there  could  be  snakes  in  here

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...

I got a temp job in an official statistics department at the age of 23. Somehow; while I was nominally educated (economics & philosophy), I'd never written any code, never simulated anything, never calculated a PDF , and never actually analysed more than 50 rows of data. Most notably, I'd never heard of principal components analysis (nor any unsupervised learning, tools with which one can discover the ' joints ' of nature without really putting one's mental framework into the mix). We (they) built a PCA model of childhood poverty, letting the algorithm find the most important parts of the phenomenon, making them fall right out of the data, heedless of the Marxism or Malthusianism or indeed mindlessness of the modellers. Despite my tiresome anti-realism and anti-quantoid convictions, I could see the philosophical implications were huge. So here I am.

to live within PRISM (pej. v.): to spend your time on the public web, i.e. within full view of government intrusion . Scalish (programming adj.): Of code written in good Scala style. See also Pythonic , Ruby Way , maybe Rustic . nostrification (German n.): the conversion of degrees granted elsewhere into local terms. ravioli code (programming n.): marked by overzealous encapsulation. See also spaghetti code , marked by heavy coupling and no interfaces. rescission (legal n.): revoking of a contract; repealing of a law. Used in casual conversation by Ruth Davidson. Easy to work out apriori ("re", again, "sciss", separate/broken) but still new. merkledag (n.): Merkle directed acyclic graph: a particular hash-linked data structure suitable for massively decentralised work. This word denotes the logical plan used by instances of the Interplanetary Filesystem . (All IPFS addresses are merkle hashes, links between which form a graph.) Stench gas (n.)...

You could quantify your knowledge of maths by giving the year of development of the most recent theory you have mastered. (One's "theory year".) In mechanics, I have covered Lagrangians quite well, so my mechanics year is 1783.* Aggregate scores are much less meaningful, but I am inclined to be brutal and set one's overall theory year as the oldest year among your knowledge of the big trunk branches (geometry, algebra, Analysis, number theory, combinatorics, groups, logic...). My mate Johnny points out a couple of problems here: Most mathematicians are so specialised that they'd have a TY of 2013 for one thing and 1800 for everything else. Your metric shouldn't have a low score for the greatest actual proponents. Response : theory year was made for omniscients, not for man. Mathematics itself gnaws at your concept: for Category theory promises to make all areas equivalent. So one very high TY, + 1945 in topology could theoretically give you an ov...