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Showing posts from June, 2016

Notable words, Q3 2016

Saffronisation (Hinglish n.): official idealisation of ancient Hindu society: nationalist indoctrination masked as anti-Orientalism. At the limit, includes claims that Vedic India had TV, cars , and stem cell therapy . See also bhagwakaran . Dark pool (n.): a secret asset market (private as in not governmental and private as in confidential). No transparency, no public "market depth" reporting or identities. Reduces market impact of your trading and hides your strategies from others. Legal, mostly. Brownout (US n.): Reduction in the available electricity supply which knocks out high-voltage devices for a number of hours. Sometimes intentional, to stop e.g. thunderstorms from overloading the grid and causing fires. A mediocre blackout. salty (adj.): touchy; of a person who is acting irritable because of their failure. A taunt in PvP culture. Britain is very salty at the moment. Convex hull (n.): The smallest symmetrical shape that contains all of a gi

Highlighted passages in Holloway's Leaving Alexandria

God chose to empty himself of language and become a life. But along comes Christianity and turns it back into words, trillions of them, poured out incessantly in pulpit, book and on the airwaves, reducing the mystery of what is beyond all utterance to chatter. I told them I had come to mind religious overconfi­dence more than I minded its atheistic opposite, because atheists did not claim to put ultimate reality into words. agnosticism should not be described as a hypothesis, because it is not positing an answer to the question so much as learning to live without one ...there is no doubt that Anglo-Catholicism, as it evolved, became attractive to gay men, though the reasons for this are probably more theo­logically rooted than is commonly understood. The high camp aesthetic of the more florid wings of the movement was clearly attractive to a certain kind of gay sensibility, as anyone who has had to negotiate a high mass in one of the more fashionable outposts of Anglo-Cathol