notable not able

• 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 closing.


• civil twilight (n.): the bit just before dawn (and just before night), when the center of the sun is 6° below the horizon.


• totality (n.): period during an eclipse when the eclipser totally blocks light from the eclipsee.


• publon (academic pej. n.): the Least Publishable Unit; the smallest and least significant academic paper which can still be published. This is what publish-or-perish leads to.


• IBGYBG (finance interjection): I'll be gone, you'll be gone. This is terrible business, but don't interfere - we won't bear the downside.


• burpee (exercise n.): a squat plus a little jump back. what an ugly word though.


• tonsillolith (Latin-Greek n.): tonsil stone; nasty smelling accretion ("calculus") of calcium and mercaptan that forms at the back of your throat.


• saturated model (stats pej. n.): A model overfit so severely that there's one parameter per data point. Zero degrees of freedom, max variance. The mean is a saturated model at n=1.


• data snooping (academic n.): deciding what models and tests to run after peeking at the data; data dredging; p-hacking. One of the most pernicious flaws in the low-power sciences.


• noise realization (stats n.): a roll of the dice.


• cumgutters (n.): the iliac furrows of people who do too much exercise. These:
  
  
• the dismal science (n.): economics. However, tankies take note: Carlyle first called it this because economists argued against slavery:

  Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall Philanthropy [religious abolitionism] is wonderful; and the Social Science - not a "gay science," but a rueful - which finds the secret of this universe in "supply and demand," and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful.
  
  Not a "gay science," I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science. These two, Exeter Hall Philanthropy and the Dismal Science, led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it - will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, widecoiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!



• the gay science (n.): (good) poetry. In the air before Nietzsche used it.


• the liberal sciences (n.): theoretical or fundamental physics. Basically anything which you can't use directly in industry, which supposedly earn disdain like the usual impractical degrees. Though it's hard to believe that the physics students suffer much afterward.


• the sweet science (n.): boxing (???)