notable nudniks

• 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 get forward error correction.


• to wallhack (gaming v.): to make textures transparent so that you can cheat and see enemy players through walls.


• Solutrean hypothesis (archaeology n.): claim that proto-Europeans settled the Americas. Heterodox, but not crank?


• Spoken Soul (academic n.): Cringey term for African-American English; 'ebonics' except nasty people appropriated that.


• obesogenic (pej adj.): obesity-producing. Standard modern diet, transport and environs.


• shrouded attribute (economics n.): hidden cost; like booking fees.


• hige (n.): that pattern on well-worn jeans:
  
  


• VASIMR (engineering n.): the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket; an electric engine for space. Crawling towards a full test after 40 years of funding cuts.


• to stan (v.): to obsess over, particularly over a celebrity. See also parasocial interaction.


• retpoline (low-level n.): return trampoline. An infinite loop in assembly language. Coined for Google's nearly-performance-neutral Meltdown fix for pre-2015 processors.


• nudnik; נודניק‏ (Yiddish n.): pest; naysayer.


• punim (Yiddish dim. n.): face, especially a child's.
• to hypermile (gearhead v.): to jury-rig a car for mileage; weight reduction, streamlining, batteries...


• thermal rectifier (nanotech n.): diode allowing heat to flow in one direction on net. Currently barely exist, but the logical conclusion is Maxwell's demon but for real.


• parchment barriers (n.): all that law is, in the absence of general consent / overwhelming force.