there  could  be  snakes  in  here

universal physics (science n.): finding a single law that crosses the scales of a phenomenon. Rare? paperwork pollution (econommics n.): great word for what bureaucracy does to a society; same kind of externality and maybe even worse in time terms. delusion box (AI safety n.): self-modification allowing the system to systematically ignore / confabulate inputs. weird machine (theoretical CS n.): a system which is Turing-complete when you wouldn't expect it / when no one intended it. e.g. Peano arithmetic, Magic the Gathering. to bugsplat (US military v.): to murder by use of a drone. screenshot-dunking (internet n.): to printscreen someone's online behaviour in order to mock them. In passing this spreads their message, of course. By analogy with the trial by ordeal of water . Twitter is of course a dunking machine by design. homoglyph (code n.): character which looks almost exactly the same as a character with a different Un...

on road, on the roads (London slang adj.): involved in petty crime; in the Game. pagan (London slang adj.): Enemy. Osman warning (UK law n.): letter informing someone they are at high risk of murder, issued by British police; the black spot. creps (London n.): cool trainers. He skulked, like his creps was made out of lead. His skin, normally like polished bronze, was drained flat, as if he'd been bleached. When I smiled and said hello to him, Husayn looked at me from fifty miles away. multimessenger (astronomy adj.): other things than EM to get info about the universe (at the moment we're trying neutrinos, cosmic rays, and grav waves). (Rays are particles, not waves.) wamb (internet sociology n.): the opposite of a nerd ; an unusually intuitive, extroverted, impulsive, lookist person. Currently this is thought to be "normal person", but if the empathising-systematising trade-off is at all right, then in fact normality is in the middle o...

Exponential Age (history n.): the modern age. Refers to this under-reported phenomenon: Coined by Ada Palmer. syndromic surveillance (tech/medicine n.): predictive diagnosis; pre-appointment warning. Oversight of populations using health data before diagnosis to signal a sufficient probability of a case or outbreak feedback weaponization (internet): spamming the "Report Abuse" function (for instance) in order to disrupt a community. shadow biosphere (speculative biology n.): an extensive unseen system of life on earth, based on non-carbon or non-nucleic acids. The thought is that almost all microbe probing is done by reference to standard biochemistry, and that there could thus be a lot of biological activity going undetected. orthoprax (religious adj.): of correct conduct. (orthodoxy emphasizes correct belief). bleisure (corporatese n.): business leisure. Free time stolen between ...

monkeysphere (comic n.): a unit of 150 humans. After Dunbar's number , a hypothesised upper limit of meaningful relationships. white monkey (ex-pat pej. n.): Caucasian employed in China for nonproductive, status reasons: e.g. to wear a suit and sit around an office looking exportsy; to pretend to play live music, to sit in cool bars (...) therapeutic index (medical n.): the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. For opioids it's only about 6:1, hence the trouble. spoonie (internet n.): someone with a chronic illness. From not having enough spoons (energy, mental health) to deal with something. chiller (US n.): notably cool person. azn (US slang adj.): Asian. Particularly online, or in Asian-American punk or hiphop. Dymaxion (BS proper n.): Buckminster Fuller's buzzword for his style / metier: DYnamic, MAXimum, and tensION. Actually a really good choice, because it's goofy, neologistic, impractical: ...

Overconfidence : Donald Moore helpfully disambiguates this into three pieces: Overestimation : thinking that you're better than you are. Absolute error. Overplacement : mistakenly thinking you're better than others. Rank error. Overprecision : excessive faith that you know the truth. Calibration error. It takes a little work to distinguish them. Overplacement can come apart from overestimation if you are accurate about yourself, but think everyone is dumber than they are. You could have overprecision without overestimation by being excessively sure you're terrible. And you could be unlucky enough to overestimate without overplacing, if you correctly rank everyone else above you, but still rate yourself too highly in an absolute sense... inflammaging (medical n.): general, chronic, subclinical inflammation associated with aging. max fac (trade adj.): 'maximum facilitation'; of a proposed trade system avoiding bo...

Bayes error (ML n.): the least wrong you can be; a component of the irreducible error (along with the error associated with bad data). pie barm (Wigan n.): Meat pie in a bread roll. A serious shibboleth, see also Wigan kebab, pea wet . pop socket (gadget n.): A sticky telescopic piece of plastic that lets you hold your phone with two fingers. Very trendy for unclear reasons.. stolen valor (US n.): military fraud, false honours. Boeotian (adj.): dumb. Named after an ancient region of Greece: Idiotsville. Trying to think of a comparable British expression but can't. epazote (culinary n.): Delicious Mexican herb. See also wormseed, Jesuit's tea, Mexican tea . proda (nautical): 1) shore, edge, liminal. 2) usage peculiar to Peter Watts (a marine biologist and novelist): prologue, prolegomenon. choker (NBA pej. n.): a team that loses out in the playoffs despite a strong regular season record. Pentalobe (trademark n.): Appl...