Hurricane Beta...) is pressed into service. The original lists used female names as meteorologists proposed the names of their sweethearts; more recent practice has alternated gender on each successive storm (so Alex, Brenda, Charles, Diana, Elmer, Francesca... or a similar pattern).
** A similar alphabetically-sequential naming series was used circa-1883 for a string of Atlantic and Pacific Railroad stops where steam trains took on water across the Mojave Desert. The first was "Amboy", now a ghost town on the former US Route 66. followed (from west to east) with Bristol, Cadiz, Danby, Essex, Fenner, Goffs, Home, Ibis, Java, and Klinefelter. Most of these points are now abandoned.
** Similar alphabetically-sequential naming patterns have been used for versions of software; Ubuntu uses names of animals this way, while the Android OS used to use names of foodstuffs (beginning after 'B' as the base, "Cupcake", "Donut", Éclair", "Froyo", "Gingerbread", "Honeycomb", "Ice Cream Sandwich", "Jelly Bean", "KitKat", "Lollipop", "Marshmallow", "Nougat", "Oreo", "Pie", ending just before this reached 'Q').
** In 2012, [[The Weather Channel]] began naming winter storms starting with "Winter Storm Athena", a nor'easter that hit the Eastern United States and Canada in early November of that year. As of this writing (Fall 2021), this remains a practice exclusive to The Weather Channel, with both the US National Weather Service and competing weather forecasters like AccuWeather rejecting outright the use of names for winter storms.
 
== All The Tropes ==