there  could  be  snakes  in  here

My main output was to teach you 500 strange words . I got cross about the prestige of certain knowledge workers . I collated some skits . I tried to predict what would happen this year . I reflected on what I did wrong in school . I wrote about the difference between knowing (the password, the algorithm) and grokking . I wrote about the perception of value and dissed phenomenology again . I wrote about how unrealistic realistic art is . I made analogies between my philosophy and the ancients' . I reviewed Robin Hanson's grand book, Geoff Dyer's nonbook, and Ted Chiang's sculptures . I estimated how many lives the media thinks certain kinds of lives are worth . I estimated how many hours I have spent on maths . I wrote a poem about the north . I wrote a poem about nationhood . I made a joke ranking of mathematics students . I wrote about how it feels to grok statistical learning for the first time . I wrote about the compleat scientist . I wrote about Nazi nuclear...

psycho-boom (心理热潮) (n.): recent rapid, enthusiastic import of psychiatric concepts and treatments in China. Excellent stuff. Except, unfortunately, psychoanalysis has stolen a march on the cognitive/biological approach, and is enjoying a lucrative afterlife, following its much-deserved death in the West. American psychoanalytic institutes often have trouble finding willing patients; Chinese programs have the opposite problem. When Beijing University held a series of lectures on Carl Jung a few years ago, it could admit only a quarter of the people who wanted to attend. scènes à faire (legal n.): something too simple or cliched to be copyrightable. e.g. rooftop showdown, the millenial whoop. to get winstoned (underground UK v.): to cut one's septum on one of the new plastic £10 notes, which have Churchill's face on them. bomb (underground UK n.): a paper case to deliver powder to the stomach. sac (chess v.): to sacrifice Quadrila...

exercise intolerance (medical n.): Collapsing after minor physical effort. Marker of severe heart disease or CFS. Might this be a less-heralded advantage of doing regular exercise: a canary in the mine? degan (n.): death-free vegan; vegan who will eat cultured meat. Coined here , no traction yet. degen (thieves' cant n.): sword capacity discipline (airline n.): Overbooking, downsizing, outsourcing, just-in-time arrivals. Using fewer planes to maintain prices, while enforcing this monopoly with state violence if necessary. plasmon (physics n.): the quantum of plasma oscillation; the as-if smallest unit of change in the free electron gas. exciton (condensed matter n.): Way of describing a paired electron/ electron hole as if they were a particle. First-ever unambigious sighting, the other day . goniometer (physics n.): Device for measuring or creating precise angles psychrometrics (engineering): the study of gas-vapor mixes...

[work in progress] NOVELS The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) Tales of Earthsea (1998). Tehanu (1990). The Farthest Shore (1972). A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). Sometimes described as most suitable for children, but I read it at 26 and felt no deficiency of tone or . The Dispossessed (1979). Lathe of Heaven (1971). Grand psychedelic indictment of utilitarianism. Endorsement of psychoanalysis and Daoist woo. I don't care, it's amazing. The Other Wind (2001). The Tombs of Atuan (1970). STORIES Things or The End (1970). Beautiful study of apocalypse and mass psychosis. Planting an apple-tree. I gasped. Romance: 5/5. The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas (1973). Intuition pump for utilitarianism. Details about this toy society are added one by one, and your mood darkens. She condemns it but not loudly. I'm afraid I think she is a coward, but I appreciate her clarity. If you walk away from Omelas you must believe in banning...

reversal (medical n.): the eventual withdrawal of a treatment used without sufficient evidence, when it is found to be null or harmful. There must soon be a reversal on heart stents to relieve pain following a shocking null result ; millions of invasive surgeries, presumably hundreds of deaths. booter (retrocomputing n.): 1) software executed at boot, from a bootable disk, not through an OS. Some early games did this, remarkably. 2) Web service that will thoroughly DDoS your target for a few bucks. The record-breaking attack on Krebs was through one of these. assurance contract (economics n.): Legal instrument for decentralised funding of public goods. Think Kickstarter for climate change, roads, and schools. pilpul (Hebrew n.): pepper; sharp analysis. The method used by scholars to resolve contradictions in the Talmud or different halakhic judgments. See also retconning, logic-chopping, splitting hairs, red herring. arruginat...

access abyss (global health n.): The gigantic difference in access to pain relief across the world: most of the world's opiates are consumed by the richest fraction of the population. Hundreds of millions die without any pain relief at all. A complete travesty, especially given how cheap they are. Intensification of "gap", the usual economics word for disparity. fictitious force (physics n.): A force which only arises when considering motion between a non-inertial frame and an inertial one. (e.g. the Earth's frame and the Sun's.) We say the sun goes round the earth, despite the licence to say either given by Galilean relativity, because saying the opposite produces four extra awkward forces in the equations. The argument goes through, ultimately, by Occam's razor, and by computational convenience. co-rumination (psychology n.): excessive discussion of one's problems and picking of scabs within friendships. Can make negativity reinfor...

geofence (tech n.): a virtual boundary that lets software respond when its device enters or leaves a particular area. e.g. disabling wi-fi, e.g. sending an alert. My engineering lecturer claimed that the DoD disabled his car with one of these. Stingray (policing n.): phone snooper; IMSI-catcher. Emulates a real phone tower to locate and identify nearby phones. In common use in large US cities. Moravec's paradox (AI n.): the surprising fact that abstract cognition has proved much easier to emulate in AI than has basic, instinctive visual and motor processing. Haut en bas. slamming (white-collar crime n./v.): taking control of a phone owner's account without permission. Done by actual companies, somehow. benefit of clergy (medieval n.): right to be tried by the Church instead of the magistrate; effectively, the right to not be executed for your crimes. Originally only granted to clerics, hence the name, but eventually to anyone who could read....

Half-Mourning (Victorian n.): The final stage of the Decent two-year grieving period, in which the widow is allowed to hear hats again and can start to work bland colours (grey, lilac, lavender) into her clothing. Game recognizes game (black proverb): Takes one to know one; great minds think alike. Self-aggrandising compliment. healthspan (n.): the length of time in which you are healthy. Healthspan is the proper target of medicine, but has been sidelined in favour of raw longevity for a century. bare stick (光棍) (Chinese n.): Single man. (Some suggest that this is a dick joke, but this is likely to be denied by locals.) Name of the annual Valentine's Day / orgy of consumerism, on November 11th (chosen because 11/11 has a lot of single 1s in it). exploitable (n.): a meme template with blank space for you to speak your branes in. manhwa (만화)(Korean n.): manga. brohoof (internet n.): A high-five between two broni...

twenny nug (channish n.): 20 (chicken) nuggets. skiff (US military n.): Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Airgapped, maximal security computer installation. class-struggle face (阶级斗争脸) (Maoist n.): the fixed frown-grimace suitable for intimidating black elements . A risque joke at Mao's expense. I make this face at work when I don't want to be bothered. (I work in an open plan.) black money (Indian n.): Money from the black market, untaxed: perhaps trillions in total. twice exceptional (US pedagogy adj.): both disabled and gifted. (“ being gifted and being disabled are surprisingly similar: isolating, mystifying, petrifying. ”) nasheed (Arabic n.): religious song, canonically a'capella, but these days they add a bunch of overdubs and comps and stuff. Searching for them can get you put on A Watchlist. grand truth (ML n.): The underlying distribution; the population. I think it's probably a m...

niceness (UNIX n.): inverse process priority. a job with a high niceness is very kind to the users of your system (i.e., it runs at low priority), while a job with little niceness utilises more of the CPU TPTB (internet n.): The Powers That Be. You can hear the conspiratorial hiss. skeuomorph (pej. design n.): an object which retains the look and metaphors of its predecessors even though it does not need to: cultural fluency (culture war n.): Mandatory ideological re-education on campus (see also sensitivity training ). Very useful, not as guide to actually ethical conduct, but as primer on what inadvertent words are likely to incite a mob. stemwinder (US n.): A rousing speech, especially by a politician. spavined (posh adj.): bony, particularly of horses; wasted. neuclidean (maths adj.): noneuclidean for impatient people. landsat (science n.): The oldest satellite mapping project: 45 years of continuous imagery. interocu...

sentinel organ (medical n.): a part of the body particularly sensitive to some medical insult (pathogen, toxin, mutation). Canary in the mine. Has been used of the brain, liver, thyroid, mammaries . toxicant (medical n.): toxic substance. Hypernym of toxin , which is supposed to be "naturally produced toxicant". Language being what it is, people actually use "toxin" as the hypernym and "toxicant" as "artificial, industrial toxin". the walking well (medical collective n.): Medical jargon for healthy people. But particularly malingerers: people going to the GP with nothing wrong. Term is a shibboleth for the speaker being an allied practitioner. apodization (signal processing n.): applying a function to a signal to change its shape, in particular tapering out the extreme values to zero, in particular improving the focus of an optical system by manipulating its input-intensity profile. Literally "de-footing". Used to p...

pokie (Oz n.): slot machine (metonym for poker machine). See also pokie palace , a cheap casino. The only evidence I have that this diminution is typical of Australia is this: Jahwist (philology proper n.): One of the hypothesised four authors of the Old Testament, the one who uses YHWE as the name of God. numale (manosphere n.): Slur for non-hegemonically masculine / non-sexist man. Said to be disrespected by all. the Cupertino idiot-tax operation : Apple Inc. banya (Russian n.): sauna room. to patch (Scots v.): to cancel; to bail; to ditch. Dundonian. stramineous (Latinate adj.): straw-like; worthless. to slot floppies (Rhodesian v.): to shoot insurgents. Presumably racist. source (stream computing n.): stream creator/pusher. Source and sink are from thermodynamics and/or ecology. sink (stream computing n.): stream consumer. A class or function (or file...) that receives events from another object or f...

to knout (v.): to lash with a barbed, multi-headed whip. Peculiar to English commentary about Tsarist Russia. to perlustrate (v.): to inspect thoroughly; to rifle through. morganatic (adj.): Of marriage: crossing class boundaries; partial; granting no titles to the wife and children. AKA left-handed marriage . accouchement (Fr n.): a birth; the moment of fetal expulsion. altricial (adj): incapable of moving around immediately after birth. test particle (n.): fictional entity used in high-energy physics simulations / dynamics problems at the limit. Model with only one property, the one you want to simulate. fustian (n.): 1) thick dark cloth; 2) pompous writing. Confusing because it looks like an adjective. to templatize (computing v.): genericise; to use metaprogramming templates on. Seen in a BS marketing spiel; yet another case of presenting some 40-year-old basic CS idea as revolutionary innovation. nesomane (n.): Island lover. ...

infra dig. (Latin / U adj.): infra dignitatem; incredibly posh way of saying the already posh "beneath one". shakeout (business n.): The collapse of a competitive industry into oligopoly. Wall Street word: you can hear the salivation. ranch (computing n.): cluster. (Archaic.) shell account (computing n.): a remote userspace. Remarkably, you can buy one of these for accessing your casual-but-nerdy forum (it's giving randos an arbitrary-execution place on your server, after all). These are how Unix-inclined programmers survived in a Microsoft world. malocclusion (dentistry n.): misalignment of teeth between your two jaws. ULEZ (London n.): Ultra Low Emission Zone. Tiny central circle of London that you have to pay extra to drive polluting vehicles in. Overlaps the existing Congestion Charge Zone perfectly, which makes for an interesting ontology of tax. workforce-planned area (corporate n.): a physical area of a company where everything is highly...

Intermittent Explosive Disorder (medical n.): behavioral disorder involving sudden irrational rage. Children under 6 are never considered to display IED: their explosive disorder is instead due to being under 6. Very possibly the reason for that unbelievably petty outburst you saw in Morrison's the other day. sport one's oak (Oxbridge v.): to signal a desire for solitude by closing one's (outer) door. fatberg (n.): a congealed mass of cooking fat, nappies and condoms, blocking a sewer. This one is 130 tonnes. Vouched Mozillian : A trusted volunteer for the Mozilla Foundation. Sounds like a clan from Dune . monocoque (engineering adj.): of frames which use the external chassis to support weight, lacking an internal load-bearing frame; 'structural skin'. Underwater basket weaving (US n.): snarky metonym for any useless university course. Decried as racist , as all things must be. survivors movement (internet n.): ...

revert (n.): a convert to Islam. We "revert" to it, however, because we reportedly already agreed to follow Allah's rules before we were born. tulpa (n.): Tibetan spirit familiar / alter-ego / imaginary friend. More recently used for pretend, voluntary dissociation . Workflowy and this site are my tulpas. contrafactum (n.): a cover of a song with different words. For instance, my mate called this a 'parody' of 'Hallelujah', but it is not a parody, because it is not making fun of the original. hyperprior (philosophy n.): Andy Clark's term for the cognitive conditions of learning anything about the world (e.g. sensory co-ordination, object permanence, "the world is in one determinate state"). Previously called synthetic a priori judgments, or conditions of possibility , but unlike Kant Clark is willing to imagine that they might not be innate and/or logically necessary, but actually learned from sense data in infancy. Which is ...

to glomarise (US govt v.): to stonewall; to answer a request for information with "neither confirm nor deny". After that time the Americans tried to steal a ruined Soviet nuclear sub. pro tanto (legal adj.): as much as you can; as far as it goes. Of a fine with a cap dependent on how much the defendant actually has. multihyphenate (adj.): doing several jobs, like "actor-director" or " scientist-playwright ". Good word - but unfortunately it is largely used by pretentious fools and connotes deluded bragging about one's own complexity. Moiré pattern (n.): large-scale interference pattern produced by a stripey pattern with lighter gaps. Old TVs were terrible at showing anything striped without moiréing. powerless (theoretical CS adj): having sub-quadratic complexity; not having a power (greater than 1) on any term. cryptobourgeoisie (): people who have made a lot of money (millions) through bitcoin and ether. The door is closin...

New Aesthetic (art n.): Best defined visually . That slightly grating half-digitised gimmick that every other alt rock album of the last 7 years has used: surface learning (n.): superficial, merely verbal , resentful, and test-driven education. No engagement, no internalisation , no critique. Forgotten within months. Most of the 'learning' in the world is just this. chinny reckon (sarcastic English interjection): Liar! See also Itchy Chin , Chinny chinny ... My peers used this to mean "I wonder" in response to an obvious question. damnit operator (computing n.): "!"; an error-suppressing manual override of some language feature. e.g. style inheritance priority (in CSS) or nullability (in C#). farm (computing n.): Set of servers all slaved as one. adult supervision (n.): Whereby a startup hires an older, outsider CEO. Started as a joke, but it is now reified. UQ (academic n.): uncertainty quantification; a multidisciplinary ...

black tax (South African n.): 1) putative burden on black South Africans, to support their extended family; 2) Trevor Noah uses it as a substitute for "white privilege", which I think is a good idea. Racism is an artificial burden on black people, rather than an unearned bonus for whites. 'Privilege' distorts the issue and invites correct but irrelevant objections about how little has been given the privilegee. Saffer (n.): South African person. japie or yarpie (Afrikaans n.): (white) farmboy; bogan; teuchter; hillbilly. chemsex (gay UK n.): Intercourse facilitated and potentiated by e.g. meth, GHB, mephedrone. Particularly of Grindr people. See also slamsex , chemsex with injected substances. dec (fashion n.): Décolletage; a woman's neck, shoulders and cleavage. MORSE (academic n.): Maths, Op Research, Statistics, Economics. All the good stuff. passage (microbiology n.): process of a pathogen iterating itself, as it pas...

'I think in a line — but there is the potential of the plane.' This perhaps was what great art was: a momentary apprehension of the plane at a point in the line. — Charles Williams A theory is a machine for answering a class of questions. — Judea Pearl What philosophers and social thinkers and literary critics call their "theories" do not often merit the word. Rather, these people lay out models - with all the artificiality, partiality and temporariness that implies, and seldom the precision. A model is a tool for making sense of things, for filtering out things in self-defence, and is not necessarily a general claim about reality, a truth-machine. (Some of them agree with this low estimate, like the post-modernists. People don't realise that post-modernists are often self-deprecating - some of them even call their works little: Minima Moralia , Minima Memoria , les petits récits .) These theories are actually language games . O.K. Except th...

I can handle bullshit. However copious, however arbitrary: I am confident in the extent of my stoicism, I could be a Kolmogorov , it would flow over me without touching the heart. I'm capable of not caring about what I do. Logically, I would be worse off if I couldn't stand it, if I was forced to be Solzhenitsyn . But I can't help admiring people who can't put up with it. I have an extra ability, and many extra opportunities, but they've the crown.

winchell (n.) and lippman (n.): Two words for 'journalist' coined by Heinlein. A "winchell" is a hateful, gossipy pundit. Named for this nasty little man. A "lippman" is a brave, muckracking investigator. Named for this good guy. We really really need two words for these two wildly different ideal types. (More recently Nick Davies tried out "churnalism", but it didn't stick.) It is stupid to attack 'journalism' when you are only dissing winchells, but that is the blunt instrument of language for you. niladic (computer adj.): Of a function, having zero arguments. The zeroth member of the n-adics. d'Alembertian (maths n.): the Laplace operator in Minkowski space; the divergence of the gradient of a function in a 4D manifold. What a beautiful word. bim (1950s US n.): woman. I think the register is the same as "chick" or "broad". offboarding process (HR adj.): The minutiae surrounding leaving a job:...

"36056e1bc7447cc3d66832a10f9e420beeab3226" (2017) by dorianna Besides being free and endless and potentially superhuman, algorithmic art has a hidden benefit: The artefacts are not the real problem with conceptual art : rather, it's the pretense. The artist, feigning profundity; the critic, helping them wank. Artbots won't claim profundity, nor will they be attributed it; so they might make museums smell less of shite. "Accidentally generated pattern........" (2015) by Kieran G. Larkin 'Exploration of Related Points Along a Space Filling Curve #2' (2007) by Don Relyea "inception_4c-output-3-9-3" (2007) by Pete Ashton

POPS (n.): privately owned public space. A place where secret rules can apply to you. You can tell them by how nice/sterile they are and by the hi-viz men lurking at the edges. ("Public" is obvs a very vague word but it is fair to gloss it here as "unfenced place with seating or grass, on a public thoroughfare, which people gravitate to in idle hours".) to roget (v.): to disguise plagiarism through systematic abuse of a thesaurus. Good word game: what rogeted phrase produces "sinister buttocks"? (Actually of course, "to attempt to disguise".) The sad thing is is that this is happening in an age with good automatic paraphrasing software. yellow books (maths n.): The mathematics textbooks put out by Springer Verlag ; a watchword for rigour and broken ground and what you will never ever master. nooch (n.): Nutritional yeast. A forced and chummy coinage by well-meaning vegans. senectitude (n.): old age, senescence, dotage. bobby-sox...

bit bucket (n.): 1) Figurative location wherein all lost data resides; data heaven; 2) a null device or placeholder bitstream, for removing useless data: e.g. ' /dev/null ' on Linux; 3) an IT product by the giant meta-IT company Atlassian; 4) Literal location underneath the front hopper of a 1960s computer, which collected the used bits of punch cards. Here is the bit bucket for the (60 year!) CosRay experiment in McMurdo Antarctic Research Station: rainbow bridge (post-Christian n.): A Heaven for nonhumans, particularly pets. So named in a clickbait prose poem of the 1990s. I have seen this used sincerely for the afterlife in general, hence "post-Christian": I said in my heart, “Concerning the sons of men, God tests them, that they may see that they themselves are like animals.” / For what happens to the sons of men happens also to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over ...

I see the term "high-powered people" quite a lot, and realise I don't know what it means. A trivial gloss of it is "powerful" (but it's more useful as marker of a tendency toward power). So another trivial one would be "having characteristics that bring success (in organisational life)". What characteristics are those? Intelligence, motivation, charm and leadership spangles, tolerance of long hours, self-esteem, appetite for money or status or ascent. Or else sociopathy , narcissism, risk-taking, obsessiveness, 'the sterility that waits on practicality'. Well, I don't have most of those things. Insofar as I know what I want from life, I want to know things, to make things more knowable, and to do good. (A lot of good, like 30,000 QALYs of good. That's not average: if we grant parents benevolent aims, then raising two kids is like 40 - 140 QALYs , if you and they are unusually lucky with genetics and peers. And that...

thicc or thique (hip-hop adj.): curvaceous; in particular, callipygian. I thought this might be satirical, but no, it is well-attested in the literature . parietal hours (from the Latin n.): "walled hours": times of the day that American college students were allowed members of the opposite sex in the dorm. About 25 hours a week, at 60s Radcliffe. aborning (US adv.): while being born. e.g. I NEARLY DIED ABORNING; I WASN'T TO GET OFF SO EASILY frass (US n.): Insect droppings. Compare Jamaican raas ? shotgun parser (n.): an ad hoc input recognizer, split into many pieces, across all layers, with parsing interspersed with processing logic, often reading Turing-complete data formats. Very insecure, predictably and by default. Unfortunately, this antipattern is the standard way of reading input, used in 99% of programs, simply because it is very very easy to do. "Shotgun parser" is the enemy of the Langsec people, who demand regular and context-fr...