It’s Talk Like a Physicist Day!<\/p>\n
I gave a rather extended vocabulary list<\/a> last year, and used a lot of those terms. A few more that I’ve used in the last year:<\/p>\n I mentioned a quantum, to mean a small amount, as in “take that with a quantum of salt”<\/p>\n I used “collapse the wave function” to denote resolving something, as in “the election collapsed the presidential race wave function”<\/p>\n resonated \u2014 already in common use<\/p>\n a short amount of time became “a small delta-t”<\/p>\n a wide variety of something I called a spectrum<\/p>\n I refer to a rumor (aka nebulous information) as “Nth-hand information”<\/p>\n I didn’t forget, I “expunged this from the buffer”<\/p>\n An either\/or situation is a Boolean state<\/p>\n Happy New Year’s Day was “Happy return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver”<\/p>\n When something came close to me, it was at perigee<\/p>\n And of course, the blogging community is called the blogohedron<\/p>\n I also like making up measuring devices, like the cringe-o-meter to measure how painful something looks, or the Geekmeter. “Pegging the Geekmeter” is a large signal, and means you’re in a maximal “Talk Like a Physicist” state.<\/p>\n Made-up “elements” I’ve used in the last year<\/p>\n Politicium And some new vocabulary and ways to use it:<\/p>\n Incompatible things are “out of phase.” “Pi out of phase” is the ultimate in being out-of-step, which leads to destructive interference.<\/p>\n Something that is close is “within epsilon”<\/p>\n We physicists quantify relationships \u2014 something that is complicated is “nonlinear,” or even “highly nonlinear.” Opposites are “inversely proportional”<\/p>\n Two different things happening at once can be said to be in a superposition (That’s a superposition of painful and funny!)<\/p>\n If something doesn’t happen, you can say the wave functions just didn’t overlap<\/p>\n It’s not unclear, it’s opaque<\/p>\n A situation that’s impossible to resolve has overconstrained boundary conditions<\/p>\n It’s not a hill\/ditch, it’s local maximum\/minimum<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s Talk Like a Physicist Day! I gave a rather extended vocabulary list last year, and used a lot of those terms. A few more that I’ve used in the last year: I mentioned a quantum, to mean a small … Continue reading
\nGrinchonium
\nQuiltonium
\nElephantium
\nNerdonium<\/p>\n