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Showing posts from July, 2017

notable omens and totems

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

notable bit buckets

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