Category: General stuff

Neologisms

isi / / General stuff, Stuff that matters

A facet of lexical innovation, neologisms describe emotions people feel, but can’t explain. The below collected from the interwebs long time ago:

  1. Sonder: The realisation that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
  2. Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
  3. Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
  4. Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
  5. Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
  6. Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
  7. Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
  8. Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
  9. Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
  10. Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
  11. Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
  12. Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
  13. Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
  14. Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
  15. Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
  16. Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
  17. Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
  18. Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
  19. Nodus Tollens: The realisation that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
  20. Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
  21. Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
  22. Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
  23. Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

Chain my hash#

isi / / General stuff, wearedb

[This post is a note to self] – Blockchains are a type of ledger. Coin “miners” make calculations and add messages to the blockchain over time. The messages are hashed to protect the ordering and contents of messages. These hash ledgers are (allegedly!) tamper-resistant as the contents of later entries depend on the contents of earlier entries.

The novelty (in comparison to conventional dbs) is that it is a distributed system with no owner. This is what enthusiasts mean when they say that the blockchain is trustless: instead of central authority, like a bank, many miners compete to successfully write a new message to the blockchain. They do this by means of a proof-of-work algorithm, each with their own copy of the ledger.

Blockchains capture the previous digest and the current message to produce another digest.

About the need to disagree better

isi / / General stuff

How to disagree well: 7 of the best and worst ways to argue

Paul Graham, Harvard Ph.D programmer and writer, proposed that the web is turning writing into a conversation, with the internet an unprecedented medium of communication. In particular, it allows people to respond to others in comment threads. And when we respond on the web, we tend to disagree. He says this tendency towards disagreement is structurally built into the online experience because in disagreeing, people tend to have much more to say than if they just expressed that they agreed.

Interestingly, even though it might feel like it, the world is not necessarily getting angrier. But it could if we don’t observe a certain restraint in how we disagree. To disagree better, which will lead to better conversations and happier outcomes, Graham came up with these seven levels of a disagreement hierarchy:

Graham viewed his hierarchy as a way to weed out dishonest arguments or “fake news” in modern parlance. Forceful words are just a “defining quality of a demagogue”. By understanding the different forms of their disagreement, “we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.”

Read more about this here.

PS: I’m a sucker for AdHominem : / I need to get better at this, I want to debate from the top only.

Long term observe

isi / / General stuff

I don’t believe in Astrology, or horoscopes. But what I thought the other day is that if China is one of the few cultures that went on for millennia without major interference or change, their long term observations have been closely colported and transcribed over generations and generations. So if they say that every 12th generation certain character traits in humans reappear, I actually consider that a possible proposition (not sure if true tho).

When I look at generations now, at grandma, mum, daughter, child, and see how certain personal qualities or peculiarities jump over one or two generations, I consider it possible that, if you made this real research and monitored long term data of psychological evaluations and references, you might get to the conclusion that very particular human traits reappear every 12th generation.2016 Chinese Year of the Monkey Mind you I am not trying to make the case for snake oil sellers here, but question what the basis for this widely accepted and longstanding compartmentalising might be.

Continue reading “Long term observe”

How not to social media

isi / / General stuff

The only social media platform I use is Twitter. I enjoy chatting with people, which is exactly why I like Twitter: wordy tweeps come together, to meet and have a conversation. Even follow each other at times.

But hey, sometimes this ease just does not work out, and you end up completely misunderstood, even considered a creep. Last night the cookie monster -of all tweeps- got me totally wrong, and thought I’m a full-on weirdo. When that happened I mentioned it to my [#IRL] friends afterwards, and they just started laughing, cos they know me as the founder and first member of the planetary no-evil federation.

So nothing is easy, no even the easy things.

If life gives you crumbs, just suck em up.

monster
PS: Dear Cookie Monster, I made cinnamon rolls as per your flickr post, I also have high regards for Leonard Nimoy and his work, and I truly hope you don’t only have another 10 years to hang around.
PSPS: smokes suck anyway.