The Soviet Ruling class, members of the communist party that control everything. Slavoj Žižek re-purposes this term to describe the members of a ruling political party and or the elite.

A modeling programming language and environment that provides a way to express, simulate, and optimize systems (usually physical).

Most of the time, writing an algorithm is to write a specific solution to a certain problem. When doing mathematical modeling, we are collecting data from a simulation of equations that describe the problem.

See also:

• A slide deck of usages of OpenModelica in different fields from avionics to economics
• All about Modelica blog post with an overview of Modelica

A formal system (one that is consistent never yields a false statement) can not also be a complete system (containing all true statements)–there will always be statements that are unprovable yet true (i.e. G-statement).

The proof is derived from Principia Mathematica (PM) logic looking at number theory. You can build new theorems from axioms that are true infinitely but, because it is infinite, it can not contain every true statement.

That means there is always some truths that can’t be captured by a single system no matter how elaborate or seemingly robust. That’s why it’s important to have multiple systems and acknowledge you will always be limited in understanding the fullness of anything described by a formal system.

See also:

• I Am a Strange Loop provides a nice explanation about recursive thinking that led Godel to finding a proof
• Gödel Incompleteness For Startups applies this theorem to building companies and competition

A declarative language for describing diagrams and an environment that renders .dot files into images. Since the diagram is written in code, it can be checked into version control and updated later which is much easier than a team need to use a separate (usually commercial program) to share a file to make updates.

Giving a thing to someone else, while still retaining ownership, for the purposes of selling the thing.

A virus that passes from animals to humans. Examples include: SARS, Swine Flu, and COVID-19.

A pattern for traversing a tree of heterogeneous objects. Decoupling the algorithm for traversing the tree and the code operating on the objects leads to a much cleaner (and easily extensible) code.

Example usages include traversing an AST, the AST does not need to be changed to accomodate new code that is operating on it e.g. linters.

A state of equilibrium for an organism that is the optimal condition. For example, mammals regulate body heat so as not to become overheated or too cold.

A corona virus that became a global pandemic. The number of cases has surpassed 2MM and over 500 thousand people have died (at time of writing).

Besides a health crisis, COVID-19 also created an economic crisis as countries shut down and placed restrictions on gatherings of people and whether businesses could operate.

Posits that there were previous civilizations on Earth before humans. Some scientists are conducting research to see if we could detect changes in things like atmospheric carbon, plastics, and nuclear fallout since it’s highly likely no other physical evidence would exist e.g. buildings and artifacts.

Intertwines documentation and source code which emphasizes the need for code to not only be understood by the compiler, but also by future engineers trying to reason about your code.

Introduced by Donald Knuth in his book Literate Programming written in 1984 and implemented in the CWEB tool.

Literate programming with org-mode

Here’s an example of weaving the execution of code into this document which exports both the code block and output:

import random
print random.randrange(0, 100)

54

To tangle this code such that it exports to a source code file we can add the following heading to the source block tangle: hello_world :exports none which will export the code block to a file hello_world.py.

Read more about literate programming in org-mode using org-babel

A rating for the ability of a virus to spread. R of 1 would indicate each infected person infects one person. Anything higher than 1 has the potential to grow the number of cases exponentially (i.e. an outbreak or pandemic). For example, measles had an R value of 15.

This is similar to big O notation in estimating computation complexity. R1 would be constant time and R1+ would be O(N^1+).

A document that keeps track of critical decisions made by a team to raise awareness and provide a reference for future discussions that involve some form of ‘why did we decide to do x?’.

A shell holding company goes public with the intention of raising money to merge with a private company—effectively making the private company public without having to go through the listing process.

While the fees tend to be higher than the private company going through the process of IPO-ing, they only need to make a deal with a single party (the SPAC) which significantly simplifies the process.

See also:

• 165 SPAC IPOs from January to October 2020

In finance, the plutonomy is the small group of people that control most of the wealth.

Plutonomy is also the study of production and distribution of wealth.

A framework for starting companies that focuses on better understanding of customers and markets by building minimum viable products to validate assumptions.

Just about anything that companies do can be considered securities fraud. There is a very wide definition and application of securities laws that make it seem like just about everything meets the definition.

See also:

• Matt Levine from Money Stuff coined the phrase and is a common theme in his articles

The understanding of knowledge and distinguishing between truth and beliefs.

Knowing how we know what we know is vital to thinking clearly about problems and coming up with the right solution.

Knowledge that can not be transferred through words alone. For example, it won’t help someone learning to ride a bike to make them read an instruction manual and expect they can flawlessly ride a bike afterward.

See also:

• Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice essay which discusses tacit knowledge as it applies to knowledge workers. In one of their examples, they talk about a senior engineer that somehow anticipates future changes and architects an appropriate system consistently. They can explain the principles that lead to a decision, but can’t necessarily explain fully–it requires emulation and accumulation of experiences.

A mathematical function that produces an ‘S’ shaped curve when plotted and is used to transform a number into a value between 0 and 1 (also -1 and 1).

This is useful in preparing data for machine learning models or linear programming where you need values to conform to a specific range.

Scientific change doesn’t happen because because people change their mind, but because the next generation of scientists have different views.

This is similar to startups and larger companies. As new people come in, they bring in new ideas and change happens (both good and bad).

Thurgood Marshall made the comment that we have “substituted economics for race” in his dissent to the San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez.

The Supreme Court ruled that the right to be educated was not covered by the 14th amendment and that school funding based on property tax was ok even though Black people were systematically pushed into low-income areas and therefore had no means to fund schools like the white neighborhoods.

Thurgood Marshall’s comment calls out the veiled racism and attempt to legitimize segregation by reducing the matter to an economic issue.

A financial instrument that spreads the risk of corporate loans across many investors. The money is loaned to companies that typically can’t raise money otherwise e.g. through a traditional bank loan.

This is similar to CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), but instead of mortgages it’s corporate loans.

During the COVID-19 economic crisis, CLOs are starting default at the highest rates ever which leads some to believe banks are over levered (carrying too much risk) which could create a cascading effect similar to the 2008 financial crisis.

An illusion of a choice between two inequivalent options.

Hobson ran stable filled with many horses. This gave customers the impression that they would have many to choose from. However, he required that customers can only buy the horse in the first stall or nothing at all. This was to prevent the best horses from being chosen repeatedly and overused.

For example, White Rage describes the negotiations of school segregation as a Hobson’s choice—the state says you can either continue with segregated schools or have no Black schools at all.