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NASA Names Space Station Treadmill After Colbert
willith writes "The SF Chronicle reports on the results of the International Space Station Node 3 naming contest (which we previously discussed). Comedian and fake-pundit Stephen Colbert conducted a bombastic write-in campaign and repeatedly urged his show's fan base (the 'Colbert Nation') to stuff the ballot box with his name, which resulted in 'Colbert' coming in first in the write-in contest with almost a quarter-million votes. Although the Node 3 component will not be named 'Colbert' — NASA has instead chosen to call it 'Tranquility' — one of the Node 3 components will bear the honor: the second ISS treadmill, which will be installed in Node 3, will be named the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill. The formal announcement was made on the air yesterday at 22:30 EDT on the Colbert Report by astronaut Sunita Williams."
That was my reaction when I saw the show last night, too.
They not only decided to ignore the write-in winner, but also to ignore the winner amongst the 'finalist' names that NASA had selected.
Based on numbers reported from MSNBC:
From that, we know that Tranquility is under 114,427 ... but we also know the relative percentages of the 4 that NASA proposed (which gives us: Earthrise : 24k; Legacy : 35k; Venture: 21k), the total number of votes, and that there were another 4 above Tranquility in the rankings ... even if there was a multi-way tie between Xenu/Socialvibe/Buddy/Ubuntu and Tranquility, and Synergy and Vision got negligible results ... Tranquility couldn't have gotten more than 86k votes.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.