The Daily WTF

At the age of 17, our friend Argle had a job as a programmer for an aerospace firm, mostly working with commercial flight-deck equipment. Like with anyone new to a given industry, he found himself puzzling over the plethora of acronyms that got thrown around in conversation without a thought. Lacking an Internet to go look these things up in, Argle was forced to ask people to stop, go back, and explain. But what 17 year-old feels comfortable interrupting much older adults like that? Most of the time, the acronyms were scribbled down on a yellow legal pad, to be figured out later.

The programming side of the job was no problem, at least. There was one case of something a little odd: someone handed him some coefficients of a polynomial and told him to make them into a FORTRAN function. He had no familiarity with curve fitting, but

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