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95116cb
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"The police never saw a noun they didn't want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became "to action", as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. This, to review a major inqurity is to review the list of "actions" and their consequences, in the hope that you'll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn't."
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policing
jargon
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Ben Aaronovitch |
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e30e855
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For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until appropriated words that were ancient and vague--force, mass, motion, and even time--and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton's laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists' view of nature. It was the same with information. A rite of purification became necessary. And then, when it was made simple, distilled, counted in bits, information was found to be everywhere.
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linguistic-drift
scientific-revolution
jargon
information
isaac-newton
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James Gleick |
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79a116b
|
Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are!
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writing
humor
jargon
confusion
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Lewis Carroll |
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e0204e9
|
Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham. Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.
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humor
maturin
jargon
nautical
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Patrick O'Brian |
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278ddc3
|
You are a reasonably civil, complaisant creature on dry land,' said Stephen, 'but the moment you are afloat you become pragmatical and absolute, a bashaw - do this, do that, gluppit the prawling strangles, there - no longer a social being at all. It is no doubt the effect of the long-continued habit of command; but it cannot be considered amiable.
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jargon
navy
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Patrick O'Brian |
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31682dc
|
"These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu. But as a professor who was popular with his students--and who advocated general education--Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory."
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specialists
jargon
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Michael Crichton |
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6fff781
|
"We decided to go back to basics and put the frighteners on some snouts." "Really?" "We adopted a proactive intelligence-gathering policy utilising appropriate stakeholders in the community and pre-established covert human intelligence sources. "And nobody can put a frightener on a covert human quite like Lesley can."
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intelligence
jargon
police-procedure
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Ben Aaronovitch |