there  could  be  snakes  in  here

(c) Tom Gauld (2014) When physicists do mathematics, they don’t say they’re doing “number science”. They’re doing math. If you’re analyzing data, you’re doing statistics. You can call it data science or informatics or analytics or whatever, but it’s still statistics... You may not like what some statisticians do. You may feel they don’t share your values. They may embarrass you. But that shouldn’t lead us to abandon the term “statistics”. – Karl Broman what makes data science special and distinct from statistics is that this data product gets incorporated back into the real world, and users interact with that product, and that generates more data: a feedback loop. This is very different from predicting the weather... – Cathy O'Neil / Rachel Schutt "Data science" is the latest name for an old pursuit: the attempt to make computers give us new knowledge. * In computing's short history, there have already been about 10 words for this activity (and god kn...

Strine (Oz proper n.): that thick Australian accent. Onomatopoeic: just say "Striiine" - "(Au)stralian" - with a long ɒ sound. curioso (C17th It. n.): Brilliant enthusiast of unusual things. Originally synonymous with virtuoso ; a word for a proto-scientist / Renaissance man. sockdolager (American n.): A finisher; an exceptional thing. Probably from "sock" (punch) and "doxology" (final hymn). Was the last word heard in the theatre before Lincoln was shot amidst laughter. gunsel (originally Yiddish n.): 1) hoodlum; Player. 2) catamite - from the Yiddish גענדזל, gosling. <3. The derived term "gunselism" has exactly 1 hit and how often do you see that? green ink letter (n.): A lunatic rant sent in to the Letters page. cromulent (adj.): blameless; fine. Made up by a Simpsons writer to demonstrate Frege's Context Principle (or Springfield's inbreeding). Taco Bell Programming (n.): the discipline of so...

"This isn't right . Imagine: we give them a loss function, without a utility function. They can't feel good; only less bad." "It's the same with us, tho. What we call utility is just the absence of loss." "I'm not sure that's true. Pride feels to be more than the absence of shame; love is more than absence of loneliness." "There's a fairly big gap between your two examples. And it's hard to think clearly when strong pleasure or pain is implicated." "Nevertheless, yours is the view requiring a mass redefinition of natural language to make two entities become one." "I don't mind. Even if they're not identical, we can still capture most of all value by reducing harm." "I don't see how you can know that." "Obvs I don't know it infallibly, but anyway it can't hurt ." "You might be more ambitious than such moral hedging." "Yes, as so...

Something of real consequence was happening. We were at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming. After a lull of almost 180 years (public punishments were phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and in 1839 in the United States), it was back in a big way. When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being leveled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice. And so I made a decision. The next time a great modern shaming unfolded against some significant wrongdoer—the next time citizen justice prevailed in a dramatic and righteous way—I would leap into the middle of it. I’d investigate it close up and chronicle how efficient it was in righting wrongs. After the interview was over, I staggered out into the London afternoon. I dreaded uploading the footage onto YouTube because I’d been so screechy. I steeled myself for commen...

Technical books often use seemingly nontechnical, apparently normative terms: you're marching through your dense and spidery notation, and suddenly you tread in a gob of ordinary language. Some of the most important concepts in the formal sciences are of this sort, in fact: well-behaved . "not weird; having all properties suitable for the present study; not in violation of any of the assumptions we just made". One of the big offenders, used everywhere and never defined truly, only by context. Usually "well-behaved compared to an unrestricted superset we don't want to handle right now". well-defined . "unambiguous; blessed with just one interpretation". One of the core differences between the formal sciences and other enquiry. Terminology in other fields is nowhere near as clear as this (not even ones which seem highly formalised, like Spinoza's Ethics or Wittgenstein's Tractatus or half of Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form * ). ...

Some people try to help one person at a time, and other people try to change the whole world. There's a seductive intimacy in the first kind of work, but it can also be messy and unpredictable. People may resent help that is so intimate, and if it goes badly, the blunder is personal. Even when the help succeeds, the victories are small and don't really change anything. The second kind of work is more ambitious, and also cleaner, more abstract. But success is distant and unlikely, so it’s helpful to have a taste for noble failure, and for the camaraderie of the angry few... [ Dorothy ]: "They were people you did not want to be around. They were so sharp. Everything was a matter of life and death: we've got to do this action because the world depends on it." In 1967, a long-term study of living, unrelated kidney donors was initiated, with the aim of helping transplant centers form policies on these confounding individuals. The study subjected the donors to ...

to curry (equestrian v.): to groom, firmly brush all over. (Don't freak out if someone tells you they're off to curry a horse.) See also "to decompose into univariate functions" and " shout at ". People really like this word. GLEE (adj.): "Gay, Lesbian, and Everyone Else". I like this; the current bien-pensant name has grown to "LGBTQIA"; not pronounceable, nor even anagrammable. But GLEE probably can't catch on, since people will see abstraction as erasure, and also won't like it tacitly including majority people. septentrional (poncey adj.): Northern. Used in the clumsy retroactive Latin for the US, "Civitatibus Foederatis Americae septentrionalis". boodles (adj.): Butternut squash noodles. avi (n.): Profile picture ("avatar"). Annoying; optimised for tweeting, not speaking. OC (adj.): Original character; in fanfiction, a new protagonist added to the existing cast. Pejorative? procursiv...