At one point during the ACRI project, when one of the expatriate American engineers suspected that things were spinning out of control, he searched a large French/English dictionary for the equivalent to the English word "doomed". He found it translated as "voué à l'échec", with the example of usage provided being "le projet était voué à l'échec dès le début": the project was doomed to failure from the beginning. This coincidence provoked much nervous laughter, and the phrase, delivered with a heavy American accent, became something of a mantra to some of the more pessimistic observers. Humor is a great antidote for stress. Less serious artifacts of ACRI include:
Mark Burton's American Cheese Research Institute page.
Heavy Metal Machine, a rock song composed in honor of a useless change of project nomenclature.
Peter Bird started a comic novel based on the project.