there  could  be  snakes  in  here

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...

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.): ...

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 ...

to glomarise (US govt v.): to stonewall; to answer a request for information with "neither confirm nor deny". After that time the Americans tried to steal a ruined Soviet nuclear sub. pro tanto (legal adj.): as much as you can; as far as it goes. Of a fine with a cap dependent on how much the defendant actually has. multihyphenate (adj.): doing several jobs, like "actor-director" or " scientist-playwright ". Good word - but unfortunately it is largely used by pretentious fools and connotes deluded bragging about one's own complexity. Moiré pattern (n.): large-scale interference pattern produced by a stripey pattern with lighter gaps. Old TVs were terrible at showing anything striped without moiréing. powerless (theoretical CS adj): having sub-quadratic complexity; not having a power (greater than 1) on any term. cryptobourgeoisie (): people who have made a lot of money (millions) through bitcoin and ether. The door is closin...

New Aesthetic (art n.): Best defined visually . That slightly grating half-digitised gimmick that every other alt rock album of the last 7 years has used: surface learning (n.): superficial, merely verbal , resentful, and test-driven education. No engagement, no internalisation , no critique. Forgotten within months. Most of the 'learning' in the world is just this. chinny reckon (sarcastic English interjection): Liar! See also Itchy Chin , Chinny chinny ... My peers used this to mean "I wonder" in response to an obvious question. damnit operator (computing n.): "!"; an error-suppressing manual override of some language feature. e.g. style inheritance priority (in CSS) or nullability (in C#). farm (computing n.): Set of servers all slaved as one. adult supervision (n.): Whereby a startup hires an older, outsider CEO. Started as a joke, but it is now reified. UQ (academic n.): uncertainty quantification; a multidisciplinary ...

black tax (South African n.): 1) putative burden on black South Africans, to support their extended family; 2) Trevor Noah uses it as a substitute for "white privilege", which I think is a good idea. Racism is an artificial burden on black people, rather than an unearned bonus for whites. 'Privilege' distorts the issue and invites correct but irrelevant objections about how little has been given the privilegee. Saffer (n.): South African person. japie or yarpie (Afrikaans n.): (white) farmboy; bogan; teuchter; hillbilly. chemsex (gay UK n.): Intercourse facilitated and potentiated by e.g. meth, GHB, mephedrone. Particularly of Grindr people. See also slamsex , chemsex with injected substances. dec (fashion n.): Décolletage; a woman's neck, shoulders and cleavage. MORSE (academic n.): Maths, Op Research, Statistics, Economics. All the good stuff. passage (microbiology n.): process of a pathogen iterating itself, as it pas...

'I think in a line — but there is the potential of the plane.' This perhaps was what great art was: a momentary apprehension of the plane at a point in the line. — Charles Williams A theory is a machine for answering a class of questions. — Judea Pearl What philosophers and social thinkers and literary critics call their "theories" do not often merit the word. Rather, these people lay out models - with all the artificiality, partiality and temporariness that implies, and seldom the precision. A model is a tool for making sense of things, for filtering out things in self-defence, and is not necessarily a general claim about reality, a truth-machine. (Some of them agree with this low estimate, like the post-modernists. People don't realise that post-modernists are often self-deprecating - some of them even call their works little: Minima Moralia , Minima Memoria , les petits récits .) These theories are actually language games . O.K. Except th...