there  could  be  snakes  in  here

I got a temp job in an official statistics department at the age of 23. Somehow; while I was nominally educated (economics & philosophy), I'd never written any code, never simulated anything, never calculated a PDF , and never actually analysed more than 50 rows of data. Most notably, I'd never heard of principal components analysis (nor any unsupervised learning, tools with which one can discover the ' joints ' of nature without really putting one's mental framework into the mix). We (they) built a PCA model of childhood poverty, letting the algorithm find the most important parts of the phenomenon, making them fall right out of the data, heedless of the Marxism or Malthusianism or indeed mindlessness of the modellers. Despite my tiresome anti-realism and anti-quantoid convictions, I could see the philosophical implications were huge. So here I am.

to live within PRISM (pej. v.): to spend your time on the public web, i.e. within full view of government intrusion . Scalish (programming adj.): Of code written in good Scala style. See also Pythonic , Ruby Way , maybe Rustic . nostrification (German n.): the conversion of degrees granted elsewhere into local terms. ravioli code (programming n.): marked by overzealous encapsulation. See also spaghetti code , marked by heavy coupling and no interfaces. rescission (legal n.): revoking of a contract; repealing of a law. Used in casual conversation by Ruth Davidson. Easy to work out apriori ("re", again, "sciss", separate/broken) but still new. merkledag (n.): Merkle directed acyclic graph: a particular hash-linked data structure suitable for massively decentralised work. This word denotes the logical plan used by instances of the Interplanetary Filesystem . (All IPFS addresses are merkle hashes, links between which form a graph.) Stench gas (n.)...

You could quantify your knowledge of maths by giving the year of development of the most recent theory you have mastered. (One's "theory year".) In mechanics, I have covered Lagrangians quite well, so my mechanics year is 1783.* Aggregate scores are much less meaningful, but I am inclined to be brutal and set one's overall theory year as the oldest year among your knowledge of the big trunk branches (geometry, algebra, Analysis, number theory, combinatorics, groups, logic...). My mate Johnny points out a couple of problems here: Most mathematicians are so specialised that they'd have a TY of 2013 for one thing and 1800 for everything else. Your metric shouldn't have a low score for the greatest actual proponents. Response : theory year was made for omniscients, not for man. Mathematics itself gnaws at your concept: for Category theory promises to make all areas equivalent. So one very high TY, + 1945 in topology could theoretically give you an ov...

to red team (US military v.): to attack your own side, to test the soundness of their defence. See also pentest . rah (UK n.) or Rah-Rah (US n.): brash upper-class young man. A preppy boor. the Real Book (70s, US n.): illicit book of jazz scores, including melody lines, photocopied by generations of American music students. A phenomenal playlist . The biggest jazz sheet book ever. manel (n.): Man panel; public speaking session with no women. (Not including the chair, for some reason.) People are angry about this, because they take manels to constitute a claim that no women know anything about the topic. This is a bit strong. government name (US gang n.): birth name; source of embarrassment for thugs with edgy nicknames. See also (UK) Sunday name : "Aye, ma name's Bet - oh bit ma Sunday name's Elizabeth.". the note (cinema n.): the impression a character gives in their first scene, setting the tone for them. By analogy with a tuning fork. H...

thought vector (ML n.): digital representation of an idea ; a series of numbers produced by embedding e.g. the words "cow", "heifer", and "Aberdeen Angus" in several languages, but also ( speculative ) all these images . if you can convert each sentence in a document into a vector, then you can take that sequence of vectors and [try to model] natural reasoning. And that was something that old fashioned AI could never do. If we can read every English document on the web, and turn each sentence into a thought vector, you've got plenty of data for training a system that can reason like people do. (Now, you might not want it to reason like people do, but at least we can see what they would think.) What I think is going to happen over the next few years is this ability to turn sentences into thought vectors is going to rapidly change the level at which we can understand documents. A big ass deal. Of course, it is not computationally pos...

incel (n.): involuntary celibate. Tends to be used by terribly bitter people. Ozy Frantz is trying to reclaim the term, since the problem is a real one. foofaraw (West US n.): pomp, fuss, ruckus. sinter (metallurgy v.): to fuse things into a solid without heating them to liquefaction. Think making a vicious snowball out of powder. Useful for ultra-high-melting-point things like tungsten. zero-rating (telecomms n.): Offering free mobile data, usually for very limited things like app stores or Facebook. A good form of price discrimination - but legislators often ban it in the name of net neutrality, creating equality by running among fields with a running chainsaw. Common in the developing world - best of all, for Wikipedia . dead mileage (n.): non-profitable movement of commercial vehicles, for maintenance or live placement. to deadhead (v.): to travel, as staff, using dead mileage. data sleaze (n.): customer data obtained secretly by businesses, secretly sold...

(or, rather, How many hours have I spent explicitly doing maths? ) Formal education Preschool . 300 hours of counting? Primary school. (4? per week * 40 weeks x 7 years) = 1100 Secondary school (6 years) S1+S2: (3? per week * 40 weeks * 2) + homework (80), revision (40) = 360 Standard Grade: (3? per week * 40 weeks * 2) + homework (160), revision (50) = 450 Higher Maths: (3 per week * 40) + homework (100), revision (100) = 320 Physics: (2 * 40 * 1) + home (50) + revision (50) = 180 Chemistry: (2 * 40 * 1) + home (50) + revision (50) = 180 =~ 1800 Higher education Economics = (4 hours * 24 weeks * 4 years) + homework (200) + revision (200) + thesis (100) = 900 Cryptography = 100 Half a BSc in Maths = 16 hours per assignment x 23 assignments + (60 hours study x 4 courses) = 600 ~ 1600 ~ 5000 hours. Researches My own writing hasn't been very mathematical so far. But I've done a bunch of recreational bits and warmup pieces, and read boo...