Various Language notes on natural, synthetic and programming languages.
Welcome to the Language Portal, the goal of these pages is to host a few resources, summaries and notes from my own language studies. I've moved all notes about programming languages here, and math things here.
A tragedy consists of the same elements as a comedy, that is, the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.
dictionary
- Anthropomorphism: Attributing distinctly human characteristics to nonhuman processes.
- Antifragile: Some things benefit from shocks, they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, stressors, risk, and uncertainty.
- Parsimony: Refers to the quality of economy or frugality in the use of resources.
- Lateralus: The affliction of illusion of inescapable cyclicality. Example: The failure to recognize one's growth, inability to dream of unprecedented things, ceding to self-reinforcing systems, being jaded to hope, waiting for nonexistent chickens to hatch from nonexistent eggs.
- Rationality: Characteristic of thinking and acting optimally.
- Epistemology: A theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
linguistics
- Gematria: A cipher that assigns numerical value to a word, name, or phrase in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other.
- Palindrome: A word, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward.
- Ambigram: A word, art form or other symbolic representation whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation.
- Leitmotif: A short, constantly recurring musical phrase associated with a particular person, place, or idea.
- Asemic: A wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning".
dread
- Acedia: A state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world.
- Weltschmerz: A deep sadness about the inadequacy or imperfection of the world.
- Mono no aware: An awareness of the transience of all things that heightens the appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing, translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera".
- Mottainai: A sense of regret over waste, translated as "What a waste!".
- Wabi Sabi: An aesthetic, and principles, which includes asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature.
Did you know that before the invention of the crowbar, crows just drank at home?
Ship of thesaurus: When you rewrite a text by replacing every word with a synonym until none of the original words are left.
principles
- Occam's Razor: When several theories are able to explain the same observations, Occam's razor suggests the one making the fewest assumptions.
- Kolmogorov complexity: The length of the shortest possible program to output a given object.
- Kardashev scale: A measure of a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy used for communication.
- Levenshtein Distance: A string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences, or comparing the similarity of two words.
- Bechdel test: A method for evaluating the portrayal of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.
- Finkbeiner test: A checklist proposed to help journalists avoid gender bias in media articles about women in science.
- Ship of Theseus: A thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.
- Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- Cargo Cult: When you follow the instructions but don't understand the process.
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