[time-nuts] Obscure terms

[Rex]

Hal Murray wrote:

>>Can someone please put me out of my misery and tell me what these
>>stand for? 
>>    
>>
>
>You must not be very miserable.  Google usually does a good job of answering 
>that type of question.  There are a couple of sites that collect acronyms and 
>several sites that collect slang.
>
>In this case, the top pair of results are good hits and down near the bottom 
>of the first page is the Wikipedia page that covers it:
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_(unit_of_measurement)
>
>Sometimes it helps to add acronym or slang to the search string.
>
>
>  
>

Yep, as usual Google is fantastic for this task. Asking, 'RCH 
definition', I found out this:

Royal Canadian Hussars
Recognized Clearing House
Reference Change House
RCH -- Chile (international vehicle ID)
Railway Convalescent Home
Redundancy Check
Remote Control Head
renal compensatory hypertrophy  (my clear favorite -- I'll try to 
remember this if ever asked)
reproductive and child health
residential care home
Residential Children's Home
right cerebral hemisphere
Royal Children's Hospital
Small unit of measurement

Huh, what? That last one sounds right, so I followed the link and 
learned this:

    What is RCH?
    One of the definitions of RCH is "Small unit of measurement".

Very informative! So much more than the original page with just, "Small 
unit of measurement." One of the definitions of redundancy is "Being 
redundant."

I know... As you have shown, the dedicated googler can eventually 
sometimes find the desired relevant information. Especially if the 
answer is already known.

As with most www experiences, sometimes what you find by accident is 
more interesting than what you wanted, but there is no guarantee that it 
will be easy, at all, to find what you really wanted.

There has been an ad on US tv recently for a competing search engine. 
Real people give random orthogonal answers to simple questions, 
suggesting the google experience. Marketing genius. But I never used the 
new one. Let's try the same search on Bing.

Nope. The same random stuff, but it gets more random even faster than 
google.

Sorry for yet another digression, but it was fun trying the experiment 
and venting about seeing what I expected to see.