A few months ago when I was stuck in traffic, I noticed the car in front of me had a license plate that said LM4250.
"Huh," I said to myself. "That guy really likes his National chips. What's an LM4250?"
I looked it up when I got home, and the LM4250 is a low power precision op-amp. "Maybe he's the guy that designed it, or he did some important work on it. That's pretty cool!"
Then we moved to the new house, and I started seeing a LOT of LM license plates. LM4105, LM4216, etc. What the heck was going on?
Eventually I figured it out. Near our new house is a Limousine company that specializes in "regular" sized limos instead of stretch limos. They have a whole fleet! And as I drove past it one day, I noticed that all of their plates on the cars are LMxxxx -- LM for Limousine, presumably.
Sadly, not all of the plates corresponded to actual part numbers. Still, it's fun when every now and then you see a DC/DC step down controller parked at the curb:
