there  could  be  snakes  in  here

grey literature (librarian n.): a subtractive genre: neither academic nor commercial nor amateur writing. NGO reports, government whitepapers, think tank bilge, treaties. Perfectly named. Whatever you think of the average quality of academia, I guarantee you this is worse. It is not clear how much of the world's decisions depend on it. hoʻoponopono (Hawaiian n.): "making RIGHT"; a particular conflict resolution ritual. Recently rehashed into a Standard New Age form of narcissistic self -forgiveness. Behold: we can now complain about the cultural appropriation of intangibles: “ When things are taken out of our cultures and applied in ways in which those outside the culture want to apply them, especially for profit, there is almost always a problem. ” frummer (Yiddish n.): a highly observant Jew. From פֿרום‎; pious. shadow welfare system (sociology n.): things that poor people do to get by outside of government benefits, e.g. food banks, not paying for the su...

universal physics (science n.): finding a single law that crosses the scales of a phenomenon. Rare? paperwork pollution (econommics n.): great word for what bureaucracy does to a society; same kind of externality and maybe even worse in time terms. delusion box (AI safety n.): self-modification allowing the system to systematically ignore / confabulate inputs. weird machine (theoretical CS n.): a system which is Turing-complete when you wouldn't expect it / when no one intended it. e.g. Peano arithmetic, Magic the Gathering. to bugsplat (US military v.): to murder by use of a drone. screenshot-dunking (internet n.): to printscreen someone's online behaviour in order to mock them. In passing this spreads their message, of course. By analogy with the trial by ordeal of water . Twitter is of course a dunking machine by design. homoglyph (code n.): character which looks almost exactly the same as a character with a different Un...

on road, on the roads (London slang adj.): involved in petty crime; in the Game. pagan (London slang adj.): Enemy. Osman warning (UK law n.): letter informing someone they are at high risk of murder, issued by British police; the black spot. creps (London n.): cool trainers. He skulked, like his creps was made out of lead. His skin, normally like polished bronze, was drained flat, as if he'd been bleached. When I smiled and said hello to him, Husayn looked at me from fifty miles away. multimessenger (astronomy adj.): other things than EM to get info about the universe (at the moment we're trying neutrinos, cosmic rays, and grav waves). (Rays are particles, not waves.) wamb (internet sociology n.): the opposite of a nerd ; an unusually intuitive, extroverted, impulsive, lookist person. Currently this is thought to be "normal person", but if the empathising-systematising trade-off is at all right, then in fact normality is in the middle o...

Exponential Age (history n.): the modern age. Refers to this under-reported phenomenon: Coined by Ada Palmer. syndromic surveillance (tech/medicine n.): predictive diagnosis; pre-appointment warning. Oversight of populations using health data before diagnosis to signal a sufficient probability of a case or outbreak feedback weaponization (internet): spamming the "Report Abuse" function (for instance) in order to disrupt a community. shadow biosphere (speculative biology n.): an extensive unseen system of life on earth, based on non-carbon or non-nucleic acids. The thought is that almost all microbe probing is done by reference to standard biochemistry, and that there could thus be a lot of biological activity going undetected. orthoprax (religious adj.): of correct conduct. (orthodoxy emphasizes correct belief). bleisure (corporatese n.): business leisure. Free time stolen between ...

monkeysphere (comic n.): a unit of 150 humans. After Dunbar's number , a hypothesised upper limit of meaningful relationships. white monkey (ex-pat pej. n.): Caucasian employed in China for nonproductive, status reasons: e.g. to wear a suit and sit around an office looking exportsy; to pretend to play live music, to sit in cool bars (...) therapeutic index (medical n.): the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. For opioids it's only about 6:1, hence the trouble. spoonie (internet n.): someone with a chronic illness. From not having enough spoons (energy, mental health) to deal with something. chiller (US n.): notably cool person. azn (US slang adj.): Asian. Particularly online, or in Asian-American punk or hiphop. Dymaxion (BS proper n.): Buckminster Fuller's buzzword for his style / metier: DYnamic, MAXimum, and tensION. Actually a really good choice, because it's goofy, neologistic, impractical: ...

Overconfidence : Donald Moore helpfully disambiguates this into three pieces: Overestimation : thinking that you're better than you are. Absolute error. Overplacement : mistakenly thinking you're better than others. Rank error. Overprecision : excessive faith that you know the truth. Calibration error. It takes a little work to distinguish them. Overplacement can come apart from overestimation if you are accurate about yourself, but think everyone is dumber than they are. You could have overprecision without overestimation by being excessively sure you're terrible. And you could be unlucky enough to overestimate without overplacing, if you correctly rank everyone else above you, but still rate yourself too highly in an absolute sense... inflammaging (medical n.): general, chronic, subclinical inflammation associated with aging. max fac (trade adj.): 'maximum facilitation'; of a proposed trade system avoiding bo...

Bayes error (ML n.): the least wrong you can be; a component of the irreducible error (along with the error associated with bad data). pie barm (Wigan n.): Meat pie in a bread roll. A serious shibboleth, see also Wigan kebab, pea wet . pop socket (gadget n.): A sticky telescopic piece of plastic that lets you hold your phone with two fingers. Very trendy for unclear reasons.. stolen valor (US n.): military fraud, false honours. Boeotian (adj.): dumb. Named after an ancient region of Greece: Idiotsville. Trying to think of a comparable British expression but can't. epazote (culinary n.): Delicious Mexican herb. See also wormseed, Jesuit's tea, Mexican tea . proda (nautical): 1) shore, edge, liminal. 2) usage peculiar to Peter Watts (a marine biologist and novelist): prologue, prolegomenon. choker (NBA pej. n.): a team that loses out in the playoffs despite a strong regular season record. Pentalobe (trademark n.): Appl...

Politics : actions aimed at getting into power; where policy is action taken by those in power. Or: War : attempting to enact policy via embedding metal in people. Politics : attempting to enact policy via words flood-fill (algo n.): Very simple connected-area algorithm used in e.g. MSPaint's bucket cuttlefish suit (tech n.): active camo Cx (corporate n.): customer experience, after UX (user experience). Irish goodbye (US pej. n.): Leaving without saying goodbye. See also French exit , filer à l’anglaise . cobot (tech n.): collaborative robot. Physical augmentation for human tasks; safe despite strength. absolutorium (Polish Latin n.): academic absolution; releasing a student from their studies. The Flippening (digital currency n.): the foretold point when Ethereum will overtake Bitcoin. The Great Span (Kottkean n.): whoahing at how extremely long-lived people can bridge extremely different eras , or at how short recorded history ...

Point Nemo (geography proper n.): the oceanic pole of inaccessibility; the furthest point from any land. britbong (Irish pej. n.): Slur for 'British person'; a subreddit doing their bally best to be racist (but it is really hard when you have to invent all the stereotypes on your own). jackeen (Irish pej. n.): "a self-assertive worthless fellow"; a Dubliner. West Brit (Irish pej n.): Irish person perceived as being too British, liking Britain too much. See also oreo, apple, banana , pom, coconut . culchie (Irish pej n.): hick; teuchter; bogan; yokel. blerd (n.): black nerd. data leakage (ML n.): letting knowledge of the test set inform the training process. See also contamination triboelectric (physics n.): frictionally electrifying. e.g. clothes static. data hygienist (new new economy n.): hypothetical future profession, scanning training data for socially unacceptable content to prevent future Tays or Alisas . S...

grognard (French / nerd n.): old soldier; a player who refuses to play updated versions of a game. large-sample statistics (Victorian n.): pertaining to operations on samples of size 150 or more. (Pffffff) Power distance (sociology n.): the extent to which low-status people accept power inequality, on average, in their culture. Literature includes a cross-cultural metric which strikes me as an excellent idea. Atlanticism (Russian pej n.): doctrine of close alliance between America and Europe; NATOism. The contrived antagonist of 'Eurasianism'. I had scoffed at the very idea, but Germans are so anti-American that Dugin's dark scheming is not even absurd; read this on Schroeder as corrupt Eurasianist . novichok (Russian n.): Secret Soviet nerve agent, apparently much stronger than VX, apparently used on Skripal. free-range parenting (US n.): Letting your child roam, walk to school, live as if this was the lo...

egoboo (fandom / open source n.): ego boost; social credit; pleasure received from public recognition of one's voluntary work. See also warm glow . soyboy (MRA pej. n.): feminine man - in reference to the urban legend / quack palaeo notion that soy xenoestrogens lower testosterone. Depressingly, it's because of people like this that Cordelia Fine's bullshit is justifiable. See also numale, cuck, beta (though on top of the gender policing, soyboy adds diet policing and is that much worse). rufous (n.): reddish brown; robiny. inclusion rider (Hollywood n.): condition that one's peers must meet a diversity quota. Dolbyification (industry n.): moving off manufacturing / and towards licencing and assurance. See Coolidge effect (biology n.): broad tendency for males to exhibit renewed sexual interest if introduced to new sexual partners (even though previous partners are still available and had not ). emodiv...

nolle prosequi (Latin ): unwilling to pursue; used to announce the decision not to press charges. skeptical theism (n.): view that we can't discern whether natural evil is good evidence against the existence of Yahweh. ("it would not be surprising for an infinitely intelligent and knowledgeable being's reasons for permitting evils to be beyond human comprehension") True in the same boring way as radical sceptical scenarios: we can't rule it out. But it quite ignores the fact that evil is manifest ; the burden of showing its hidden benevolence is on the theist. noseeum (pej. n.): 1) sandfly, midge; 2) anti-theodicy inference by which we survey the world, find no reason for the immense suffering within, and so conclude there is no reason for it. Meant as snark by theologians, but sounds fine to me. portfolio career (n.): having several part-time jobs at once. Could be nice, but is more often sweet lemons on the part of people who want to be in crow...

copaganda (US n.): media that portrays police positively; also those press conferences with a bunch of dope on the table. Black MIDI (music n.): Subgenre of Japanese chip-tunes, named for having so many notes that the score would look solid black if transcribed to sheet music. Pairs well with bullet hell games. PC music (music n.): genre and/or performance-art label; pop music insiders making exaggerated, hyperreal versions of present Chart milieus. It is diabetes music. More difficult to listen to at length to than e.g. thrash metal or Black MIDI; I make it 4 mins into this for instance. to misbuy (PR v.): to purchase wrongly. Complement to missell attributing blame on consumer; pushback from financial companies. collision installation (biz n.): business strategy in which a human helps you switch to the product; imparts metaphorical energy by "colliding" with you and sending you sailing into the CLTV. See also Collison install . ...

shruggie (internet n.): ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . deepfake (ML n.): deep(-learning-produced celebrity) fake (porn). Not just morally repugnant, but actively disastrous: the looming end of all candid-camera evidence. binch (Twitter n.): bitch; for people who shy away from gendered language. milkshake duck (internet n.): a person made briefly famous for innocuous reasons who turns out to have a dark past. to corncob (internet v.): 1) to clearly lose a debate and then deny that you have; 2) pejorative for gay sex? celldar (n.): cellphone radar ; spies and riot squads are able to forego their own transmitters because we are all now broadcasting our location constantly. bandh (Indian n.): general strike called by a political party, enforced with physical threats. persec (military n.): personal security: the privacy of people with access to your secure system. strangelet (theoretical physics n.): conceivab...

She opened the door to his room gently, excruciated by the whining of the hinge. Patrick was asleep in his bed. Rather than disturb him, she tiptoed back out of the room.      Patrick lay awake. His heart was pounding. He knew it was his mother, but she had come too late. He would not call to her again. When he had still been waiting on the stairs and the door of the hall opened, he stayed to see if it was his mother, and he hid in case it was his father. But it was only that woman who had lied to him. Everybody used his name but they did not know who he was. One day he would play football with the heads of his enemies. ‘Be absolute for death’, a strange phrase from Measure for Measure, returned to him while he bared his teeth to rip open a sachet of bath gel. Perhaps there was something in this half-shallow, half-profound idea that one had to despair of life in order to grasp its real value. Then again, perhaps there wasn’t. But in any case, he pondere...

citogenesis (n.): the creation of a loop of citations for a baseless fact. Coined by Randall Munroe. Bradford Factor (HR n.): dumb measure of the burden of someone's sick days: (Number of occasions sick)^2 x Total days absent. Objectively badly calibrated: making an effort to come in to the office before full recovery is penalised compared to taking a whole week off. Apparently widely used in the UK. dehiring (HR n.): euphemism for being fired gently; colluding with an employee you want rid of, to get them hired somewhere else. outplacement (HR n.): another kind of gentle firing: in particular, outsourcing the firing process to a training-and-counselling company. scripta manent (Latin proverb): 'text remains'; can I get that in writing? music bread (Sardinian n.): sort of like a papadum or hardtack. sea-turtle (海龟) (n.): a Chinese graduate of foreign universities who returns to China. Pun on haigui, ocean-return . ...

imeldific (adj.): ostentatious; extravagant to the point of vulgarity. Coined by Imelda Marcos, which tells you something about her relationship to herself. Professor the Lord (UK pron.): Honorific for someone who is both a university professor and a peer. cf. Professor the Lord Vice Chancellor Winston and Professor the Lord. privately rational (economics adj.): Tyler Cowen 's new term for economically rational. I think I'll taboo the latter from my speech, since the former is so much more evocative. senolytic (bio n.): agent that kills only old, malfunctioning, cancer-prone cells. Just beginning applications... Lit: age destroyer . elephant's breath (pretentious n.): beige-grey . do-calculus (stats/CS n.): Judea Pearl's causal identification framework; a symbolic logic for deriving all the observational implications of a model. turbocode (electronics n.): particularly good way of encoding signals to g...