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Showing posts from September, 2017

notable no-no-no-notorious

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

notable intermittent explosions

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.):

notable nota bene

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