Naming conventions

Yeah, so it's unrelated to bioinformatics, but I thought that it was cool (well, maybe not cool, but interesting) - that new planet, 2003 UB313? The people who found it want to call it Xena. Yes, after that Xena. Screw Sedna or whatever poncy name is being mooted by other people.

At least it's memorable. I vote that we ditch numerical identifiers for unique, whimsical slogans wherever possible in human genetics. There's no real reason to restrict database identifiers to twelve bytes or whatever any more. Space is cheap and datapipes wide. Why not expand the dbSNP or PubMed identifiers fields to 128 characters and use unique, auto-generated sentences instead of numbers? On the rare occasions where I have to remember identifiers offhand I'd remember the "clerks love monkeys snp" or "sausage rolls make you fat paper" far more easily than RSxxxxxx.

Of course, scientific papers might not get through email spam filters anymore, but it's a small price to pay, surely?